Photo by Curt Hoppe
98 BOWERY: 1969 - 89
view from the top floor
By Marc H. Miller
Telling stories with pictures, ephemera and a few carefully chosen words is what I most enjoy doing. Over the course of a varied career as an artist, curator, art historian, journalist, and publisher, I have been fortunate to be able to create many visual narratives. "View from the Top Floor" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the twenty years I lived in the top-floor loft at 98 Bowery.
From 1969 to 1989 the Bowery was a low-rent refuge for artists and free spirits willing to tolerate the vagrants and drunkards who lived on the street. 98 Bowery provided the location from which I witnessed and participated in the art, music and counter-culture that emerged in the East Village and Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. There is much that will be familiar here, but this is not the conventional story of those years in downtown New York. This is one person’s version; it is my story.
