Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Clinton Hill Apartment On The Market For $1 million
In case you hadn’t heard, New York is a lot more expensive than it used to be — the rent is too damn high, etc. etc. There are also more jobs and probably less random incidences of violent crime than there used to be, but still, not cheap!
For yet another harbinger of the increasingly unreasonable real estate market, the Clinton Hill apartment where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe famously shacked up in 1967 just hit the market at an asking price of $1 million. For perspective, when they lived there, the rent was $80 a month.
In all fairness, the apartment, which is essentially the second floor of a larger townhouse, does seem to have cleaned up significantly from the “aggressively seedy condition” Smith described Just Kids, given the “exposed brick and parquet floors” described in the listing, as does the neighborhood as a whole.
And instead of looking at this as the death knell of the bohemian dream, let’s focus on the positive: maybe someday I’ll be able to flip my zoning nightmare of a Bushwick apartment for millions upon millions! Or just get edged out to the next hot, cheap neighborhood.
