In 1958, Jane Jacobs, an enduring critic of urban renewal schemes, boldly claimed that people give life to a city—“and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” On a sun-drenched, breezy morning, I watch this premise come to life on St. Petersburg’s First Avenue South. Determined joggers cut through empty parking lots. Brunchers bunch and disperse on sidewalks. The park across the street becomes a sun spa, a fishing hole, or a nature trail, depending on who you watch. Metropolitans fill the street like a living stream, and along with two companions and our bikes (fixie, vintage Schwinn, and fancy electric), I am about to jump in. We are riding in search of an erstwhile St. Petersburger called Jack Kerouac, who would’ve celebrated his 99th birthday on March 12.
We are not the first to make this journey. Hundreds of pilgrims have come to St. Pete before to pay homage to this icon of the Beat Generation, author of “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums.” They visit Kerouac’s favorite hangout, Flamingo Sports Bar, where the novelist is lovingly immortalized both in the decor and in the memories of owner Dale Nichols, who struck up a friendship with him in 1967. They trek out to the home on 10th Avenue N where Jack spent the last years of his life with his mother and wife, writing, drinking, and—if reports are to be believed—watching Walter Cronkite with the volume down while Handel’s “Messiah” blared along in the background. And they know he died of drink just a few miles away at St. Anthony’s Hospital, on Oct. 21, 1969, at the tragic age of 47.
But maybe there’s more to this tale—or at least Margaret Murray, Associate Curator of Public Programs at St. Pete’s Museum of Fine Arts, thinks so. For her graduate thesis at Savannah College of Art and Design, Murray researched and created a bike tour based on the author’s life in St. Pete, adding new stops and new dimensions to Kerouac’s St. Pete story. Following her lead, local nonprofit The Friends of Jack Kerouac now looks to revive the tour, making it a regular offering for Kerouac fans or anyone interested in a new way of seeing the city.
Which is why I’m now shivering in the shadow of Al Lang Stadium, the first stop on a test run of sorts for the tour. Together with the Tampa Bay Times building just a few blocks away (our second stop), this site speaks to another side of Kerouac—the lifelong sports fan, who went to Columbia on a football scholarship. Jack enjoyed watching spring training in downtown St. Pete and playing out his own fantasy baseball leagues. He even covered a few baseball stories for the St. Petersburg Times.
Rolling down the Pinellas Trail, we hang a left on 22nd Street, into the heart of what was once St. Pete’s bustling Black businesses district. Our next site is the Manhattan Casino, St. Pete’s famous stop on what was once called the Chitlin’ Circuit—a network of clubs across the segregated South where Black performers were welcomed. Kerouac went to shows at the Manhattan, and liked hanging out with (and occasionally playing the ukulele alongside) musician Ronny Lowe, whose interracial band The Dominoes was one of the first acts to break the local color barrier. Jack loved jazz, the rhythms of which punctuate his prose, and intensely missed the music scenes of his former homes in San Francisco and New York. He found another sustaining connection here.
We ride back up the street, weave through easy traffic on Central and find ourselves at Haslam’s, St. Pete’s oldest bookstore and one of Kerouac’s favorite haunts (in every sense). Just as the living writer spent hours there, reading in his favorite corner, his ghost is now said to wander its linoleum labyrinth. In both incarnations, the story goes, Jack liked rearranging the book displays so that his titles were just a little more prominent. Though the store is currently closed—and has been since the pandemic started—it feels like we have reached a center of sorts, a deep spot of quiet where a troubled soul could rest. Life is picking up along Central, dinners and shoppers lounging and promenading in the warming sun. An ancient roadster, tricked out with homemade Mad-Max-style armor, zooms ferociously up the street.
Now we face the dilemma of how to navigate the 40 or so blocks that lie between us and Kerouac’s house. We rule out 1st Avenue N, with its arterial traffic and big box stores: here be dragons. Instead, we poke along Central and cut north through a neighborhood of low-slung, boxy ranch style houses, some painted in gorgeous tropical colors, many trimmed with pretty gardens or whimsical yard art. As we edge to the left to turn onto Ninth Avenue N, my pulse begins to thump. This is a busy road. We have reached the edge of the neighborhood where—Jane Jacobs again—“distance and convenience set in” and “the small and the various and the personal wither away.” Cars woosh by, coating us in exhaust. To be fair, this seems a fitting dilemma for a Kerouac quest, given that Jack did not drive. He was famously reliant on others to get from place to place and, as Murray pointed out to me, many of his St. Pete friendships were driven (so to speak) by a need for wheels as well as companionship.We form a tight knot and take over the right lane.
Before too long, we have arrived: an ordinary, brick-trimmed house on an ordinary, tree-lined street in Disston Heights. Though not all his neighbors welcomed the “big city” beatnik, Jack liked the low ceilings and air-conditioned splendor of his St. Pete house, conducive as they were to holing up and working—which he did. In the four years he spent in St. Pete, Kerouac sweated out two novels; one of them, “Satori In Paris,” poignantly, was about his own search for his origins. Taking it in, you can feel him losing his bearings here: to buy the house, he had to sell priceless letters from Allen Ginsburg and other Beats, and once here, he was known to spend hours on late night, long-distance calls to old friends and connections. This house had ghosts, long before its occupants died.
But you can also feel some hope. After decades of vacancy, the house was purchased last year by Ken and Gina Burchenal, who are working to preserve it, and Kerouac’s St. Pete legacy, in perpetuity. In the afternoon sun, the current tenant is livening up the porch with rows of potted plants. Even in what was then the quiet town of St. Pete, Kerouac could not escape the shadows that assailed his mind and swamped his work. But there was meaning as well as madness in his struggle. I like how Murray puts it: “He sought peace here. He wasn’t always successful in finding it; but his searching was genuine.”
As for our search, riding back through the streets we share with Kerouac’s ghost, I recall the intricate mural, “King’s Dream Unite,” which we admired earlier on the north wall of the Manhattan. Artist Ya La’Ford’s overlapping lines reminded me of an old city map, streets spinning out and filling in as new neighborhoods grow. La’Ford speaks of the importance of connections in her work, and the mural makes a powerful statement against the backdrop of the go-like-hell interstate that slices the sky beyond it, and which changed this neighborhood profoundly. I think this is what we were really searching for today: the city on a human scale, knit together into some kind of meaning by an aching heart and a feverish brain. A mile—or more like 12—in Kerouac’s shoes.
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This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2021.