98 Bowery, Marc H. Miller’s personal pictorial scrapbook of Lower East Side bohemia, covers the years 1969 through 1989, when he inhabited the top-floor loft at the title address. Part autobiography and part history, the website captures historic developments in art and music. Started in 2008, 98 Bowery has since received more than half a million visitors, as it has grown to incorporate hundreds of pages as well as a commercial offshoot, Gallery 98, that makes available work by some of the artists covered.
2016 marked the completion of the story, with the addition of pages devoted to Miller’s years as curator at the Queens Museum, from 1985 through 1989. There’s also now an unexpected epilogue: Miller’s account of returning to the Queens Museum in 2016 as curator of an exhibition about the Ramones, the punk progenitors who figured prominently in Miller’s earlier tales. Finally, there is the postscript: a reflection on the dichotomy of personal and public history, and on the Internet’s ability to sustain memories of the past into the future.
