Bull's Head Tavern

William P. Chappel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the early 1800s, Henry Astor’s Bull’s Head Tavern on Bowery stood at the epicenter of the city’s booming livestock district. There, slaughterhouses, stockyards, butcher shops, and tanyards processed cattle from across the tri-state region. The choicest stock would be paraded through the streets (sometimes with music) by butchers who took orders from residents. In the mid-1820s, hoping to rid Bowery Village of its noise and filth, a group of wealthy New Yorkers bought out Astor, who then led the relocation of the meat-processing trade by opening a new Bull’s Head in a more rural location at Twenty-Fourth Street and Third Avenue.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art