The Art Tourist takes the Kerouac Hike

Denver seen 50 years after arriving in On the Road

DENVER – It’s 25 degrees Fahrenheit, foot-high piles of snow bumper every street the day more than 100 people show up to walk around with literary scholars, including Audrey Sprenger, and David Amram, composer, his daughter, a jazz poet and Neal Cassidy’s son John to places where Jack Kerouac hung out with Cassidy and Alan Ginsberg in the 1940s on the way to chronicling the sounds of conversation and thought of the Beat Generation in his second published novel On the Road.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of publication of On the Road, I and 100 companions left the Denver Public Library, itself a monument of new cultural progress in the city, took, en masse, step after step away from the Golden Triangle of new Art Museum architecture skirting the crown jewels of Denver’s former period of haute culture – civic center park – created by former mayor Speer at the last turn of the century and walked briefly east on Colfax, the longest main street in America, north on Sherman with the capitol at our backs, past the church of the Holy Ghost where Cassidy was baptized to the unusual intersection of 20th and 20th where the diagonal downtown streets of Denver tangentially meet the gridded avenues parallel to Colfax. At this point we headed uptown to that area called 5-Points, which had been the most rundown part of Denver since I’ve known her, but is perceived to be reviving recently due to great old brick houses and rapid rises in real estate in the rest of Denver.

We walked by old ball fields, buildings where historic music was played, old Victorian apartment homes were Cassidy lived, and a pie manufacturing place that was one of the only standing-unchanged buildings from the On the Road period. The Puritan Pie Company apparently survived the depression by being a bootleg whiskey joint, and Cassidy’s father, a barber, used to trade haircuts for pies. Cassidy lived across the street and went to school in the neighborhood. Neal Cassidy eventually married a University of Denver graduate, moved to California and then lived and died in Mexico. The three-hour tour took us snaking back into downtown and over to Union Station, ending on the millennium bridge. The UnsafeArt crew walked with David Amram, who told me the story of how Raffi used him to rhyme with jam, and explained to the men how fun Denver was in the ’40s.

We walked over the Platte passed where we used to go to dive ’70s coffee shops that were now posh wine bars, to a neighborhood that you wouldn’t have wanted to walk in before 1990. I had visited some old houses there in the early ’80s, and as a 20-year old blond woman I didn’t feel very safe, alone, there. Not that anything ever happened, and I and friends frequented more dive coffee shops and 20th and Larimer Mexican restaurants and jazz clubs until they got cleaned up or scraped. This tour of time for me came back to the present in this Highlands restaurant where I had $8 Bloody Maria’s with my Sunday brunch of Calamari/Chorizo Hash and listened to a very Denver American version of "Guantanamera." and enjoyed it.

Back we went to the library were our car was parked, and we went in to see the famed scroll that lay in state there with the words Kerouac typed and called Gone on the Road, and he eventually revised and sold to Viking Press as On the Road. Writing this scroll seems spontaneous like the style of his prose and the life of Cassidy, but there is evidence on the scroll that someone cut the paper to fit the typewriter. That’s a long cut and someone had to plan that out before typing one word, not to mention the fact that the story was planned in Kerouac’s journals, according to his teacher at Columbia, and was based on the Joan Anderson letter written by Cassidy. Cassidy’s letter has a funny and facetiously high-brow tone that is easy to read although I feel sorry for any woman that got close to him. He never published anything in his lifetime, and I started thinking I should stop walking and drinking around Denver and start writing.

Terry Talty is the art tourist, who has recently been playing tourist in the country of Colorado, a place half the size of France.