Minetta Creatures

Minetta Creatures will reveal the historic course of Minetta Brook through a performance of people costumed as plants and animals that would have inhabited the island of Manhattan prior to Dutch colonization. A long-term goal of Minetta Creatures is to create a permanent environmental artwork to celebrate the stream, to bring awareness of the hydrology of the neighborhood, and to connect parks within the watershed.

Minetta Brook is one of 101 waterways and water bodies of pre-colonial Manhattan. The stream once ran aboveground in Greenwich Village and lives on in streets (Minetta Lane, Minetta Street) and parks (Minetta Playground, Minetta Green, Minetta Triangle). However, the stream itself is largely hidden from view. You can almost picture a section of its flow in the curves and dips of Minetta Street and Downing Street.

Minetta Brook is a second-order stream; it has two, spring-fed, source tributaries. One arm originated at 16th Street at Sixth Avenue and the other between 21st and 20th Streets at Fifth Avenue. The two tributaries joined midblock between 11th/12th Streets and Sixth/Fifth Avenues. The stream flowed southeast then turned southwest entering Washington Square Park west of the Washington Arch. The stream left the park at the southwest corner traveling along MacDougal then along Minetta Lane then Minetta Street to Downing Street. At Varick and Houston Streets, the trunk split. One leg flowed west on Houston and turned south on Greenwich towards Charlton Street. The other leg flowed on Varick then traveled diagonally between King and Charlton. Both channels rejoined at Charlton discharging into the Hudson River at the former shoreline between Greenwich and Washington Streets.

• Select creatures*
• Design creatures
• Performance rehearsal(s)
• Stage performance

* Our creature list includes heron, beaver, bullfrog, brook trout, sensitive fern, tulip tree, and water. Our wishlist creatures are red-tailed hawk, blue jay, red maple, flowering dogwood.

Minetta Brook was a central ecological feature of Greenwich Village prior to Dutch colonization and through the early mid-1800s. The stream landscape included marsh and forest that supported a diversity of aquatic and terrestrial plant and animal species. Although the Minetta place name lives on in streets and parks, if you don’t know the origin of the name, you don’t know that a stream once flowed through the neighborhood. Minetta Creatures seeks to improve ecological literacy at the neighborhood scale, and hopefully the project will be a model to celebrate the numerous waterways that used to dot and wind along the surface of the entire city.