Paul Simon childhood home — Kew Gardens Hills, Queens

Paul Simon grew up at 137-62 70th Road in Kew Gardens Hills, a middle-class residential neighbourhood of attached brick houses in central Queens. The family had moved from Newark, New Jersey, when Paul was an infant, and it was in Kew Gardens Hills and the neighbouring Forest Hills that he met Art Garfunkel — the two grew up streets apart and met in sixth grade at P.S. 164. Their partnership, which produced some of the most enduring folk-pop music of the 1960s, began in the Queens bedroom culture of the late 1950s: two boys from Jewish families in a prosperous outer-borough neighbourhood, teaching each other guitar parts and listening to the radio.

The Queens geography of Simon and Garfunkel is one of popular music's more improbable origin stories — the music that followed them bears so little relation to the suburban brick-houses-and-corner-shops landscape of Kew Gardens Hills and Forest Hills that the connection requires active imagination. But the neighbourhood's culture — its emphasis on education, on aspiration, on making something of yourself and leaving — is entirely consistent with what Simon became: a musician whose restlessness drove him from folk to rock to Brazilian music to South African township music to gospel, always moving, never content with the last thing he had done.

The house at 137-62 70th Road became publicly notable when Simon and Garfunkel returned to Queens for a photograph taken by Edie Baskin in the mid-1970s that was used as the cover art for their 'My Little Town' single — a song about the suffocating smallness of the suburban childhood they had both escaped. The image of the two of them in the driveway of Paul's childhood home captures something exact about their relationship to where they came from.