He lived at Chelsea Hotel where I lived for some good number of years. We were around the corner and he always had visitors, like, he was very close to Allen Ginsberg, Corso... Gregory Corso was always there and very often I could smell what they were smoking right in my room. Sometimes I... real smoke used to come in, they used to set mattresses on fire and there were fireman coming in. And he was a very heavy drinker during the time that I met and used to... wherever at night, like usual late night, if he walks with somebody, he sees a fire alarm handle he goes and pulls it down, and therefore then fire alarm. Until I think he befriended... Barbara Rubin befriended him and... and somebody by the name Rosebud... by the name Rosebud. I don't know her real name, you were around too... I mean, I'm talking to Amy Taubin. Yes, she befriended or they befriended him, they really admired him and decided to save him from drinking and all that trouble, that he was almost every night going to jail and... and they managed. I don't know how they did it. He stopped drinking, or at least reduced to drinking to minimum. I mean, his diet was very, very strange, when we moved into Anthology Film Archives, we purchased the building in '79, but we opened to the people only in late '78, that means in '88... that means for like eight, nine years we were renovating.

For the first few years we had no heat, no nothing and he had no... Harry Smith had no place to live. He lived in various... on the Bowery with friends, for some time he lived in some hotel, he had too many problems there, so I gave him during all his days, for like two years he spent, I gave him a room; it became his sort of working space where he moved in with his drawings and and stuff and he used to come like everybody at nine o'clock, though we never keep such strict, you know, at Anthology, rules. He used to come because he, you know... he cannot... he did not like his... that was the period he was staying on the Bowery somewhere next to William Burroughs place and actually it was William Burroughs that got him that little place there on the Bowery, together with others bums practically, and he was not in very good health, Harry, already. And he used to come and stay until we all leave and he leaves also like signing in and signing out and there... and very cold, we were all with gloves, mittens all the time, with tips cut off so that we can type and so he spent and when that... when he, of course, died later, he left all his materials at Anthology, hundreds and hundreds of boxes of materials. That is Harry who is definitely, if one can use a word, genius as once Robert Frank said, 'I have never met geniuses in my life except one, Harry Smith'. I think he was.