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MINETTA STREET, NOS. 2, 4, 6 On the same day Abbott photographed Mori's restaurant, she took this picture of three small houses on nearby Minetta Street, a tiny one-block byway that bent along the course of what was once Minetta Brook. The houses dated to 1800, when "the Minettas"--Street, Lane, and Place--were home to free African-Americans. The Georgian doorways of these modest dwellings suggest that they were built by artisans. By 1900, the tiny houses had become ragpickers' warehouses, but in the 1920s, when the Village attracted artists, writers, and professionals in search of an American Montmartre, they were renovated as private homes. Abbott seems to have captured such a householder leaving no. 2. Only months after she photographed Minetta Street, all three houses were demolished to make way for a five-story apartment building fronting on Sixth Avenue. In 1930, the avenue was extended south of Carmine Street, cutting a deep swath through the old Village and demolishing half of Minetta Street. Abbott's composition was typically direct and artful. Standing on a stoop across the street, she gave the stoops at nos. 2-4-6 greater depth by photographing them from slightly above. The stepped shadow falling across the facade of no. 4 echoes the shape of the stoop below, while the shadow of a bulbous chimney across the street breaks up the rectilinear pattern of light and dark. Return to Greenwich Village |