Located outside the Manhattan Detention Complex visitor entrance. A nearby sign reads:

You are not allowed to enter any DOC facility while in possession of narcotics, weapons, or tobacco products. Lockers are available inside of the building to secure your personal and/or prohibited items. These lockers only accept a quarter for use during your visit. There is also 1 "amnesty box" outside in which you may deposit any illegal substances or items you may have in your possession, no questions asked. All illegal substances or items must be deposited before you enter the first search station and will not be returned.

A sign on the wall of this former firehouse (currently home of the Downtown Community Television Center) proclaims:

This building, constructed in 1895, is among the best of the many eclectic firehouses built by Napoleon Le Brun & Sons. Today it seems surprising that such an elaborate design would be used for so utilitarian a structure. The entire spirit of the building — with its corner tower, steep roof, dormers, and stone and iron crestings — recalls a romantic fairy tale.

One of Manhattan's precious few alleyways

I didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to this freight elevator entrance the first time I passed by on Cortlandt Alley. Fortunately, my route required me to turn around at the end of the alleyway and head back north. As I walked by the second time, I happened to glance to my left, and I noticed a sign reading "SENEGAL" visible through one of those little rectangular windows. So I crossed over to take a closer look...

The doors were locked, but a sign inside reads:

Museum

A smart man's garbage is a foolish man's fortune & vice versa.

The Museum boasts an assemblage of assorted collections from around the world.

Strange artifacts and objects removed from their narratives make up these walls. Some are overlooked, and some are overused.

Each item has its own history.

To discover the stories, please refer to the brochure below

or call 1 (888) 763 8839

and enter the object's reference number.

Welcome to the Museum.

Give 'em a call! You can read many of the reference numbers here and here. I haven't listened to all of them, but a few of my favorites so far are 7087, 7076, 7081, 7058, and, of course, the classic Senegal placard: 7048.

A floating flame amid a sea of rectangles. (Although its buoyancy has been slightly diminished in recent years by a glass security wall installed at its base.) Take a spin around!

This windowless behemoth, housing telephone switching equipment and a data center, is said to be one of the nation's most secure buildings.

since we've seen a new type of sidewalk vent. This one looks like a modified Holmes.

he decided to get Haircut No. 13

I posted a photo of this place months ago, but the lighting was bad. So I'm replacing it!

You know what, make that two.

It's generally good practice to stay away from religious leaders with show-biz names. And this guy's no exception.

over the Holland Tunnel exit roadway — traffic was much heavier down below.

For much of the 19th century, this was an exclusive, gated private park (like Gramercy Park today), accessible only to the affluent families who lived around its perimeter. It was built by Trinity Church, who hoped to lure wealthy residents to the area (then on the outskirts of the city) to support the new chapel being constructed next to the park. As commercial development spread north in the 1840s, the neighborhood found itself surrounded by the working class, and resentment toward the park's closed-off confines grew:

The journalist and all-round labor agitator Mike Walsh regarded the park as an affront to the citizens of New York. "A more exclusive concern than this park does not exist on earth. Its gates are all locked, and keys for it are sold, by the church which claims it, for ten dollars a year, to none however, but the upper ten thousand, who reside in the surrounding palaces. Can anything be more insultingly aristocratic than this?" He made a democrat's protest by climbing over the ornate railing of St. John's Park and strolling on the forbidden gravel paths.

Perhaps this outrage had some effect: during the winters of the 1860s, the park's trustees decided to flood the grounds of St. John's and open it to the public as an ice-skating rink.

The park was sold in 1866 and a railroad freight depot was subsequently built on the property. The quality of life in the area declined substantially over the next couple of decades, and the neighborhood had become a "slum" by the 1890s:

Thomas A. Janvier noted "the aggressive presence of several distinctively Neapolitan smells. The stately houses, swarming with this unwashed humanity, are sunk in such squalor that upon them rests ever an air of melancholy devoid of hope. They are tragedies in mellow-toned brick and carved wood-work that once was very beautiful."

Completing its ignoble descent into obscurity, St. John's Park is now the inaccessible gravel-filled lot you see here, sitting in the middle of the Holland Tunnel exit rotary.

(In case you were wondering, that's One World Trade Center looming in the background, under construction.)

is, I'm sure, the reason that all of these people have come to the Feast of San Gennaro.

Our third Toynbee tile. (I think the first line is "House of Hades".)

The New Museum

I always assumed this building was abandoned. It certainly looks that way from the street.

Boy, was I wrong!

But wait! What's that scraggly little plant clawing its way out from beneath the pile of Jersey barriers?

Heat likes to go outside where she can see flowers
Heat is my friend in my beautiful imagination

Standpipes: they're not just for buildings!

This bizarrely wonderful playground must have been the work of ol' you-know-who.

There's a pedal at ground level that turns on the water to wash all the goop down the trough and into the drain.

This house of immersion contains four mikvahs partially filled with rainwater collected on the roof.

Named after a relative of our old friend Pickled Herring

Is this what happens when Paul Richard gets drunk?

That's the name of the apartment building (whose lobby we've already seen) at the end of the street with the statue of Vladimir Lenin (commissioned by the Soviet government and completed shortly before the collapse of the USSR) and the "Askew" clock on its roof.

UPDATE (Sept. 26, 2016): The Lenin statue has been moved to a nearby rooftop at 178 Norfolk Street.

If you catch this building in the right light, it's pretty stunning.

There are still a few holdouts, like the ol' Hawaii boys here, but the Bowery's restaurant supply district has been fading away in recent years (much like the lighting district, its neighbor to the south) as the area has been gentrifying.

Looks like the sidewalk art got a makeover in time for outdoor dining season.

lies the tent that once stretched across this now-barren red-pole frame, sheltering a motley collection of relics and oddities known as Billy's Antiques and Props. The tent met its demise back in March to make way for a new building on the site (under whose foundation the coffin will be buried, and within whose confines Billy's will be resurrected), but it looks as though the new structure is no closer to completion now than it was six months ago.

Moe is the last butcher left in Little Italy. He used to be in Little Italy, anyway, before all the Italians left and the upscale boutiques moved in. The neighborhood is now known as Nolita, as it is north of (what remains of) Little Italy.

Also, as you may have noticed, this meat market looks an awful lot like an art gallery. That's because it is an art gallery; Moe's shop is actually located across the street. The artist whose work is for sale here is no Johnny-come-lately, however; he's an elderly Hawaiian man who's owned this building since 1977.

You can see my shadow cast on the wooden frame, within which lies my reflection in the mirror, within which lies the reflection of the mirror's reflection in the window (located about where my reflected stomach is). Got that? Here's a closer look.

This is part of the Elizabeth Street Gallery, "an atmospheric mash-up of architectural and antique objects, including second-century Greek and Roman carved-stone vessels, sixteenth- to nineteenth-century architectural elements and statuary, and twentieth-century folk art and curiosities." Here's a look inside the gallery. The garden is available for all sorts of events, including the gag-worthy "sublime urban picnics", according to the gallery's website.

is what this building used to be. Now it's the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Let's take a look inside...