From One Manhattan Square, it’s about a mile to the Museum of Street Art. Just make your way north to the Bowery via your preferred combination of streets, and let the Lower East Side unfold in layers — past tenement blocks, noodle shops, and bodegas with sun-faded signage. It’s a route that doesn’t announce itself as cultural, but it gets you to MoSA, an unorthodox museum built into the stairwell of the CitizenM New York Bowery Hotel, showcasing the legacy of the 5Pointz graffiti collective and the artists who defined a generation of New York street art. The experience is free, and it starts at the 20th floor.
Before street art had museum walls or gallery shows, it had the subway. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, graffiti spread through the city on the sides of moving trains. It was illicit, high-risk, and impossible to ignore. The work wasn’t sanctioned or celebrated; it was a coded language of names and neighborhoods, made by teenagers with spray cans and something to prove. Artists like TAKI 183 and Tracy 168 signed their tags onto steel and concrete, marking space in a city that hadn’t offered them much of it. This was how the story started: not on the Bowery, not in a stairwell, but in motion, on the MTA.
By the 1980s, Downtown had become saturated. Corners were filled with layers of color and language, and half-legible tags nested into full-scale murals. On Bowery, in Alphabet City, on tenement walls and plywood fences, the city’s surfaces thickened with presence. Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring weren’t departures from the graffiti world; they were part of its spectrum. Their work used the same tools and had the same immediacy, the same urgency. But it also held still long enough for people to gather around it, to point and say: This stays.
As the Lower East Side became more mapped, more visible, the need for open surface multiplied. In Long Island City, a warehouse once used for water meters offered the kind of blank volume that was increasingly rare: uninterrupted exterior walls, industrial scale, and just enough distance from real estate pressure. That building became 5Pointz. Under stewardship of Meres One, the founder of 5Pointz, it turned into a collaborative canvas for aerosol artists from all five boroughs and dozens of countries. Murals rotated. Tributes stacked on tributes. At any given moment, it held new work from new hands — local, international, returning, first-time.
In November 2013, the walls at 5Pointz were painted white overnight. Years of work vanished in a single coat, ahead of demolition plans. Meres One and the artists sued under the Visual Artists Rights Act and won a landmark case: $6.75 million in damages, upheld on appeal. In the years that followed, Meres moved to Brooklyn, kept painting, and kept looking for a way to restore what had been taken. When CitizenM offered him a stairwell at their Bowery hotel, he accepted on the condition that it be used as a working space, not merely a static archive. The result is MoSA: a vertical installation spanning 20 stories and built by the original 5Pointz collective.
You enter on the 20th floor and work your way down. The stairs are bare concrete, lit by wall-mounted fluorescents, but the walls are full: murals stretch from tread to ceiling, dense with color and layered in aerosol. Meres One opens the sequence with a fisheye view of the Bowery, his distinctive bulb icon floating just above the skyline. On the 19th floor, artist Cortes NYC renders a mosaic-style mural in the blue-and-white palette of the old Bowery subway station, tiling the word ART into the curve of the stairwell like it was part of the infrastructure. A few floors down, Elle’s portrait of RuPaul splits across two walls, painted in saturated reds and bruised purples with a floating halo of cut-paper effects. On the 15th, Djalouz wraps the landing in warped block lettering that drips at the edges, like the words are liquefying as you descend. There are stairwells that feel quiet and others that feel loud. Some visitors stop to sketch. Others talk through the whole descent.
Within the walls of One Manhattan Square: a spa, a squash court, a pool, a garden. Outside: the rest of the city, with the Lower East Side as your home neighborhood. That balance, self-contained but open to everything, is what sets this address apart. Contact our sales team to schedule a tour and learn more about how One Manhattan Square is shaping residential life Downtown.