The Tale of a Waterway in Manahatta
Topographical map showing approximate course of Minetta Creek, overlayed with street grid as of 1865, reproduced from “Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York” by Egbert Ludovicus Viele.
Wandering around a city, we are spellbound by our immediate present times. We believe we are immersed in a certain eternity: the city has never been different. That sense of perpetuity is accentuated in a place like New York City, so venerated for its modernity and contemporaneity. However, since the Dutch occupation of the island in the early 1600s, what we now know as Manhattan witnessed dramatic alterations in its natural topography, hydrography, and natural land ecosystems. Nevertheless, even if sometimes available only to the keen eye, the curious, or the knowledgeable, remnants of long-gone eras always find ways to jut out to the surface one way or the other.
This is the case of Minetta Creek, today entirely buried underneath sections of downtown Manhattan including around Minetta Lane and Minetta Street. Their names are intimately related to the erased imprints of the area’s indigenous people. Minetta Creek or Minetta Brook, in the aboriginal Lenape Unami language was called Manette or Manetta, translated as "devil." Others relate the words to Manitou or "spirit." In the Lenape people's mythology, the Manetta creek was the remains of a snake that terrorized humanity since the beginning of times. The Lenape believed the serpent would eventually devastate civilization until their mythical god defeated it, burying it under the ground, leaving as an index of its existence its mark in the serpentine shape of the brook.
Back in time, Manetta Brook was part of Manahatta's undulating topography "watered by over 108 km of streams and at least 21 ponds, flowing in and out of wetlands that covered nearly 10% of the island in the late 18th century." The landscape included oak, hickory, and chestnut tree forests, grasslands, marshes, peatlands, rocky headwater streams, and ponds.Until the 1600s, the Lenape people were seasonal occupiers of Manahatta, settling in several villages spread throughout the island. Its west shore was positioned alongside present-day Greenwich Street, where nearby ran Manetta Brook providing easy access for fishing, especially trout, and oyster harvesting to the native people. One of these aboriginal settlements, Sapokanikan, translated as "land where tobacco grows," was located on the east bank of the Hudson River near Gansevoort Street. It was a temporary village and trading post for this group of hunters and fishermen. From Sapokanikan ran a footpath developed to travel inland through hills, swamps, and streams cutting through meadows and dense vegetation.
Manetta Brook originated on present-day Fifth Avenue and East 21st Street with a bifurcation towards Sixth Avenue and West 16th Street. From there, it flowed through the western side of Washington Square Park to MacDougal Street at the park's southwestern edge. Following its course, the creek rolled along Minetta Lane to the sinuous curve of Minetta Street, streaming toward the Hudson River midway Minetta Place and Downing Street. Between 1808 and 1828, the watercourse was progressively covered beneath the surface. That was due to the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 that established the grid layout design for Manhattan streets above Houston Street and below 155th Street. However, Minetta Street retains to this day the creek’s original curve, being one of the two streets in all of Manhattan, along with Gay Street, with the bent-elbow shape.
Today, only a few signs of the brook can be found on the surface of New York City. These are, first, the shape of Minetta Street that reveals the specific location of the creek's course; second, a dozen manhole covers located along the original creek’s course, places where beneath the surface it still runs; and a single plaque on a building on Fifth Avenue. Additionally, the old asphalt mounds on Washington Square Park put in place in 1970 as a remembrance of Minetta Brook and which were replaced when the park was renovated in 2008 by the "hills," a playground with a sinking and rising topography covered in synthetic grass. Finally, installed in 1998, are the bluestone paving with etchings of trout in the Minetta Triangle in memory of the creek, at the intersection of Minetta Street and Sixth Avenue.
The story of Minetta Brook is a testament of the extent to which the original island of Manhattan has been completely transformed to the man-made dominion. The alterations of the natural mantle of Manahatta were intensified after the American Revolution, when the city became a pull of attraction, and population growth turned significant. From then on, the original crust of the island has been re-engineered: hills were flattened, valleys leveled, waterways diverted, significant parts of the island's shores filled, and its endemic vegetation was uprooted. Discovering the residual signs of the existence of Manetta Creek discloses humankind's complex relationship with nature which has been established for centuries. Manetta, the snake, dominated by the Lenape god and turned into a creek, was later concealed in New York City's underground and subjugated by modern civilization. The specter of Manetta Brook, suffocated under the surface of the emblematic modern metropolis, conveys a creeping sense of humanity's arrogance over the natural environment. However, the brook keeps evidencing itself through its vestiges and uttering a hint to its forgotten presence.
