J. Thermes: My name is Jennifer Therms, and I am an author and an illustrator and a map illustrator. My book is called Manhattan: Mapping the Story of an Island. I have always been fascinated by Manhattan itself. I grew up on Long Island outside of the city and spent a lot of time as a young person going in there, and to me, it was always just the city, my backyard, and I ended up going to school there.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I recognized what a world-class city this was and it led to a lot of curiosity about how this tiny sliver of land became the magnificent city that it is today. So curiosity drove that and I did a ton of reading for research. I visited museums. I'm familiar with Manhattan already, but I did a lot of walking around anyway again. And it really became the story of a place and how it changed over 400 plus years.

So part of my research was using the map archives at the New York Public Library. If you go back to some of these original old maps, there's a place called the Collect Pond on the maps. I had no idea that there was a giant pond down in lower Manhattan right around the area that is today's Chinatown.

It had two streams that connected it to the Hudson River and the East River, and over the years ... well, first the Lenape lived there because Native Americans lived on the Island for thousands of years. Then when Europeans arrived, they moved next to the island.

It was outside of the city itself. So it became home to freed black people at the time. Then industry moved in and they filled in the pond and they dug the streams to become canals, and those ended up becoming Canal Street because eventually, it became so polluted that they had to fill everything in.

So there's actually a park down there called Collect Pond Park, that is the area that I'm talking about. And so I was very surprised to learn about that pond down there.

So many of these stories are untold. You know, we don't hear about how the place was physically built. And so those were the stories that I was interested in telling in this book.

There are a lot of little hidden references. There's a reference to Hamilton in the front map and the theater section. There's the Schuyler sisters, which I'm a huge Hamilton fan, so just a lot of fun little things like that. These are just some of the fun things that an illustrator can do to make it more interesting and try to make history come alive.