Building History Timeline

Diane di Prima


1967
The poet, who spent time with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, wrote a book of poetry named for the Albert.

The next year [1967] brought a summer of many urban riots. My family and I were back in Manhattan for a brief time, ensconced in the Hotel Albert on University Avenue [sic]. This was a time of multiple causes and petitions: Allen [Ginsberg] and I worked together on many of them. There was some sense, I think on both our parts, that we could rely on the other in such endeavors. We shared an ethos in some odd way. It was inherited and familial: Allen’s was Jewish and socialist, and mine Italian and anarchist, but when it was time to act, we mostly tended to see eye to eye.

Anne Waldman described di Prima in residence at the hotel:


I had met Diane [di Prima] earlier at the Albert Hotel in New York, when I was seventeen. She was in situ with child, shrines, library, magical accoutrements, an entourage that made me even more curious about her work.