The tin clad plywood in the window arches, and the stone exterior of the Germania bank building at Spring and Bowery has been a prime canvas for graffiti artists, especially paper-pasters, for many years.

More Pasted Paper in the GammaBlaBlog.
Search for "obey" on the GammaBlaBlog

The old bank, basement vault to roof, is the studio/residence of photographer Jay Maisel. It makes sense, that a visual artist would be open to this form of expression.

According to: whatisee on Satan's Laundromat - Jay Maisel "bought the old bank on the corner years ago, when it was a scary neighborhood. The first floor (double height) is his office (with basketball court) and a mezzanine. The second floor is a museum of his images. The top floors are his home. In the basement is a rather large studio with backdrops, etc. It has commercial sized bathrooms and the vault where he keeps his negatives. It's also where he keeps his bags and bags of discarded slides. From the outside, it looks abandoned and covered over in graffiti... From the inside though, it's beautiful."

"PRAY FOR PILLS" - a classic from the Stencil Poet. The catacornered entrance doors, corner of Spring and Bowery.

Article about Maisel in Interior Design Magazine - "Maisel sees his home as a problem to solve. After being told by air-conditioning experts that window units could never cool a space as big as his, he bought six regardless and created makeshift ductwork out of giant plastic bags, which hang overhead like balloons the morning after a party. "Maya Lin was here, and she told me she had to steal the idea," he offers, a cigar dangling from his mouth. When the kitchen ceiling sprang 18 leaks, he didn’t resort to 18 buckets. Instead, he hung a sheet of Mylar, angled to drain over the sink. He does most of the maintenance himself. And he doesn’t like tenants. Roy Lichtenstein rented the fourth floor in the 1960s, and Maisel is still smarting over a party for 600 thrown by the pop artist."

Looking west on Spring Street at 195 Bowery. Grab the penthouse for $3.7 Million. Photos from the tenth floor on Curbed. (Unfortunately they are looking east and north and not towards Spring street, but still interesting)

Spring Street is named for a spring that once supplied drinking water. It still flows beneath the pavement. In 1974 it flooded a basement on West Broadway, where the spring originates.

Detail of the print shortly after it was put up. Swoon sometimes pastes together sheets of Chinese newspapers for her prints. They peel and flake-off, layer by layers as they age. Her street art prints are made to be ephemeral. Give them a few years or rain and sun, and most likely you'd need a forensic investigator to tell if the prints were ever there. Another view of the same print

Something that seems not to be deteriorating at the same rate is whatever it is, that is dripping down the wall. It looks as wet and sticky as the moment first spewn. An effective defense against tampering, I'm sure.

If you continue west along Spring street to the next corner, Elizabeth Street, you will find the mysterious 11 Spring, a long-ago icehouse, and present day street-art mecca. Nightly for many years, the identically draped windows, above flickered as if lit by candles, though no one could be seen there to tend them. Last year it was sold to Lachlan Murdoch, son of right-wing media-mogul Rupert. The curtains and candles are now gone, but the exterior has so far not been touched. More information about this on Gawker.

A reader of Gawker provides more insight into both Jay Maisel's bank building as well as 11 Spring. - "I know the photographer who lives right next door to 11 Spring in the old Germania bank building at the corner of Bowery and Spring (190 Bowery) which is an equally intriguing spot. His name is Jay Maisel, he was a big advertising photographer back in the day and bought the 6-story building bank in the mid 60s. He's kept lots of the interior and old fixtures and doors intact, using the basement vault as an archive for all his negatives and prints. The entrance lobby is now a combination office and basketball court. The executive rooms upstairs are devoted to galleries of Maisel's work. Anyhow, I once asked him about the mysterious 11 Spring St. building and he told me that it was occupied by the set designer (or production designer) of Blue Man Group. Apparently he's an odd guy. And apparently, he's left. Maisel also once mentioned that Diesel was trying to force him out of his building so they could build a superstore there. It didn't go through."

nycjpg.com has a beautiful photo showing the identically arranged white curtains in all the windows.

I remember these walls being used by street artists, as far back as the early 1980's. I need to go through my old slides, to see if I can come up with a good illustration for this. I wonder who applied that coat of white paint over the bricks on the Spring Street side? An artist who thought he needed a blank canvas or someplace to show his slides, a vigilante aesthetic censor, concerned neighbors, or the mysterious owner in the middle of the night? Who knows.

A three photo panorama take near the time the building was sold. The curtains were still in the windows. Click to see larger version.

It's not uncommon to see other photographers here.

This must be one of the best documented locations in the city.

This page will be updated.
Comments, corrections, questions and contributions are welcome.
Mike Natale
email