The milk crate is the most useful object in New York City. It is a chair. It is a table. It is a step stool. It is a bookshelf. It is a record holder. It is a basketball hoop when you turn it upside down and nail it to a telephone pole. The milk crate was designed to carry milk and it carries everything else. Nobody in New York has ever used a milk crate to carry milk. The milk crate is the Swiss Army knife of the street.

You steal a milk crate from behind a bodega at four in the morning and you do not feel guilty because the milk crate wants to be stolen. The milk crate was born to be repurposed. It was manufactured for one thing and the city found a hundred uses for it. The man on the corner sits on a milk crate and plays chess. The woman on the stoop puts her plants on a milk crate. The kid in the apartment has his comic books in a milk crate. The DJ has his records in milk crates and the milk crates are the library of the neighborhood.

I moved to the Lower East Side with a guitar and four milk crates. That was my furniture. Two milk crates stacked with a board on top was a desk. Two milk crates side by side was a couch. One milk crate turned upside down was a nightstand. The apartment had nothing in it and I had nothing to put in it except milk crates and within an hour I had a furnished apartment. That is the economics of being broke. You do not buy furniture. You find furniture behind the grocery store at four in the morning.

The milk crate has been illegal to possess in New York since nineteen seventy-seven. Section 16-120 of the Administrative Code. You can be fined three hundred dollars for having a milk crate in your apartment. Nobody has ever been fined. The police do not enforce the milk crate law because every police station in the city has milk crates in the precinct. The law exists but the law lost. The milk crate won. When an object becomes more useful than the law that prohibits it the law becomes decoration.

They make plastic milk crates now. The new ones are lighter and weaker and they crack when you sit on them. The old ones were made of a plastic so thick you could stand on them. You could stack five high and climb them like a ladder. The old milk crate could hold a man and his record collection and his philosophy of life. The new milk crate cannot hold a gallon of milk without bending. That is the difference between the old neighborhood and the new one. The old one was built to hold weight. The new one cracks under pressure.