Jack Kerouac Is Unknown Queens Luminary

Author Pat Fenton lectured on the life of Jack Kerouac and the 12 years that the Beat Generation author lived in Queens at the Queens Historical Society. Photo Jason D. Antos Queens has been the birthplace and home to many of the world’s most famous artists. Acclaimed film directors Martin Scorsese and John Frankenheimer were born in Corona and College Point, respectively. The borough’s North Shore was the predecessor to Beverly Hills when silver screen legends like Charlie Chaplin, Ethel Merman, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford called it home. There are even a few old time residents who can recall the days when magician Howard Thurston walked his baby elephant through the streets of Beechhurst or when they went to school with TV star Fran Drescher at Parsons Junior H.S. in Flushing.      
Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, also lived in Queens. And if it were not for people like Pat Fenton, nobody would ever know.   
On January 31, the Queens Historical Society celebrated the Queens chapter of Kerouac’s life with a lecture by Fenton. The event attracted an overwhelming response from Kerouac fans, including students of English and contemporary American literature.
Fenton has been on a 20-year crusade to learn more about Kerouac’s existence in Queens and how it affected his life and writings.
“I want Kerouac to be recognized in the County of Queens,” Fenton said. “It has not been an easy task.”
Fenton spoke for more than two hours about Kerouac’s life and exploits around the borough.
“Kerouac lived here for 12 years, which is the longest time he lived anywhere at one time during his life,” Fenton said.
The author and creator of the Beat Generation, an honor that he detested, lived at 133-01 Cross Bay Blvd. from 1943 until 1949 above a drugstore in Ozone Park. It was here that he wrote his first novel, The Town and The City, in 1950. He earned a living working as a soda jerk in the drugstore below the apartment that he shared with his mother. In the days when not everyone had a telephone, Kerouac would receive his calls from poet friend Allen Ginsberg at the drugstore.
Across the street at 133-10 Cross Bay Blvd. is Glen Patrick’s pub. It was at this bar that Kerouac would go to fill his mother’s teakettle with draft beer. The establishment is mentioned in Vanity of Duluoz where the author writes about his father buying beers for Ed White, who would appear in On the Road as Tim Grey.
Kerouac would also roam the streets of Queens, walking from Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica to Cross Bay Boulevard in Ozone Park, writing down thoughts in a small notebook which he kept in his back pocket.
It was also in Ozone Park where Kerouac began his journey into American literary history with On the Road. 
Research for the trip was done at the old Children’s Library at 95-16 101st Ave. With the help of a librarian, Kerouac pored over maps, outlining the route he would travel in order to write his great American novel. The starting point of that route was the Rockaway Boulevard station of the IND subway where in1947 Kerouac hit the road with his “canvas bag” over his shoulder.
After being rejected by several firms, On the Road was published by Viking Press in 1957.
After returning home, Kerouac moved to 94-21 134th St. in Richmond Hill and lived there from 1950 until 1955. It was from this second floor apartment that overlooked the street that he wrote Subterraneans, Maggie Cassiday and Book of Dreams.  Ginsberg would visit him often. “One day he gave me a writing lesson in that room,” Ginsberg said. “He sat me down at his typewriter and taught me spontaneous prose. Jack was brilliant.”
After leaving the borough for good in 1955 for Orlando, Florida, Kerouac rarely talked about his Queens experiences. The only time he was ever heard talking about the borough in public was during a trip to New York where he met with friend and composer David Amram, with whom he collaborated in 1957, presenting the first jazz/poetry readings ever given in Manhattan.
“I knew Jack for many years,” Amram said. “One night in the late 1950s, I was riding in a car on the Long Island Expressway with him and as we passed by Queens, Jack gave this little gesture with his hand and said, ‘I used to live back there’.”
Kerouac died from alcoholism in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969 at age 47.
“Jack and I would walk around the neighborhood, often just talking,” Ginsberg remembered. “I used to call him ‘The Wizard of Ozone Park’.”
For more information, visit www.jackslastcall.com or www.queenshistoricalsociety.org.