Patti Smith’s book Just Kids turned 15 on 19 January this year. The book follows her move to New York City as a young creative with no money and meeting her lifelong friend and companion, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Throughout the novel, Smith covers from her birth in 1946 to Robert’s death in 1989 to complications surrounding AIDs.
Patti Smith is a painter, poet, musician, author and all-round creative who
started her career back in late 1960s New York. She became an incredibly
influential member of the New York punk rock movement. She met her
creative partner Robert in the summer of 1967, a year where people took to
the streets in the US to protest the Vietnam war, the first colour television
broadcasts in the UK began, Charlie Chaplin released his last film, and Jimi
Hendrix set fire to his guitar in Monterey.
Patti and Robert met when she was homeless in New York City. She was
going door to door with her résumé, one that listed her only qualifications as
a short factory job and her education as scattered and incomplete. Against
the odds, Patti managed to secure a job as a waitress at an Italian restaurant
in Times Square. As hard as this was to accomplish in 1967, it makes one
wonder how far this is from reality today. To get a job with no experience, in
the heart of the city feels close to impossible unless you have connections at
the restaurant, which Patti did not.
Throughout the book, Patti paints the harrowing, occasionally gruesome and
perfectly imperfect picture of the starving artist. Living in New York City
with no money at all but somehow making it work whilst still having the
time to invest into creative hobbies. Happening to be in the right place to
make creative connections, the people Patti and Robert met during this time
changed their lives forever. An important element of this narrative is the
Hotel Chelsea.
The Chelsea Hotel is the most infamous hotel in music history. Frequented
by the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Jimi
Hendrix, Bob Marley, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, and of course Robert
Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. As well as many creatives outside of the
music world: Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol and more. The hotel
is said to be haunted as it was the location of Dylan Thomas’s death as well
as the tragic death of Nancy Spungen at the hands of her boyfriend, the Sex
Pistols’ Sid Vicious. What began as a cooperative hotel turned into a place
that many of the most famous creatives have called home at some point.
What made the Hotel Chelsea unique was the barter system that it operated,
a landlord that accepted artist portfolios as a deposit for those who weren’t
able to afford it.
55 years later, does art still hold the same value in a world so entranced with
late stage capitalism? Starving artists in 2025 aren’t living in a hotel room
next door from Adele or Beyonce – which is an accurate comparison for
Patti and Robert at the beginning of their careers living right next to Janis
Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Our current starving artists are exactly that;
starving. Either homeless because they can’t afford to get by on their art
alone, or working a job that they hate just to get by and not having any time
to dedicate to their art.
Patti and Robert paid $55 a week during their stay at Hotel Chelsea, which
equates to approximately $519.45 today. In alignment with its fame, the
Hotel Chelsea now charges around $400-$500+ for a single night. Where are
the safe havens for artists in the city? A place where artists can live and
create with each other, without having to worry about money sounds utopian
in today’s world but it did exist not too long ago.
Many artists in today’s world have to make a decision between the two, to
starve for their art or to eat and be forced to put their art on hold?
“Patti Smith in Rosengrten 1978” by Klaus Hiltscher is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.