Patti Smith’s days of sleeping in a graveyard: “Oh it was scary”
“No one expected me. Everything awaited me”: Those were the summarising words of Patti Smith the moment she boarded a bus, 20 years old, to run away to New York. Fleeing a tired life in a small town working in a factory, she was going to join the ranks of artists chasing a creative life, the inkling of a calling and the hunger to meet the others calling out. But the issue is that when no one expects you, there is no soft place to land.
Smith did have some semblance of a plan. “I was hoping my friends put me up until I could find a place of my own,” she wrote in her memoir, Just Kids. Obviously, things were different then. A 20-year-old with no prospects could genuinely land in New York, score a simple, humble job like the one she would eventually land, being a cashier at a bookshop, and actually afford to rent a place there. No one is doing that today. But Smith’s plan stumbled at the first step; “I went to the Brownstone at the address I had, but they had moved”.
And thus began Smith’s period of homelessness. On her first night in New York, she slept right there on the stoop of the building, still waiting for her friends who didn’t come. She stayed hopeful for a while, choosing to linger around the Brooklyn area where they lived, sofa-surfing between the houses of kind strangers or simply curling up on their stoop, staying optimistic that her friends might appear.
But they never did, and eventually, she knew she’d overstayed her welcome. She chalked it up to timing: “Summer seemed the wrong time to find a sympathetic student. Everyone was less than eager to provide me with a helping hand. Everyone was struggling, and I, the country mouse, was just an awkward presence,” she wrote, so she took off, further into the belly of the beast, into Manhattan.
Patti Smith’s fearless leap into 1960s New York
It gave her greater scope. She could apply for more and more jobs there, traipsing up and down Fifth Avenue in the day and then simply people watching at night, posting up in Central Park or in Washington Square to watch the street musicians play or feel the excitement and the energy of her new city. It had yet to give her a home, but it began to feel like one, or at least the one she wanted; “this open atmosphere was something I had not experienced,” she writes, “simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone.”
However, once again, these were different times. Now, no one could or would do this, I doubt anyone would dare. To turn up in New York City, in what is arguably the city, the ultimate city, with absolutely nothing, no place to go, no job to bring in money, no friends to support you and no back up plan, only the trust that things would work out—that’s the kind of mindset only the 1960s economy could afford a person.
But it’s also the mindset and the circumstances that gave the world our greats. People could do that, and did in their droves, allowing the world to know people like Smith, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen; ordinary people who wouldn’t be able to navigate that lifestyle today, who likely wouldn’t be able to afford to take the risk and so perhaps the world would never have heard them. Just think how many future idols we miss out on every day as cities become more and more inaccessible and the opportunity for a leap of faith becomes increasingly elitist.
That’s not to say that Smith didn’t struggle, though. Hunger is hunger, whether it’s the 1960s or the 2020s. Fear is fear, too, and when she was in Manhattan, still without a job or a place to stay, she wouldn’t deny that sleeping in parks, subways and even graveyards struck fear into her. “Oh, it was scary!” she recalled to The Guardian in 2016, “But no more scary than sleeping the night in a field in south Jersey”. But she knew she had to stick it out. She had to survive just long enough for something to happen, and it did.
Just as fate had stepped in to get Patti Smith to New York, it stepped in again to keep her there and deliver the life she’s led there from then on. She managed to get a job in a store, but with still no home, she was sleeping in the back room. It was here, though, that she met Robert Maplethorpe by total chance, running into him another day as fate gave them a second go. She went home with him that night, and the story of their lives, of Patti Smith’s and Robert Maplethorpe’s careers, of two of New York’s most interesting artists, blossomed.
