Jimi Hendrix and the Environmental History of Greenwich Village

ASEH field trip?  Probably not.

I guess most tourists in Greenwich Village don't come for the environmental history.  Tour buses patrol endlessly, but the cameras come out mainly for Washington Square Park and other sights that epitomize New York's human history.

Walking tours of the neighborhood zoom in on other historical sites, like the Caf� Wha?, where Bob Dylan got his act together, the Washington Square Hotel, where he lived with Joan Baez (Room 305), and The Bitter End, where local performers like Woody Allen, and more recently Lady Gaga got their start.

(It's said that Allen would be so nervous before his comedy routine at The Bitter End that he would contemplate escaping through the window; sounds like me before a conference talk).

In contrast, the environmental history of this place seems well-concealed.  Of course every place has an environmental history, even (or especially) big cities like New York.  A shelf of books testifies to this, from Mark Kurlansky's  The Big Oyster, to the remarkable Mannahatta (more about that one in a future post).

But one thing I've noticed since moving to New York last month is the sense of secrecy that gets attached to the environmental history of a city like this, and to a place like Greenwich Village.  It becomes the stuff of tours of The New York That Nobody Knows, led by urban explorers like Steve Duncan, who appears to know everything about the New York that exists beneath its streets.  Take a tour with Duncan, and one is soon peering through a sewer access cover with a flashlight.  See the rushing water at the bottom?  That's a lost river � environmental history, for those who know where to find it.

The plaque at Two Fifth Avenue

So exploring the city's environmental history can be a subtle business: a matter of tracking down hidden clues to past landscapes.  Like a tiny plaque on the side of the apartment building at Two Fifth Avenue.  Or an unusual bend in tiny Minetta Street, around the corner from the Caf� Wha?

From these and other clues a story can be told about Minetta Brook, a once trout-filled creek that ran through lower Manhattan on its way to the Hudson River.  The plaque commemorates the brook; the bend in the street follows the path it once took.

Minetta Street

Electric Lady Studios, where Jimi Hendrix made his last recording

It's a subtle, hidden history � invisible from the top of a tour bus.  But not always.  And here we come to Jimi Hendrix.  Not long before he died, he decided to set up a recording studio on West 8^th Street, around the corner from Washington Square.  Construction ran into all kinds of problems, including a flooded basement.  And the flood came from Minetta Brook � nearly forgotten, but still there, and still pushing its way into the life of the city.

Looking at an 1865 map of the city that superimposes the current street layout on Manhattan's original watercourses and topography, we can see why Hendrix had this little aquatic problem: the stream runs quite close to the stretch on 8^th Street where he located his studio.  (8th Street is just to the north of Waverly Place on the map.)

A city's environmental history can be well-hidden, obscured by the spotlights that shine on its more famous citizens.  But this history is still there, and Jimi Hendrix found it.