If this is your first exploration of the Beat Generation, it might be useful, before we begin, to define the phrase. Although Jack Kerouac is the chief high potentate of this literary movement and far and away the most well-known, there are scores of men and woman whose important novels, poetry, plays and lives define the term "Beat." The term started to resonate in New York City in the mid-1940s, when the destinies of some Columbia University undergraduates collided with a young Times Square junky and habit-supporting-thief named Herbert Huncke who somehow managed to say "I'm Beat," in a world-weary way that not only meant "I'm tired," but "I'm tired and the entire universe is tired with me."

Raised in a Catholic tradition, Jack Kerouac quickly made an important leap with Huncke's phrase, linking "Beat" with "Beatific," making the generation's status-quo-shattering exploration of universal truths into a nearly religious exercise. And if one feels like denying the Beats this sort of significance, then at least one can admit that the stories, poems, letters and journals produced by these American explorers are guideposts in an American tradition with forebears like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau.

    (the following was taken from www.litkicks.com)

With the Beat Train Tour over, ready for the Beat Shuttle? Catch a westbound shuttle on the 16th Street Mall. You're taking the same route that Neal took every afternoon coming home on the trolleys that used to run up and down 16th Street. Four blocks down, at the corner of 16th and Lawrence, you can look up and see the Daniel's & Fisher clock tower, once the tallest structure in Denver, and once at the heart of the block-long Daniel's and Fisher Department Store. When he stayed with his father, Neal woke at seven by the chimes of this clock, and as he hurried to get to school on time, he glanced at this clock to gauge his progress.

You might get off at 16th and Larimer and think about where you are. Even though you'd have to walk four blocks north to get a feel for the last of the old skid-row Larimer, you're now standing at the heart of what used to be the bona fide skid-row that Neal knew as a boy. Cassady's activity was centered around his father's barbershop, the Zaza, right next to the Zaza Theater (1727 Larimer). There's not a sign of the old Larimer in the 1700 block -- just modern office buildings built in the seventies and eighties. But this was where Cassady would spend hours watching movies and reading voraciously in his father's shop. And on his '49 trek to track Cassady, Kerouac went to movies here as well.

If you're still at 16th and Larimer, look across to the northwestern corner: this is where the old Manhattan Restaurant (1635 Larimer) stood for at least five decades, called "Denver's Most Famous Restaurant" in period advertisements), and the place where Neal's father's fleabag roommate Shorty sat and solicited donations to the Shorty cause. To the left once stood the Citizen's Mission (1617 Larimer) where Neal came for breakfast and dinner. He and his father had to walk north eight blocks to Father Divine's mission (24th and Larimer) for lunch.

For an idea of the architecture that was here, go south one block to the vibrant and wanna-be-hip Larimer Square area between 14th and 15th. An entrepreneur named Dana Crawford rescued this area in the 60s, but all the buildings are intact, and this is a perfect time to hop into The Market at midblock for coffee, a bagel or a sandwich.

From here, you can do a couple of things. Walk up (north) and over (west) to 16th and Market and on the southeastern corner (there's an Office Club store there right now) you'll be at the site of the dreaded Metropolitan Hotel (227 16th St.), the fleabag among fleabags where Cassady stayed with his father most of the time. They moved around to lots of transient hotels, but The Metropolitan seemed to be his father's favorite locale.

Or, if you're in the mood to visit a modern Denver pool room to say you've been there, check out Calvin's on 15th between Market and Blake (though you should know that Cassady's real poolroom hangout was ten blocks east at 15th and Glenarm, Peterson's Billiard Parlor, at 1519 Glenarm -- there's nothing there now that even remotely resembles a poolhall). If you do want to go back in this direction via the 16th Street Mall shuttle, you might want to know that Allen Ginsberg, in the summer of '47, worked nights vacuuming the sales floor of May D&F at 15th and Tremont -- it's been closed for a couple of years and is about to be torn down for an urban shopping mall. And Cassady worked for May D&F, too, chauffeuring customers to and from the store parking lot -- making money for driving in a car must have been heaven for him.

Back in lower downtown, if you want to visit a downright holy bar (and you do, you do), go up to the Oxford Hotel at 17th and Wazee and seek out the narrow, orange and thoroughly Deco chamber called The Cruise Room (opens at 4:30 daily -- get there at opening for a seat). It's unchanged from before prohibition and Cassady almost certainly took a drink or two here. Have a martini and meditate.

And if you're at the Oxford, glance toward the mountains down 17th Street and you'll see Union Station, where Neal and his Dad would stop (restroom break!) on their Sunday walks around the Platte Valley train tracks. At the moment the main waiting room is huge and beautiful -- a great neglected public space from another age with long wooden benches and a lunch counter. Within a year, though, a semi-horrific restaurant chain is putting a restaurant in the place. Gentrification is always cool until it gets thoroughly out of hand.

And as you walk around this lower downtown area, you might put a tape of Kerouac's "Neal and the Three Stooges" meditation into your Walkman -- he talks about Larimer, Wazee and Wynkoop and the railroad tracks.....and Neal, of course.

My Brother's Bar, 15th and Platte (2376 15th Street), is a great Beat site. It's a short drive/long walk from lower downtown. Just go toward the mountains on 15th. You'll cross the Platte River Valley as you go there -- Cassady was all over this area as a kid. He called it his "beach."

This is a bar where Cassady definitely drank -- and it's been in continuous operation since the days when Neal drank here. There's no sign -- never has been, but it's on the southeastern corner, across from Shakespeare's Poolhall (modern site) and Maxfield's Bar (great building, lousy sports bar). Back by the pay phone, hung on the wall, is a letter from Neal to Justin Brierly! Cassady is writing from juvy hall, asking Brierly to come to this bar at 15th and Platte to pay off his bar tab. Great stuff. Almost as great is the famous ``JCB'' - jalapeno cheeseburger -- eat it, enjoy it.

(Oh, in his autobiography, Neal Cassady talks about his happiness at seeing the familiar yellow streetcars of Denver after a trip to Los Angeles with his father. In the parking lot of My Brother's Bar you can see, next to the Forney Transportation Museum, one of these streetcars.)

Elitch Gardens, 38th Avenue and Tennyson St. If you're at My Brother's with a car you should probably check this out while you're at it. (Continue up 15th to Zuni, right on Zuni to 38th, left on 38th to Tennyson) The new Elitches is soulless and downtown; the old Elitches (closed a year ago) was a century-old garden spot with cool, old rides and Edenic landscaping. Family picnics were the norm; same for the Beats: Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and other Denver friends came here and smoked pot in the picnic area -- and ``Elitching'' became the gerund phrase among them for getting high.

Denargo Market, 2901 Broadway. (Go up Market to Broadway (diagonal st.) then look for 2901) This is the former produce market where Cassady worked; and where Kerouac worked for a day in the summer of '49 before being asked to not come back (If you're driving, check this out on you're way up to the Cassady boy block at 26th and Champa).

The Colburn Hotel, 9th and Grant Street (980 Grant). (Take 17th Ave. east to Grant, south on Grant) Another important Beat site near downtown in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer of 1947 Carolyn Cassady lived here (third floor) when she met Neal Cassady. The quasi-famous love triangle went into overdrive when Ginsberg came out for the summer (Cassady was driving Carolyn, Allen and Luanne Henderson crazy at the same time, in shifts, though, on one occasion Neal, Allen and Luanne end up in the same bed at the Colburn. Ginsberg took a room in the same place until he ran out of money; then moved in with Neal and Carolyn. Ginsberg wrote "Denver Doldrums" here and on August 23, 1947, his last day in Denver, watched two bricklayers working and wrote notes that later became "The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour," a poem that Ginsberg has categorized as one of his first mature poems.

Civic Center Plaza, Broadway and Colfax. On one end is the state capitol building, which both Cassady and Kerouac mention in letters (Kerouac watched bats fly around the dome at night; Cassady and Luanne had a major blow-out on the capitol lawn). On the other is the City & County Building (Ginsberg in "The Green Automobile": ``Denver! Denver! we'll return/roaring across the City & County Building lawn..."), and the current Water Department building, which was the main Carnegie-given public library when Cassady was a kid; but Cassady also would have been in the library at its current site across the park at 14th and Broadway.

6100 West Center,

Lakewood, Colorado (formerly Westwood). Kerouac's Home, June-July, 1949. Modest suburban home in Denver's western suburbs. Take Broadway south to Alameda, right on Alameda out several miles. Take a left at the street before Pierce (sorry, can't remember the name)(if you get to the shopping mall, you've gone too far), south for a few blocks, then a right on Center--- second house from the corner on the left. Kerouac used his thousand-dollar advance from The Town and the City on this house with the idea of moving his mother, sister and brother-in-law here. He'd spent the previous year fantasizing about Colorado (see letters to Ed White in The Missouri Review, 1995) and the experiment was, at one level a failure -- his mother and family hated it and moved back within a month to get their old jobs back. Kerouac, alone, did valuable research for On The Road, wandering the downtown streets where Cassady once lived. Robert Giroux, his editor at Harcourt Brace, visited him here to go over The Town and the City. Kerouac left Denver for San Francisco at the end of July. This ubiquitous photograph of Cassady and Kerouac side-by-side was taken shortly after this Denver period:

Out on Colfax, eastward, are a couple of Beat sites. Cassady attended East High (Colfax and York)(so did singer Judy Collins -- Dylan met her here in '59) and met Justin Brierly, who taught English here. Kerouac attended a civic luncheon here with Brierly on June 10, 1949.

At High Street look for 1729 East Colfax. The was a hang-out for teenagers called The Oasis in 1945. Gas stations remain. Cassady and "Cherry Mary" Fairland came here after the famous "Cherry Mary" event at her home near 16th and High (I've search the city directories but cannot find the exact address for any Fairlands living here in the forties).

Denverites don't know it, but there's a bona fide Beat train that stops at the corner of 16th & California downtown. (Hey, eat before you head north: 50 yards north of the stop is Vietnamna, where the lemongrass beef rice noodle bowl is fast, cheap and supreme; or right at the stop is Anthony's NY-style pizza (it's poyfect)). While you're standing there trying to fold the slice for proper mouth entry, look across the street -- you're looking at the old Denver Dry building, where the Denver Dry Goods Company was the prime department store for years. Two months after The Town and the City was published, Jack Kerouac did a book signing in here in May, 1950, before heading down to Mexico. The photograph on page 52 of Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's Jack's Book was taken at the signing by Justin Brierly, who through the years was Neal Cassady's mentor. For at least the last ten years of its existence, The Denver Dry Goods book department was in the basement of the building where, appropriately enough, there's still a book store. So as you wander downstairs in Media Play's book department, you're probably standing where Kerouac did one of his first (and rare) book signings.

It's time to finish your pizza and quit gawking at the building across the street so you can get on the train (Important: watch for the one that says "30th and Downing"). The train will head straight north for two and half blocks before making its first right turn on 19th Street. Look out the left window and you'll see Holy Ghost Church, (on 19th and California St.) where Neal Cassady was baptized in 1936 and spent three years as an altar boy. Starting here, you're also following, almost exactly, Neal's route to his elementary school as he documents it in The First Third. As the train turns left, look quickly to your right. The intersection of 20th and Court Place doesn't exist anymore but if it did, it'd be there: Neal and his family lived here briefly in 1930 when Neal was four. It's not an entirely a non-Beat moment: you're looking at the corner of 20th and Lincoln, where at age 18, just months after graduating from high school in Minnesota, Bob Dylan played in the late summer or fall of 1960, at the Exodus Gallery Bar, at 1999 Lincoln -- the building stands but it's not likely to stand much longer. He stayed in Denver for only a few weeks before trying a semester at the University of Minnesota and then moving on to New York City. He was a full year away from anything even approaching fame. It's not unreasonable to interpret Dylan's arrival in Denver as a reaction to reading On The Road -- of all the cities Dylan could have moved to in 1960 -- Denver's folk scene was no more amazing than any other midwestern city -- he chose Denver.

As you move onto Welton, the Denverites on the train will think you're nuts for jumping from side to side, but between 22nd and 23rd you'll want to be on the right side of the train. Over vacant lots you'll be able to see the playground of Ebert Elementary (410 West Park Avenue), where Neal Cassady went to school for five years. It was in Ebert's library that Neal went again and again for a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and began to devour books. As you glimpse 23rd street, look over at the boarded-up storefronts and a funky little sky-blue boarded-up shop. This is where Cassady's family first lived in 1928 when coming to Denver -- part barber shop, part shoe repair shop, with way too many Cassadys living in way too little space. Look down 23rd Street (Park Avenue West, now) as you cross and you'll see the front of Ebert Elementary.

Okay, quickly now, look left at the baseball field (23rd and Welton) -- if it's early evening, chances are that there's a game in progress, but this is the field Kerouac wrote about in On The Road; and Cassady walked through this field every day on his way to school when he stayed with his mother. Kerouac watched a baseball game one night here at age 27 in the summer of 1949 during his solitary search for Dean Moriarty, taking essential notes for OTR. Considering all his years as a boy in this neighborhood, it's probable that Cassady played many baseball games on this field.

As you cross 24th Street you enter Denver's Five Points district, where Kerouac came chasing Cassady and Cassady came chasing jazz. On your left you'll see The Roxy and The Casino, and on your right at 27th (the five-corner ground zero spot) you'll see the famous Rossonian, now empty and waiting for new life (last summer Andy Garcia, James Caan and Treat Williams shot parts of Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (thanks, Mr. Zevon) in the Rossonian, and at 27th & Welton)-- all spots where Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and many others played in the twenties, thirties and forties. When you think of the linkages between jazz and the Beats, and Cassady's influence on Kerouac, Denver starts to have an even stronger role in the development of the Beat Generation. Cassady caught some of the last of the great jazz in the early forties, and when he first dated Carolyn in 1947 she mentions going to the Rossonian and Neal recommends it to Kerouac at a later date), but by '49 Kerouac complained that there was no bop in Denver (he's been introduced to the area by Ed White and Hal Chase two years earlier). In the first chapter of On The Road, Kerouac writes about his thoughts on the corner of 27th and Welton during the '49 visit. Kerouac's ethnic nomenclature dates him, big-time, but the passage documents a unique American middle-point between alienation and integration: it wasn't about ethnicity, but about lostness, beatitude, being Beat.

And if you didn't eat before you got on the Beat Train, there is supreme food to be had in Five Points: Brown Sugar's Burgers n' Bones at 24th and Welton provides massive rib/burger portions and the juke box has old Al Green singles -- need I say any more? Ethel's House of Soul is sublime at 26th and Welton, and Zona's Tamales at 27th, across from the Rossonian, is the place for anything: from holy tamales and ribs to that pig's ear sandwich that's had your ame on it all these years. There's a sundries store on the east side of Welton, just up from Ethel's, and now and then (bright, clear mornings) the owner turns the outside speakers on and the street is filled with jazz, and R&B classics. One Saturday morning the street was empty and Aretha Franklin's "You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman)" was filling the empty street. All that can be said is that it's one form of heaven on earth.

Stay on the train to its terminus at 30th and Downing so you can get off for a moment and hop on the same train going back southbound. Look around: in 1934-35 (age 8, 9) Cassady lived briefly nearby, in a duplex at 32nd and Downing. Sorry to come back to the pleasure of eating, but Tosh's Hacienda at 3090 Downing has great Mexican food -- just hop and a skip and a...you get the picture.

On the way back into downtown, you need to make a decision. If you feel like a short two-block walk (doing this after sundown is not recommended) to visit the boyhood block that took up so much of Cassady's autobiography, get off at the 25th & Welton stop and walk west, toward the mountains, on 26th Avenue. You'll be entering a neighborhood called Curtis Park, and you'll pass California, Stout and Curtis before reaching 26th and Champa. On the southwestern corner is a vacant lot next to the mustard-yellow Gertrude. This is the site where the Snowden apartment house once stood, the center of Neal's youth during the school months. Looking right you'll see the Puritan Pie Co. building -- Neal's brothers used to bootleg whiskey in their apartment next door using the pie aroma as a cover for their activities; Neal's father used to trade haircuts for pies for the Cassady family in 1932, and his last barber shop was to your left, in the little storefront near the corner on the east side of Champa.

Next to it is The Bakery, where little Neal used to play (you can still see the painted "Cream Butter Cheese Eggs" on the storefront windows). Starting on page 97 of Cassady's First Third you can trace his boyhood on this block. This half block for Cassady was filled with sexual adventure (and misadventure) along with his first-ever mind-eyeball-kicks at the hands of his demonic older brother, who tried repeatedly to suffocate Cassady behind the fold-up bed in the Snowden.