On verso is a description of the painting by Nancy Townshend, which reads:

Bates celebrates Delancey Street in New York City made famous in the song "Manhattan," by the line "It's very funny on old Delancey Street, you know." Here he depicts a square off of Delancey Street where the highly optical, Thrift Opticians Drugs was. Bates takes our eye down this square and street by the high lamppost in the painting's right foreground. The end of a bus with the red line balances the optician store, and takes us down Delancey Street fading to the disappearing New York skyline.

Maxwell Bates, the architect, knew how to draw buildings and streetscapes. His visual memory of Delancey Street, one of the main thoroughfares of New York City's Lower East Side in Manhattan, in 1973 recalled a similar scene in New York where he had lived for about four months from 1949 to 1950. Charmed by a former Calgarian, May Watson, Bates had followed her back to New York, where he had married her on October 15, 1949. He also had taken a course each from Abraham Rattner and Max Beckmann at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He sketched and painted New York street scenes then. This provided imagery for him for his later works of art.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.