William Anthony
Miecuna

This atlas is his. He worked on it for about twenty years and did not get to finish it.

He spent his working life at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and through Neighborhood Networks, on housing — for the poor, for the homeless, for people a great many others walked straight past. It is not a small thing that a man who spent his career on who gets to live in New York’s buildings spent his own hours recording who had lived in them before.

He worked at 26 Federal Plaza, a few streets from Ground Zero. The air he breathed doing that work carried what eventually became the leukemia that took him. Even as it took hold he kept turning up for other people, and kept adding to this map.

What he left were two files: a drawing of Lower Manhattan with every building he could account for placed on it, and a manuscript of roughly nine hundred pages about the same ground. Everything on this site comes out of those two files. Nothing has been rewritten. The words, the dates, the colour code and the notes he left himself are all his.

His son finished it.

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”