A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Manhattan

A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Manhattan provides an excellent overview to this fascinating, but largely unknown, chapter in Manhattan's history. The Manhattan Project is usually associated with Los Alamos, where the weapons laboratory was directed by New York native J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the title itself is commonly thought to be a misnomer. But the first offices of the Manhattan Project were actually in Manhattan, at 270 Broadway. General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the nationwide project, decided to follow the custom of naming Corps of Engineers districts for the city in which they are located. Thus the atomic bomb project became known as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) or "Manhattan Project." The title had the additional benefit of masking the actual purpose of the top-secret project.The guide gives a full-color, in depth preview of ten sites that figured prominently in the unfolding of the Manhattan Project, from the science halls at Columbia University to Oppenheimer's luxurious childhood home on the Upper West Side. A surprising number of New York City offices, laboratories, and warehouses were involved in the top-secret project. While these New York City sites remain largely unmarked and unknown, they were a small but crucial part of the success of the Manhattan Project, and deserve to remembered.