Chronicles: Ginsberg’s NYC

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked…
 
As a poet, writer, activist and founding member of the Beatniks, Allen Ginsberg spoke for a generation. A generation striving to give a voice to the drug use, racism and oppression that fueled inner-city America in the 1950s, a voice idealism and optimism from a new, white, middle class moving out to the suburbs sought to drown out.
 
As a radical youth, Ginsberg was famous in New York but it wasn’t until his long-form, stream of consciousness poem Howl was put to print that he became known all over America. Upon publication in a McCarthy era America, Howl was deemed obscene and Ginsberg was put to trial but was vindicated soon after as the judge declared the poem to retain artistic value.
 
Allen Ginsberg died in 1997 but his words live on and many of the locations where he wrote and first performed are still here today.

346 W15th St – Ginsberg’s apartment where he wrote the poems for Empty Mirror.

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San Remo Bar, 93 MacDougal St. – This was the bar he frequented when he lived on 15th St. His presence soon attracted artists such as Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

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Columbia University – Where Ginsberg entered as a freshman and where he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes.

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