CITYist

There was a time when poets Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, writer Jack Kerouac and muse Neal Cassidy roamed freely about the East Village. On roofs, fire escapes and dark jazz clubs they gathered inspiration and communed in literary circles that would one day transcend into legend. They didn’t know it then, of course, which is why the photographs in Beat Memories, on view now at the National Gallery in DC, are so disarming and truthful.