While exploring an excavation site along the banks of the Hudson River near Croton, New York, Christopher L. Hallowell learned from local archeologists that the remains of a seventeenth-century Dutch ship lay beneath lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Interested in every aspect of New York’s early history, he scoured museums and libraries and interviewed numerous archeologists and historians to learn more about the ship and how it came to be buried underneath the 110-story buildings. He also questioned construction workers to find out why the ship was never unearthed. Hallowell’s fulltime occupation is associate editor of Natural History.