There are photographs you make because you know something is important. Sometimes the reason doesn’t become apparent until years later.
190 Bowery St, The Bowery, New York, New York
February 20, 2024
© Rick Kollmeyer
Several years ago, I was walking through the Bowery when I came across this beautiful old building. What struck me was the contrast between the architecture and the enormous amount of graffiti covering the lower section. It appeared to be abandoned.
I took a bunch of photographs, simply because.
A few years later, I was watching Jay Myself, a documentary by Stephen Wilkes about street photographer Jay Maisel. The film showed Maisel’s studio and home in the Bowery, and suddenly I recognized the building.
“Wait a second…I think I took photos of this building!”
I was pretty excited as I dug through the archive and located the images.
At that moment, I knew I wanted to photograph it again, this time as an homage to Jay.
Maisel had bought the former Germania Bank building at 190 Bowery in 1966. He lived and worked there for almost fifty years, using the enormous building as his home, studio and storage space. When he finally sold it in 2015, it reportedly brought $55 million. That’s not a bad return on a $102,000 investment.
On my next trip to New York, I took a taxi to the building. I had a great conversation with the driver, a lifelong New Yorker who knew the building well and was interested in why I wanted to photograph it. He even gave me a few suggestions for other places nearby that I might want to see.
When I arrived, though, the building I remembered wasn’t the same.
The building was still there. Everything else had changed.
It was no longer an apparently abandoned building. It was now a thriving Supreme retail store, with an obsessive following. And I had managed to arrive on a Thursday, which happened to be their new-product-release day.
There was a line of potential customers going way down the block.
I started talking with the two guys managing the line, Malcolm and Jacob. We had a great conversation both about the store as well as the vast amount of street art on the building.
I went to the edge of the sidewalk to figure out how I was going to photograph the building. I was looking for something different from the photographs I had taken years earlier. Something that would make the building itself the subject.
I attached a 14mm lens, put the camera on the ground, and started shooting.
Blind.
I couldn’t really see the composition from where the camera was sitting, so I varied the angle between shots and hoped I would get something that worked.
This was the one.
Looking at it now, I like the fact that the photograph contains all of those versions of 190 Bowery at once.
The magnificent old bank building.
The graffiti that had once made it look abandoned.
Supreme, its devoted customers and employees.
And, somewhere underneath all of it, the place where Jay Maisel lived, worked and made photographs for nearly fifty years.
I went there looking for Jay’s Bowery.
I found something else.
And I think that’s probably a better photograph.
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