VI. Bowery to Queens Museum, 1985 - 89
The year 1985 took me in a new direction. After answering an ad in the New York Times, I was appointed curator at the Queens Museum. For most of my time at the museum, I still lived at 98 Bowery, driving my car the forty-five minutes out to Flushing Meadows Park, where the Queens Museum is located.
As curator, I worked with many downtown artists, but I also organized events and exhibitions connected to the museum’s principal attraction the Panorama of New York City, a giant model of the city; and to the 1989 anniversaries of the two New York World’s Fairs which took place in 1939 and 1964 at Flushing Meadow. In 1994 I curated an exhibition about the jazz musician Louis Armstrong who lived in Corona a mile from the museum. An unexpected epilogue to my Queens Museum and Bowery story came about in 2016 when I curated an exhibition about the Ramones who grew up in Forest Hills, a mile from the museum.