It was on the second floor of this building that Jack Kerouac, living with his mother —though obviously not in her basement— during much of the 1940s, post-Columbia, post-Merchant Marine, wrote his first novel, the Thomas Wolfe-ian The Town And The City and apparently began planning what by 1957 would become On The Road.
To get there from Manhattan [or JFK], pull a Duke Ellington and take the A Train, getting off at Rockaway Boulevard [n.b., not Rockaway Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant] and walk less than a half-mile down Cross Bay Boulevard to the corner of 133rd Avenue
Kerouac historian Patrick Fenton notes that when the ground-floor store —once a flower shop, now a dance school— was a pharmacy, Kerouac worked there as a soda jerk.
Those wishing to drink even more deeply of the writer's legend could cross the boulevard to the Crossbay Sportsbar, the former Kerouac haunt McNulty's, later known as Glen Patrick's Pub.
No comments:
Post a Comment