160 Hall Street. Image Credit: Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership.

The historic homes in the neighborhoods surrounding Myrtle Avenue hold the stories of past neighborhood residents. Some of these stories belong to people of fame, others to commonplace folks. Here is one of those stories:

Rock musician, artist and cultural rebel Patti Smith moved to Brooklyn in 1967, when she met famed artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The two, in their early twenties, quickly moved in together after meeting and found themselves an apartment at 160 Hall Street, just off Myrtle Avenue. Seen above, 160 Hall Street cost the two bohemians $160 upfront (with the monthly rent only being $80!). It’s easy to suspect the apartment building looked very similar to what we see today: impeccable Italianate ornamentation and simple, but handsome, wooden doors.

The pair of artists, and eventual legends, lived their first year in New York City on Hall Street, where they first began to develop the personalities and artistic identities that the world would eventually come to know.

160 Hall is a good reminder that all artists develop into their famous selves at some point in time and at some place. 160 Hall is that place for two incredible individuals that blazed their own path in life and awoke many more to do the same.

Learn more about Smith and Mapplethorpe’s time on Hall Street in Smith’s biography, Just Kids, published by Ecco Press and released in January 2010.