East Houston St, Bowery

Houston is actually the cutoff between the Bowery and the Lower East Side, so the North side of Houston is actually the only part the hits the Bowery. Right at Bowery, the north side of Houston has a pretty community garden. I cannot begin to describe how rare it is to see a garden on a street as busy and commercial as Houston. It was the first of its kind in Manhattan and it's pretty impressive. Sort of an homage to the fact that this corner was the southern most boundary of the old Stuyvesant farm back when New York was New Amsterdam.
Just across Chrystie on the north side, there is a vacant spot which used to hold a building that saved artifacts and then sold them. The building was demolished in a fire, but they still put the artifacts out in the lot every day to sell them. That's some out of the box thinking. . . The whole rest of the block is taken up by a park (again, super weird for a street like this). It's kind of a depressing park though because you see people trying to enjoy themselves in the midst of madness: crazy people yelling, tourists, honking cabs, trash, dirt, construction. It's not even my 15th choice for a park, but I guess it's nice to know it's there should anything ever happen to the first 14.
The particular strand of Houston that runs through the Bowery isn't a stretch where you can live. Pretty much the whole chunk of it is taken up by public things. But, that's a saving grace because I can't imagine living on a street as filthy and loud as Houston and managing to maintain some sort of sanity.