Sleeping on New York streets, then punk poet laureate

Patti Smith arrived in New York City in the summer of 1967, and on her first day in the city she met the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. She was about 20 at the time, and he was 21. In an NPR conversation from 2010 about her memoir of those years, she looked back at how they began as friends.

At first the two of them were so poor that they sometimes slept on the street. The NPR piece does not say how long this lasted. Smith, speaking about the hardship, said she was no stranger to hard times, and linked that to the role models she admired, who slept under the stars.

Their circumstances eventually improved enough for the two to share an apartment on Hall Street in Brooklyn, where they worked on their art. The piece does not describe the exact moment the hardship ended. Smith says only that it took a while to become who they evolved into, with both of them going on to be known as artists.

She describes the period as one of youth and naivety, saying that they were all young and naive and lived in a time that had magic. Of her bond with Mapplethorpe she says they woke up knowing they were no longer alone. They remained partners in a lasting bond until the end, and Mapplethorpe died in 1989 of AIDS. Smith became a celebrated punk singer, poet and author, and she recounted those years in her book Just Kids.