Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a flat or house in which any passing friends or strangers can find a bed at short notice.

1968		Oz 9 7/2: They made history there by [...] providing crash pads in their communes for dropouts.
1970		Guardian Weekly 31 Oct. 24: The Berkeley police have taken to dawn busts on the communal ‘crash pads’ which litter any big university town.
1983		C. Heath A-Team 2 (1984) 23: Base of operations, and occasional crash pad.
1990		W.D. Myers Mouse Rap 77: We all get back to the neighborhood and get ready to split to our separate crashes.
1992		A. Duff One Night Out Stealing 93: Room’d been too much of a crash-pad, a place you slept, and now and again brought a woman, some low-life scrubber.
1995		R. Campbell Wizard of La-La Land (1999) 197: What’d you find over this Gotch’s crash?
2004		J. Ellroy ‘Jungletown Jihad’ in Destination: Morgue! (2004) 337: Match the mattresses to glove prints – you craft a crash pad.
2008		R. Price Lush Life 57: A five-man crash pad in Cobble Hill, an Our Gang, pot-stanky garden apartment .
2023		(con. 1962) J. Ellroy Enchanters 10: Swinger joints. Schmooze pits. Stewardess crash pads. Fag cribs and bachelorette dumps for kept women.

2. (US drugs) by ext. of sense 1, a place where users could recover from bad drug experiences [crash n.² (2)].

1970		Arizona Republican (Phoenix, AZ) 17 Feb. 14/4: In Tucson her operated a ‘crash pad’ where dopers could come to recover from bad trips.
1981		J. Elllroy Brown’s Requiem 79: ‘[H]e's always [...] taking off to hang out at the drug recovery crashpad’.

3. an apartment where a group, e.g. a police squad, can meet unofficially.

2020

D. Winslow ‘Broken’ in Broken 22: The crash pad is in the Quarter [...] near the clubs, the bars [etc].