Look Inside Richard Hell’s East Village Tenement Apartment

When he moved into his East Village apartment in 1974, Richard Hell was 24 years old and playing bass in Television, the influential proto-punk band that was one of the first to play at CBGB. At the time, the rent on the one-bedroom unit was about $110 a month.

“The heat would be off for months at a time,” Mr. Hell recalled, “but then they would forget to collect rent, so it kind of balanced out.”

Over the next 50-plus years, he formed a few new bands (including the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids), starred in a couple of movies (including Susan Seidelman’s “Smithereens”), and quit music for a writing career, penning volumes of poetry and cultural criticism, two novels, and a celebrated 2013 autobiography, “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.” In February, New York Review Books reissued “Godlike,” his visceral 2005 novel about a pair of dissolute New York poets in the 1970s.