Therapy Row with Estlin

My father led me through the rusted gates at Patchin Place when I was about fourteen years old. I felt an excitement that was unparalleled—I was in New York City for the whole afternoon. As a young girl from a rural town in Pennsylvania, I had arrived in the mecca of literary greatness. From my bedroom, where I poured over my copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill to the street where they walked alone or traipsed with friends. Greenwich Village was a distant Narnia for me—and yet here I was following my father into some forgotten corner of the city.

My father pushed us farther into the shaded urban cul-de-sac towards the humble doors of Patchin Place residents. He was going to the psychiatrist for a routine visit. He could not imagine the significance of this visit though; that it would shape his daughter’s life. As he ushered me towards his doctor’s office, I noticed a placard in the left corner with a familiar name on it: ee cummings: 4 Patchin Place.

In the 1990s, Patchin Place became a home for therapists who were attracted to this quiet place in the city. I spent the next hour in the waiting room reading gay lifestyle magazines and discovering that RuPaul was indeed a man. I was unusually patient because my father promised that I could buy a book from the Barnes & Noble I saw on 6th Avenue.

Years later, I ponder the desire of therapists to settle in that little cove. It is ironic that professionals, who spend their lives dissecting the human soul, placing the broken pieces of a life together to create a functioning adult, took over a place that attracted artists unafraid to inhabit a soul collapsed or very nearly on the verge of destruction.

Why would those who are devoted to fixing the human mind be attracted to a place where people went to absorb themselves in the intangible soul? Could it be these therapists were reluctant romantics; that they wanted to work out of a place at the very margin of normal functioning?

ee cummings himself did say that living at 4 Patchin Place “meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.” If the artists who dared to plow boldly into the unknown fields of the mind to place their feet at the very edge of sanity could find comfort on Patchin Place, then so too could those who staked their claim in that place to work and cipher paths in that wilderness.

I took a trip back there recently, having come a long way from youthful wonderment. I wanted to revisit a place of inspiration, a place that brought me to New York City and that I think, subconsciously, still keeps me here.

- Lady Gravesend