Why did Patti Smith move to New York?
“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.” That’s what Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids, recounting the moment when she boarded the bus at age 21 and travelled from her hometown in Philadelphia to New York City. It was in the big city that she would make her name, but the move was prompted by more than just a desire to succeed.
“In the spring of 1967, I assessed my life,” Smith wrote of the moments leading up to her bold move. In the year prior, her small-town life had been twisted and turned as she fell pregnant, carried the child and placed it up for adoption. She was working and earning a tiny wage in the factory that would eventually inspire her debut single, ‘Piss Factory’. But before the story was a song or even a poem, it was simply her sad reality. She knew, as she had always known, that she wanted to do more than just work a regular job and stay in the small sphere she’d always known.
So, one day, she made her escape. Her plan was to travel to the city and seek out some old friends there who were studying at Pratt Institute, an art school in the city. It seemed fated. When she arrived at the bus depot, she didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket. When she went to the phone, tail between her legs, to call someone to come get her and take her home, she found $32 lying there; more than enough. As she wrote, “I accepted the grant of the small white purse as the hands of fate pushing me on.”
On the same day she arrived, she met Robert Mapplethorpe, the man who would be her creative soulmate and enduring friend, but who was then just a mysterious stranger working in a bookshop. They fell together, figuring out a way to survive the city together. They moved into the Chelsea Hotel, Smith wrote poem and Mapplethorpe made art, they did their first shows and gradually, earned their place in pop culture history.
In short, Smith moved to New York, and her dreams came true, but the thought process behind the plan was always more than just a desire for notoriety.
Why did Patti Smith move to New York?
Whenever Patti Smith writes about her youthful dreams and hopes, they were never about fame. She never desired celebrity status or grand riches. Instead, she dreamt of community and the idea of living and working every day as an artist.
In Just Kids, she writes of her childhood dreams by saying, “I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers.” She said that throughout her youth in her parent’s working-class home, throughout her days in the factory and even throughout the painful birth of the child she gave up, the idea of this dream and purpose kept her going. She wrote simply, “I held to the hope that I was an artist.”
That’s the reason why she moved to the city. More so than knowing that New York was where the opportunities might be or where she might be able to make moves towards being an artist, she desired mostly to exist within a collective of them. In her final days in Philadelphia, she admitted to being lonely as her “few comrades had moved to New York to write poetry and study art”, her move was a desire to follow them and to once again be around likeminded people and be within a community of artists.
To Smith, it seemed as though the only way to be an artist and to finally step into the purpose she hope to hold was to exist as an artist, working daily surrounded by other artists. When she landed in New York and soon found herself living in the walls of the Chelsea Hotel which was bustling with artists, her dream came true.
Where did Patti Smith live in New York?
When Smith first moved to the city, she couch-surfed for a while around her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s mutual friends. They then moved into their first home at 160 Hall Street. However, after Smith went off on a trip to Paris, she returned to find her Mapplethorpe ill and in need of better shelter and fast. First, they moved to the Hotel Allerton on Eighth Avenue, living out what she called “the lowest point in our life together” as his condition worsened. When it hit a critical point, that’s when they moved into the infamous Chelsea Hotel.
They lived there together for several years until 1972 when they moved out into different places within walking distance. Smith moved to East Tenth Street. Eventually, she met Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith and moved to Michigan to raise their kids. After her husband passed, she moved back to the city and still lives there today.
