Nicholas Building

This guide to the Nicholas Building in Melbourne follows Vali Myers, a nineteen-year-old who left the city for Paris in 1949 and became one of the most photographed faces of the Left Bank, tattooing a young Patti Smith years later in Italy. It traces how illness brought her back to Melbourne in 1993 to a seventh-floor studio in this Art Deco tower, built decades earlier on a fortune made selling a homemade aspirin substitute. Look up in the arcade for the barrel-vaulted leadlight ceiling she and everyone else once passed beneath.