Enter the building at 161 Essex Street and you step inside the history of New York’s Lower East Side, in all its chaotic glory.

The decaying two-story building — covered in graffiti, stickers and a permanently drawn accordion gate — is the home, office and inner sanctum of Clayton Patterson, the street photographer and renegade journalist. Mr. Patterson, 76, has spent more than 40 years here, accumulating an exhaustive collection of photos, paintings and other paraphernalia from his beloved neighborhood.

There are portraits of gender-bending performers like RuPaul and Lower East Side gangs like Satan’s Sinners Nomads. There are photos and videos about the case of Daniel Rakowitz, who killed his roommate and girlfriend in 1989 and was rumored to have made soup from her body and fed it to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. (Mr. Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the cannibalism was never proved.)

The walls are decorated with graffiti by some of the famed taggers that Mr. Patterson has known over the years and paintings by Peter Missing, the musician and artist whose emblem of an upside-down martini glass was once ubiquitous in the East Village, carrying its implicit anti-Yuppie message: “The party’s over.”

There’s a thick black binder of empty cocaine and heroin bags that once drew Anthony Bourdain, who visited Mr. Patterson just before his death in June 2018. Mr. Bourdain, a former heroin user, found a bag of a specific type of heroin he’d once tried called “Toilet,” a moment he featured in the finale of his show “Parts Unknown,” quipping, “You knew you were doing something bad when you bought a product called ‘Toilet,’ you know, and shot it in your arm.”