I haven’t been able to persuade myself to visit my neighborhood museum. It could be that it looks too much like a refrigerator, especially with that rainbow refrigerator magnet out front. If they were going for that, they should have gone whole hog with school lunch schedule, crayon drawings and baby pictures. And their website left me completely uninterested in any of the art. A taxidermied headless horse hung by it’s neck, a perverse trophy on the wall, yikes! But it must have a great view, and I feel compelled to get some shots from up there.

This neighborhood was once dominated by new and used commercial kitchen equipment stores. Now only a few remain. The big show was always the messy sidewalk cleaning of used stoves, removing years of carbonized meat fats, using god-knows-what sorts of solvents hosed down the storm drains. The unenviable job employed the homeless,staying in the nearby Bowery flophouses.

Filed under: Architecture, Art, Lower East Side, Photos , Bowery by gamma