Looking at pictures of other spiral galaxies, they all seem to have a distinct central globe of stars clustered brightly around, presumably, an inner black hole.

But when we look into the night sky toward the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, we see a horizontal stripe of stars and nebulae. Why don't we see, in the middle of this stripe, the large central globe of stars in the galaxy's centre?

My hypothesis: even though the central globe does extend somewhat above and below the main galactic disk, it does not extend far enough to be seen from our position without being blocked by all the disk's dust and gases, as illustrated in the following ASCII diagram:

Your hypothesis is exactly the case.

To be sure, we do have a little "peek" towards the interior through Baade's Window, and the Milky Way is still brightest in Sagittarius and Scorpius, but there's no dramatic view. However, since the Solar System's orbit sort of "bounces" through the plane of the Milky Way, there may be times when we have a somewhat better view of the center than we do now.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Nevermind XD

There was mention on a Q&BA episode that the Milky Way is actually a barred spiral galaxy. How were astronomers able to determine that?

Here's a paper that talks about the measurements involved. Essentially, by picking the right wavelengths, you can see through the dust and map out the stars at the center, and then look at the resulting map for structural details.

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This is great, thanks!

We can see our galaxy's central bulge, although it gets kinda washed out because of all the dust in our galaxy. Look toward the constellation of Sagittarius. It is much more visible in infrared light, since the dust doesn't block infrared out so much. Here's a good picture http://www.astro.washington.edu/debattis/milkyway.html

It has also been done by identifying the kinematic signature of a bar as observed in the radial velocities of stars near the Galactic center.

And here is an 'image' showing the bulge, as directly observed from our home ...

One reason why I like this is that it shows how the bulge is visible in some waveband(s), compared with it being hidden in the waveband we regard as the default ...

[ETA: I see that tricon has posted a similar 'image'!]

I always thought of it this way....

If you has a sheet of paper, and looked at it edge-on, would you see the ink on either side?

Wow! The pictures posted above of the Milky Way's core as seen from Earth in infrared really show how we are waaaaaay out on the edge of the stellar spiral disk, whizzing around at breakneck speed. You can almost feel the cosmic wind blowing your hair back.

Thank you, Triclon and Nereid, for those images!