Is the LPC Ignoring Kerouacs Queens?
Are Queens and Kerouac getting overlooked by the Landmarks Preservation Commission? Preservationists are making some noise about the Ozone Park walk-up where Jack Kerouac started On the Road. He lived with his parents at the 133-01 Cross Bay Blvd home starting in 1943, after being let out of a Navy psychiatric ward with an “Honorable Discharge With Indifferent Character.” The apartment is something locals would like to see preserved and honored, and this Sunday the Queens Historical Society will run a guided trolley tour past not only the home, but seven other sites. The Daily News reports that it’s “Kerouac scholar Patrick Fenton, who will lecture Sunday about how the author’s work was shaped by living in Ozone Park during the 1940s,” that is questioning the city for not landmarking the site. He told the paper, “They don’t really know the history of Jack Kerouac in Queens. If they knew it, I think they’d run to his house to put a plaque up.” In 1950, after his father died, Kerouac and
