The Beat Pad

In her article The Beat \u27Pad\u27 Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer\u27s and Hettie Jones\u27s Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of home in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat pads in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting for the flourishing of the artistic scene that would change the postwar literary scene forever: it was here, in Vollmer\u27s Apartment 51, that the cornerstone for a new era in literature was laid, as Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac lived there simultaneously from 1945 to 1946. Similarly, the pads Hettie Jones shared with then-husband Amiri Baraka served a similar function, namely to build up a homogeneous Beat identity