Bob Dylan, Whitney Houston, the Grateful Dead and Patti Smith all made these places famous. Meet the residents who inherited the homes’ legacies — and sometimes find fans picnicking on their …
Owning and occupying a location where musical history went down has presented its share of opportunities and challenges to this quartet of disparate people — from preserving history to making their own. Still, all feel the weight of the history of the places they inhabit, whether their homes are virtually untouched by time, like Big Pink, or part of the palimpsest of an ever-changing city, like Smith and Mapplethrope’s once-wretched first digs.
When he first bought the home, LaSala found himself under the microscope. “People were saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to make it into a Dylan Disneyland,’” he recalls. “And they started asking, ‘What are you going to do? Make it a museum? People were just snarking at us left and right. So, we kept our heads down.”
With the advent of Airbnb, LaSala realized that they could do something similar with their perhaps too-famous house: They could buy a home with a lower profile and become stewards of Big Pink, which they could rent out to fans and artists looking for their own personal musical Mecca. “I really didn’t want to make it a museum because it’s not dead,” he says.
A few years later, though, a young emergency room doctor with a taste for real estate snapped up the long-empty house for a mere $1.5 million — plus a hefty sum for repairs. Krauthamer, now 39, had had his eye on the property for years before acquiring it in 2014. He recalls going on a tour of the house with other prospective buyers, who were all loudly speculating about how they’d change Houston’s former dream home.
After Whitney Houston’s death in February, 2012, fans laid Flowers and notes of sympathy at the entrance of her former home in Mendham, New Jersey. Photo credit: John W. Ferguson/Getty Images The 46-year-old teacher has been living in the bottom floor of what is commonly known as the Grateful Dead House for more than 10 years now — almost five times as long as the band actually resided there. The Massachusetts native happened across a Craigslist ad with his then-girlfriend, and the price of the one-bedroom garden apartment seemed right — especially for a school teacher living in San Francisco. When he discovered that the apartment once housed Jerry Garcia and Co.
Now, what Smith called “my corner of our world” is a pristine guest bedroom that its current residents have dubbed “The Mapplethorpe Suite,” outside of which stands a brand-new Peloton exercise bike. The floor-to-ceiling windows wash the white bedspread in bright sunlight and the shelves are filled with history books. Across the hall, a two-year-old boy named Sullivan snoozes away the afternoon.
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