Just Kids

“A Book That Changed How I See New York.”

I’m writing this after my latest trip to New York, having finished Patti Smith’s Just Kids just in time to take it with me. And for the first time, I found myself walking through the city with different eyes.

I’ll be honest: I never knew Patti Smith’s music. Horses came out in 1975 — the year I was born — so it was never the soundtrack of my youth in the way it was for so many others. I came to the book with no expectations, no mythology to protect or challenge.

I’ve been to New York a handful of times as a visitor — 2007, 2009, 2025, and now again this past May. Short trips, packed with the usual itineraries: Broadway, the Met, Brooklyn Bridge, walks along the High Line. I’ve always loved the energy, the noise, the sheer scale of it. But I knew the city the way a tourist does — from the outside, through postcard views and hurried footsteps.

Just Kids changed that.

Smith’s New York isn’t the postcard city. It’s darker, grittier, more desperate — and somehow more beautiful for it. The Chelsea Hotel she describes isn’t the gentrified landmark you visit on a walking tour; it was a crumbling, creative asylum where artists and addicts shared the same elevators, where everyone was hungry and nobody was playing it safe. She and Mapplethorpe arrive at twenty, both broke, both convinced they’re meant for something more. They share a tiny room, scrape by with odd jobs, and spend their nights and days making art because nothing else would do.

They love each other. Then they love each other differently. But what holds them through the late 1960s and the whole of the 1970s isn’t romance — it’s a promise: no matter what happens, we will not give up on becoming artists.

And they do. Smith becomes the high priestess of punk. Mapplethorpe becomes one of the most celebrated — and controversial — photographers of his generation. Only to die of AIDS in 1989, just as recognition finally arrives.

Reading it before my trip this time, I found myself asking different questions. Walking past the Chelsea Hotel, I wasn’t just taking a photo of a beautiful building anymore. Through the streets of Greenwich Village, I wasn’t just checking landmarks off a list. I was seeing what Smith saw: the pathways between art and desperation that once ran through those streets.

I’ve always loved New York as a visitor. But after Just Kids, I think I may finally have started to understand it.

I’ve always been drawn to both Greenwich Village and the East Village — maybe because they’re the one part of New York where the city slows down enough to breathe. Not the postcard kind of calm, but the quiet hum of people just living their lives. Everywhere I’ve ever been, I’ve always looked for paths that don’t lead anywhere in particular — a side street, a quiet bench, a corner where the city breathes for a moment before carrying on without you. After reading this book, I started doing that a little more deliberately in New York. Maybe you never really stop being a tourist. But you start appreciating a different side of the city.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s ever been drawn to New York but feels the usual itineraries leave something out. Of course, none of the places Smith writes about still exist in the way she knew them. But the spirit is still there, somewhere. You just have to know how to look — and this book shows you where to start.