The tin ceiling was in every bar and every barber shop and every candy store on the Lower East Side and nobody looked up. That was the thing. The most beautiful surface in the room was above your head and nobody noticed it because people do not look up in New York. You look ahead. You look down. You watch where you are walking. The tin ceiling was art for people who forgot to look.

The tin ceiling was invented because plaster cracked and plaster fell and landlords did not want to fix plaster. Tin was cheap. Tin was fireproof. Tin could be stamped with patterns that looked like the ceilings of European palaces and a tenement on Orchard Street could have a ceiling that looked like Versailles for eleven cents a square foot. The tin ceiling was democracy pretending to be royalty. And it worked.

The bar on Avenue B had a tin ceiling that was a hundred years old and the smoke of ten thousand cigarettes had turned it brown and the brown had turned to gold in the right light and the gold made the whole room feel like a cathedral for drunks. Nobody painted it. Nobody restored it. The ceiling aged the way the neighborhood aged. Slowly. Beautifully. Without anybody's permission.

I played a gig in a bar on the Bowery in 1972 and the sound bounced off the tin ceiling in a way that made my guitar louder than it had any right to be. The tin was a natural amplifier. The pressed patterns broke up the sound waves and scattered them around the room and every seat was a good seat. No sound engineer could do what that ceiling did by accident. The tin ceiling was the first sound system in the city and it was installed by a plumber.

The new bars have exposed ductwork. They have Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood and the ceiling is open to the rafters because the architect read a magazine that said industrial was in. The tin ceiling is behind the drywall in some of those buildings. Hidden. Covered up. A hundred-year-old piece of art behind a sheet of gypsum because somebody decided that unfinished was more authentic than finished. The tin ceiling is still there. Waiting. It has outlasted everything else in the room and it will outlast the ductwork too.