A 1,000-ton rock, possibly deposited by a retreating glacier some 12,000 years ago, sits across from LaGuardia Airport in Queens.
The lumpy behemoth has borne witness to LaGuardia’s Cinderella story, going from worst to best among U.S. airports.
But the rock has seen a lot more than that. Hundreds of years ago, much of the area was a serene marine habitat, full of bluefish and mullet swimming 40 feet below sea level.
A new book by the ecologist Eric W. Sanderson, “Before New York,” digs deep into the historical landscape of the airport and many other nooks and crannies — some 4,000 sites — in the five boroughs. As his 2009 book, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” made clear, the metropolis was once a mess of wetlands, forests and waterways.
Where LaGuardia stands, there were rocky oyster reefs and Lenape walking trails. Further inland: streams and frog hollows, where wolves once hunted their prey. Like the Lenape, the animals were pushed out when Dutch farmers grew territorial.
By the latter half of the 19th century, the farms had been replaced by amusement parks and beer halls, which were soon razed to make way for cars and planes. By 1939, much of the bay and the wetlands had been filled in with more than 17 million cubic yards of cinders, ashes and trash.
Et voilà, LaGuardia Airport — a very New York story.
At more than 900,000 words, “Before New York” is a hefty tome — mostly a reference book but with coffee table appeal — and it gives every recognizable site of the city the pre-pavement treatment.
Broadway in Times Square was part oak-tulip tree forest, part emergent marsh with a pond and streams, complete with water snakes and beavers. And in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, retreating glaciers formed peat bogs and a pond where parts of the Long Meadow and its flood-prone baseball fields are today.
The highly visual hardback emerged from research that began in the 1990s. Dr. Sanderson, who had just finished his Ph.D. on salt marshes, was starting a new position at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York.
His job, using mapping and satellite imagery to study animals and their habitats, took him to 40-odd countries, including Gabon and Mongolia. “I had this deep understanding of the landscape of other countries, but I didn’t have a landscape that was mine,” he said.
That all changed when he discovered the British Headquarters Map, circa 1782.
Created by military cartographers during the Revolutionary War, the map outlined Manhattan’s topography, complete with the lakes, streams and hills that would be drained, paved over, filled in or razed in the future.
Dr. Sanderson decided to scan the map and compare it with the city’s modern street grid, aiming to pinpoint where Manhattan’s natural ecosystems once thrived. That project led to “Mannahatta.”
Soon, New Yorkers were asking him to do the same for Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. He started researching areas piecemeal, with the help of student volunteers and research assistants like Lucinda Royte.
It could be overwhelming because of the “treasure chest” of archives available in the city and because of her boss’s unbridled curiosity, said Ms. Royte, who is pursuing a master’s degree in architecture and urban design.
“We would get to the end of one borough and say, ‘This is amazing, we have a complete story here,’” she said. “And then Eric would find a book on the bouldering routes of Central Park, and we’d have to dive back in.”
More than 600 maps, from the late 18th century through the early 20th century, and thousands of books, articles and pieces of art, were used for the project, which was documented online.
Dr. Sanderson struggled with a way to present it all in a book until he stumbled on another fateful resource at the New York Public Library, “The Gazetteer of the State of New York,” published in 1860. (A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary, typically organized by place names.)
“I was like, ‘Oh, well, maybe this is what I could do,’” Dr. Sanderson said from his book-filled office, which has views of the largest old-growth forest in the city. From this perch, he works as the vice president for urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.
The gazetteer concept ended up serving as the meat-and-potatoes storytelling section of “Before New York.”
Free copies of the book will be distributed to public high school libraries in the city following its publication on Nov. 10. Dr. Sanderson said it was crucial that present and future city leaders understood the ecology of urban environments as they managed the effects of climate change.
Ms. Royte could very well be one of those future leaders. Last spring, she published a research paper with Dr. Sanderson, which connected New York’s natural hydrology patterns with flood risks, pointing to locations for adaptation measures.
The key to helping the city, Ms. Royte said, involves looking to the past. “It might be telling us where things need to go back to the way they were.”
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