See this little curved alley? Minetta Lane. It bends because it's following a stream.
Not a former stream. A CURRENT stream. Right now, underneath your feet, Minetta Brook is still flowing — the same brook that ran through here when the Lenape lived on this land and called it Manette, which roughly translates to Devil's Water. The city buried it in the eighteen twenties, paved over it, built on top of it, and forgot about it. The brook didn't care. It kept going.
The N-Y-U Law School library — a couple blocks from here — fights a constant battle against Minetta Brook. Groundwater seeps into the basement at an estimated two to five gallons per minute in dry weather. More when it rains. They pump it out. It comes back. The brook has been winning this argument for two hundred years.
Over at Two Fifth Avenue, there's a transparent tube in the lobby that some residents claim contains murky water bubbling up from the brook. An underground stream, visible through glass, in the lobby of a M
anhattan apartment building. If you needed proof that this neighborhood refuses to cooperate with the rest of the city, there it is.
And here's where it gets good. In the late sixties, Jimi Hendrix — the same Hendrix who was discovered in a basement on MacDougal Street — decided to build his own recording studio nearby. Electric Lady Studios, on West Eighth Street. Construction was delayed for mo
