New York Penn Station, one of the busiest and most overcrowded train stations in America, is at the center of significant urban infrastructural issues and complex social dynamics. Given its geographic location underneath Madison Square Garden, improvements to and expansion of the station have proved challenging, as has regular infrastructural…
The City of New York has initiated the closing of Riker's Island, to be completed by the year 2027. We cannot help but think about what the use of the island is now, what it once was and the real implications of this closing on a localized scale. This closing…
Our initial map series catalogued the cognitive understanding of Water Tunnel No. 3 over time as more information became public. Our next maps will examine the tunnel in section (at both the urban and the regional scale) and consider the monetary inputs and time spent at different points of construction.…
1. Pitch Update We are sticking with a story about the parts of New York City that fall between various versions of active and proposed flood zones. We have refined our topic in a few ways: We want to study the ways that NYC-developed maps differ from FEMA maps. Do…
The main attempt by Eric W. Sanderson and Marianne Brown in this project is to trace back the history of landscape in Manhattan by looking into the Britain Headquarters map made in 1782. The importance of this map is to show the transformations in the island’s landscape by comparing…
The reading suggestions for this week both discuss an important issue in historic data research, or any other research, lack of precision and usage of incorrect data. In E.W. Sanderson and M. Brown's "Mannahatta: An Ecological First Look at the Manhattan Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson" the…
The Columbus Landfall reading is a pointed account of historiography that addresses how we think about uncertainty in the context of history and historical mapping. I was surprised how sure each historian was of their account of Columbus' path, how biased their approach was, and then how much vitriol they…
The entry “An Ecological First Look at the Manhatten Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson” becomes of particular interest in reference to Penn Station when considering it’s techniques to reconstruct the past condition of the site. In both these cases the present day site is no longer recognizable in comparison…
In response to Mannahatta, I am personally impressed by the project’s intention that attempted to illustrate underlying ecological layer of the past fruitful Manhattan and raises questions to public to pay attention to original ecological conditions before the massive urbanization. By gathering information from historical documents, interpretation of The…
Our latest continued research came in the form of an interview with a corrections officer who works on "The Island". We had a more open approach to this interview as we weren't too sure what we would learn from a corrections officer since they are often painted in…