Southbound

It must have been hell for Jack Kerouac to have to live in Florida. I mean, really. The man who invented being a beatnik and wrote "On The Road" should have stayed on the road and written more books like "OTR" and "The Town And The City," but his dear mother was tired and cold from a lifetime of Lowell, Massachusetts winters. In 1965, she and his third wife Stella Sampas Kerouac packed up Jack and his Underwood typewriter, bound for 10th Avenue North in St. Petersburg. 

“St. Petersburg is a place where old ladies walk all by themselves at midnight, talking to themselves on the sidewalk,” Kerouac said. 

Jack was 43 then, and he had only four years to live. Rumors still say he was working on a novel about his father's print shop when an abdominal hemorrhage, the result of decades of alcohol abuse, took him. His first appearance in print came in the local Lowell press, when he covered high school football before starring in high school football himself, exploits which won him a college scholarship to Columbia, where a broken leg ended his days in the end zone.

Anyway, no he was not happy living in Florida, and spent a lot of time playing jazz music loudly and hanging around bars and a certain bookstore, where he was known for moving his books to more prominent locations on the shelves. Of course, that bookstore is said to be haunted by a ghost, for crying out loud.

St Petersburgers claim that Jack would stroll through the streets, loudly calling out, "I’m the world-famous author, Jack Kerouac.”

This house for sale.

Now he is the world-famous late writer, and his books are still popular with the crowd that, you know, reads.  And you can live in the house he came home to during those 4 hellish years in the Sunshine State! If you have $350,000.

His survivors still come down and get away for the winter until recently, and plans to refurbish the three-bedroom house for use as a writer's retreat (can you just imagine the inspiration!) fell through.

Enter local real estate guy Frank Viggiano, who plunked down $220,000 this year to buy the house. He has restored it to its mid-Century magnificence, and it can be your next abode for that $350,000.

“It took a lot of work, but we wanted to keep everything as authentic as we could, down to the outlets” Viggiano says. “We removed all outlets and cleaned them by hand to take off the aging and discoloration and then painted the walls the original color.”

In Jack Kerouac's early career, he had a clear vision of his destiny, and he said,      "Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."

 In his Florida Elba, Jack said, "Fame makes you stop writing."