Huron's diagram showed that a pair of streams pouring out of the Collect Pond, one heading east and the other west, joined tidal creeks that meandered, in turn, into the East and Hudson Rivers.
As Sanderson and Boyer looked on, she pulled up a representation of the Collect Pond, the site of a Lenape settlement, and later of Five Points, an infamous slum, and now of Foley Square, home to several government buildings.
The first time we met, in early 2005, Casarella told me the story of the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan: drained because of pollution in the early 1800's, it was filled in and became the brutal Five Points slum.
As a result, new sources of freshwater had to be sought upstate, and the filled-in sludge and slime of the Collect Pond became the unplanned foundation for a century of Lower Manhattan slums.
"My brother and I have this theory of the Collect being the original sin of Manhattan," he said, launching into a riff on man's betrayal of nature and its consequences.
For this second installment of the Collect Call column in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, in which I track people's sometimes baffling, sometimes amusing, sometimes magnificent collections, I've come to examine Ms. Mark's need to -- if you can stand it -- save the robots.
