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I think you make a good point that 'cheap' is very relative to your means and access, and the LES may not have been cheap for _everyone_ even in the 80s. Definitely important to remember.

But I'm inclined to believe Smith that it was cheap for her and people like her in a way present-day NYC isn't, for similar people today. I guess we could try to look up rent statistics over time etc.

> if you want that in NY now you move to crown heights.

Pretty sure Crown Heights ain't affordable anymore either. (idle googling suggests median Crown Heights studio apartment price today is $2000. Yeah. "Studio" means "one room (usually very small) apartment" in U.S. rental listings, not something cool like 'giant warehouse an artist can make into an art studio', heh.)

Maybe somewhere I haven't heard of (cause I don't live in NYC) in Queens or the Bronx? I don't know if you'd have the same access to culture and money living in some far-off non-subway-served part of the Bronx though.

I think Manhattan in the 80s really was kind of unusual in being cheap _and_ still a place with lots of money floating around and cultural institutions. This is unusual. It was sort of a mid-point on the re-organization of American urban geography, with NYC being a special case as usual as the biggest city in the U.S.

>idle googling suggests median Crown Heights studio apartment price today is $2000.

It's not quite that bad. Here are some actual listings for one-bedrooms in Crown Heights that rent between $1500-1700:

https://www.padmapper.com/listings/17067721.-1-bedroom-1-bat...

https://www.padmapper.com/listings/17206256.-1-bedroom-1-bat...

https://www.padmapper.com/listings/17246561.-1-bedroom-1-bat...

But everything is relative. Those apartments would rent for around $700-800 in my city.

I don't think it's worth splitting hairs on Crown Heights real estate prices being exorbitant. They are. I moved here two years ago right when the 2nd wave of gentrifiers flooded the area. It's stark.

You might be able to get a 1500-1700 if you _compete_ for one because landlords are beginning to mobilize crappy housing stock (like these apartments).

Plus, let's not forget that $1500 is still a lot of money to most people.

Especially if you are working as a server in a small restaurant or the floor of a small music shop, which is how starving artists survive while trying to build a career.

All the focus on absolute cost misses the income side of the equation, which hasn't kept up with the cost side.

>I think Manhattan in the 80s really was kind of unusual in being cheap _and_ still a place with lots of money floating around and cultural institutions.

I think you're probably right. On the one hand, the city was something of a train wreck at the time and certainly there were a lot of areas like the LES and probably Hell's Kitchen, etc. that a lot of people generally stayed away from and were probably relatively cheap.

At the same time, Plenty of middle class and wealthier people weren't about to leave Manhattan for a whole host of reasons (finance industry, culture, etc.) in the way that the same cohort was fleeing other cities for the suburbs.

> Maybe somewhere I haven't heard of (cause I don't live in NYC) in Queens or the Bronx? I don't know if you'd have the same access to culture and money living in some far-off non-subway-served part of the Bronx though.

Large parts of the southern Bronx are served by subway and still affordable. The have relatively bad crime stats and you may feel out of place but all that was true in the LES in the 80s too. And even if there aren't great commuting options to the financial district or midtown, you don't necessarily need to be in quick commuting distance to take advantage of the proximity to the cultural institutions. It's still going to be far easier for your indie band to get booked into some west village bar if you are based out of some far corner of the Bronx than if you are based out of Cincinnati. And if you develop your own artsy section of the Bronx the millionaires that want to feel cool can take uber up there.

All that said, the Bronx runs into the whole "gentrification" debate in a way that I don't think some of these other towns across the rust belt do. I get the sense that in at least some of these cities everyone, or almost everyone, is happy to get any kind of population influx.

> Large parts of the southern Bronx are served by subway and still affordable

Not for long. There's already a hip coffee shop on 134th st right off the 3rd Ave bridge. Things are gonna creep upward pretty quick. Give it 5-10 years and it'll look like Harlem does now.

> "Studio" means "one room (usually very small) apartment" in U.S. rental listings, not something cool like 'giant warehouse an artist can make into an art studio', heh.)

As an American it never quite occurred to me how bullshit of a term "studio" is. It's more like "the minuscule size of this apartment makes it more appropriate for an art studio than an actual dwelling."

> Many New York artists talk about NYC as if it was cheap but it is simply not true.

Can you clarify your position? My reading is that the article was making the point that rent is significantly more expensive in NY today than it was in the 60s and early 70s when people like Patti Smith were there.

As far as I can tell, this is objectively true. Here's a chart of of the last 100 years of rental/purchase prices in NY [1]. Admittedly one that does adjust for inflation would be better, but it pretty clearly demonstrates that the mid-70s to 2000s showed a massive leap in NY's unaffordability.

[1] http://ny.curbed.com/2015/6/2/9954250/tracking-new-york-rent...

The post is very misleading because it's not about absolute cost of living, you should also suggest data for other towns where an artist could have lived, for example some small town in Ohio.

If Patti Smith lived somewhere in Colorado mountains to do her thing, she probably wouldn't be where she is today. Artists require audience, and cities like New York have them, ready to spend money. That's why people moved to New York, and "created their scene". They would have never been able to "create their own scene" in a farm town with population of 300.

That said, it makes more sense nowadays since we now have Internet. I think you can just live wherever is the cheapest and work on your art (could be an actual piece of art or even a business) since we have the Internet.

But it's wrong to say the artists "created their scene" in New York. New York was the only place they could have "created their scene" back then.

It's a fair point that the only way for these artists to have become successful in a significant way at the time was to move to a town like New York that can supply the necessary patronage, but I'm not sure that I'd characterize the post as "very misleading".

Even with the city's money, the artists still did have to do the legwork to create a scene that was worthy of investment. Rich people aren't gullible saps who will be parted from their fortune at the first opportunity.

An artist also shouldn't have to be as wildly successful as Patti Smith to be considered a success. Other cities of high culture like Berlin have also fostered incredible art scenes over the last few decades, and without the overflowing capital of NY. Few of those artists made it big, but many did achieve comfortable lifestyles of more modest means, and I think we could say that they "created their scene".

Relevant quote from the article:

> The idea is that you live somewhere cheap, keep your overhead low, make whatever work you want to make, create your own scene. Nobody gets super-rich or super-famous, but dammit, they get to live their lives their own way, unbeholden to anybody.

You know,, Berlin is the capital city of Germany, so your Berlin example exactly supports my point. People who are motivated to succeed naturally flock to a city with access to the largest audience, as long as they can afford it, since that raises your chance of success.

I was just pointing out this Patti Smith person is completely mistaken about what made herself successful, she thinks it's all her doing but she's forgetting she was at the right place at the right time (and of course with the right content she provided). My whole argument is if you compare larger cities with any other smaller towns, everything is easier (only drawback is money), and that's why people naturally flock to larger cities. My argument has nothing to do with whether legwork is necessary or not, it's just about how people can only create "scenes" where it makes sense. It's delusional to think that they could have created it anywhere else.

Right, Berlin is the capital of Germany, but the reason I brought it up as a counterexample for New York is that the Cold War and aftermath left it economically depressed for decades. Until quite recently, rents there were very cheap (on all kinds of interesting spaces), and the art scene flourished.

(And meta note: thank-you for editing your post to be more civil. It looks like your account is relatively new, so I'm going to leave a link here to HN comment etiquette in case you haven't seen it before [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think art has existed and will exist no matter how shitty the situation is. I'm not even arguing New York is better than Germany. This is where I think there was a misunderstanding, because I've been just talking about how "creating a scene" is not something you can just do anywhere, it has nothing to do with money and has everything to do with population and audience.

To create a scene, you go to a concentrated enough place to gather people. Why would anyone decide to go to middle of nowhere and try to create a group of like minded people? (Again, i'm talking about the past, I do think it is possible nowadays with the Internet)

When you say rents were very cheap and depressed in Berlin, I doubt that it was cheaper or more depressed than other parts of Germany. Where would German artists go for larger population? Berlin. Unless you think german artists should have and could have created a "scene" from a smaller town in germany, I don't think we are disagreeing about anything.

While that's true, I think comparing the East Village back then to the East Village today isn't sufficient to claim that the entire city is too expensive today. Maybe a less drastic approach is fine - instead of "find a new city" which cuts you off from all the resources & audiences only found in a place like NY, just find a new neighborhood.

NYC wasn't only poor people (it's a major business metropolis of ~10MM people, not everybody is going to be poor), but it was actually affordable on a small income. In fact, most of the US was the 80s, and 90s. Don't know what you mean by the Puerto Ricans who lived there before her, because they're still there.

You're right that NYC is still somewhat affordable if you look outside of Manhattan, not Crown Heights though, but places like south Brooklyn, and east Queens. The issue is that everybody who's never lived in NYC, or only lived there after getting a college degree only considers NYC to be Manhattan + Williamsburg.

Source: Growing up poor in NYC.

I get that parts of NYC have been affordable at different times, but there are parts that get gentrified and taken advantage of by a very specific class of people (primarily white middle class) who use the depressed value of the area to have more space and time to do arts and culture stuff.

I lived in Sunset Park for many many years and saw artists moving into the studios down by the docks. They came from SOHO, DUMBO, and Williamsburg. In 25 years, they will move somewhere else.

NYC since its founding has been a commercial trading center, not a creative arts hub. I don't understand where the idea that it's a place to be creative came from. There is nothing about NYC that makes me creative (in the producing sense, not consuming) because the city is so exhausting to live in, and so cramped and noisy, that I have no energy to think freely and creatively. In fact the boredom, space and ease of the suburbs leads me to more creativity.

> now you move to crown heights

No you certainly don't. Crown Heights is expensive... very very expensive.

You move to Canarsie. That's the insanity that is NYC now.

you want that in NY now you move to crown heights. And there will be some myopic look back in 25 years saying the same shit about that place too

I smiled when I read this because I remember having a gay co-worker describing his neighborhood as "I live in controversy-ridden Crown Heights" about 27 years ago.

Holy crap, I'm old!