Sonny Lawson Baseball Field

A young Neil Cassady played here. And Kerouac memorialized it in the first chapter of On the Road...

"Down at 23rd and Welton a softball game was going on under floodlights which also illuminated the gas tank. A great eager crowd roared at every play. The strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking seriousness.... Oh, the sadness of the lights that night! The young pitcher looked just like Dean. A pretty blonde in the seats looked just like Marylou. It was the Denver Night; all I did was die."

The Colburn Hotel & Charlie Brown's Bar & Grill

Carolyn Robinson, who later married Neil Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg lived in the Colburn Hotel in the late 1940s. Kerouac documents the crazy time at the Colburn in chapter 7 of On The Road. Cassady, Ginsberg and Kerouac often spent late nights at the Colburn's bar, Charlie Brown's, which is still one of Denver's coolest bars. The hotel and bar are at 10th and Grant.

The Rossonian Hotel

The ghosts of Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington haunt this now vacant Five Points hotel, which once featured a hot jazz club that lured Cassady and Kerouac with the sounds of bop.

The Rossonian Hotel - 27th and Welton

"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night." - Jack Kerouac, On The Road