Manhattan Island
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
at mouth of coterminous with the Hudson river, borough of Manhattan in New York City. Contains principal business and resiof the city, and is over dential buildings 13 miles long, with a width of 24 miles area being about 22 in the center, the are of rock. square miles. Foundations See NEW YORK MANIA. See INSANITY. MANICHÆISM, or MANICHEEISM system founded by (-ke'-), the religious , who either claimed to be Mani or Manes his followers as the or was regarded by by Jesus (John xiv: Paraclete promised two primal 16, 17). Mani postulated (God) and Darkness, under beings, Light kingdoms, and from the the similitude of his angels were born. latter Satan and being to Satan. Con- Adam owed his exists between the two tinual conflict , when the Kingdom of kingdoms, and , the world will be Light is victorious supremacy of destroyed by fire, and the God established. The ethics of the sysascetic. The Mantem were severely divided into two classesichæans were the "hearers." The forthe "elect" and mer were bound to observe the three seals: (1) Of the mouth, forbidding anihands, formal food, the use of wine and milk, and impure speech; (2) of the whether bidding the destruction of life, or vegetable; and (3) of the marriage animal forbidding (probably) bosom, offspring), since woman was dicle (certainly as the gift of the demons. The regarded less strictly bound. The hearers were was rejected, and only so Old Testament New taken as suited the pemuch of the of the sect. They had a culiar tenets was prackind of hierarchy, and fasting spread rapidly in the tised. The sect Africa, and southern East, northern survived in various forms Europe. It . until the 10th century
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's measurements in 1921 still hold: the island runs about 13 miles from the Battery to Spuyten Duyvil, is roughly two and a quarter miles at its widest, and covers some 22 square miles. What has changed is everything built on it. The "principal business and residential buildings" of 1921 were dwarfed by the Empire State Building in 1931, then by the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1973, destroyed on 11 September 2001 and replaced by One World Trade Center in 2014; the shoreline itself grew when Battery Park City was raised on landfill from the original towers' excavation in the 1970s and 1980s. The borough is also no longer quite "coterminous" with the island in the tidy way implied: Manhattan's population has fallen from its early-twentieth-century peak of over two million to roughly 1.6 million, while the borough takes in Roosevelt and Randalls Islands and Marble Hill, a scrap of land left on the mainland side when the Harlem River Ship Canal was cut in 1895.
Written for this edition, 2026.