THE MINETTA STREET GHETTO
by Simi Delgado

Much of the South Village's history has centered around various ethnic communities that grabbed big chunks of neighborhood. The very first was an African American community that was large enough to earn the area the first ethnic nickname of Little Africa.

In what is now the center of Sixth Avenue, across from the south end of Minetta Street, the nation's first African American Roman Catholic Church opened its sanctuary doors in 1833. It was built to serve the community that had already seen the first African American theatre in the United States , The African Grove Theatre, open in 1821, five years before James Fenimore Cooper published "Last of the Mohicans". It was located at the corner of Bleecker Street and Mercer Street. In 1827 the country's first African American newspaper, Freedom Journal, was published from this community.

By 1865's end of the Civil War, a full quarter of the city's African American population lived within a few blocks of Minetta Street. It was a thriving community, though terribly poor. Eventually real estate developers enticed these citizens uptown to their new tenements with indoor plumbing, one of the attractive features of Harlem. The neighborhood fell prey to the Irish and Jewish toughs of the late 1800's. The Minetta Ghetto deteriorated into a dangerous slum. Few faint hearts would dare walk it, save one Stephen Crane, author of Red Badge Of Courage, whose essay Stephen Crane in Minetta Lane was written in 1896. He introduces us to such character types as No-Toe Charley, Blood-Thirsty, and Black-Cat, who frequented a place called Pop Babcock's, "where sin shone from every corner like a new headlight." He described Minetta Street as, " a small becobbled alley between hills of dingy brick."

Copyright 1996 Simi Delgado. All rights reserved.