Robert Indiana kept a series of illustrated journals during the late 1950s and 1960s, in which he discusses the development of his work as well as his daily life on Coenties Slip.

These two journal pages cover November 13–14, 1961. Indiana sometimes went back to his journals at a later date, writing the entry based on notes. Here he indicates that he wrote these entries on January 4, 1970.

In his first entry, for November 13, Indiana records that he had been up much of the night getting ready for gallerist Leo Castelli's planned visit. He had fallen asleep exhausted, until he was woken up by "a great deal of banging on the lower door," and the discovery that the door to his studio was being removed, with the city marshal, a patrolman, and ConEd men coming in and removing his gas meter. He writes that Castelli and Ivan Karp's (the director of Castelli Gallery) visit a little later was "really anticlimactic," and that they brought him a botanica sign. 

In his entry for November 14 Indiana writes, "begin The American Gas Works today after yesterday's harrowing experience, using my loft meter as central motif of the work."