Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe — 206 East 2nd Street, New York City

Patti Smith lived at 206 East 2nd Street in the East Village with Robert Mapplethorpe in the years before her music career began — years she documented in her memoir Just Kids. The East Village in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the last cheap neighbourhood in Manhattan, a dense grid of tenement buildings in the streets below 14th Street east of Third Avenue where rent was low enough that artists, musicians, and writers could afford to live and work without immediate commercial success. Smith and Mapplethorpe arrived from New Jersey with almost nothing and built their creative lives in the East Village and its surroundings.

St Marks Place — East 8th Street through the East Village — was the neighbourhood's main artery: bookshops, record stores, the Electric Circus venue (later), the movements of musicians, junkies, and intellectuals who constituted downtown New York's creative community in that period. Smith read poetry publicly in the area, formed connections with the musicians who would become her band, and moved between the Chelsea Hotel (where she and Mapplethorpe briefly stayed) and the East Village addresses that were her actual home.

Her 1975 album Horses — recorded at Electric Lady Studios and produced by John Cale — is one of the founding documents of punk and new wave, though Smith has always resisted the genre labels. The East Village geography that shaped her is still physically present: the tenement scale, the density, the grid of streets between the avenues. The specific buildings are largely intact. The neighbourhood has gentrified substantially but the architecture of the world she moved through in 1969-1975 is still there.