The Ramp — Thorneycroft Apartments, Forest Hills

The ramp leading to the rooftop of a parking structure at the Thorneycroft Apartments complex on 66th Avenue in Forest Hills, Queens, is where the future members of the Ramones spent significant time as teenagers in the early 1970s, hanging around together in the way that bored suburban teenagers do, developing the shared sensibility that would become punk rock. The ramp is an unremarkable piece of suburban parking infrastructure — concrete, exposed to the weather, offering a view of the neighbourhood's rooftops — and it is, by most accounts, exactly the kind of nowhere place where you would expect the Ramones to have been formed.

Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy were not close friends who discovered they shared a vision. They were neighbourhood figures who gravitiated toward each other partly by proximity and partly by a shared feeling of not quite belonging to the world around them. The ramp was a place to kill time, listen to music, and avoid the pressures of school and family. What emerged from this — the idea of a band that played fast, dressed alike, used fake brotherly surnames, and treated two-minute songs as complete aesthetic statements — was one of the most influential ideas in the history of popular music.

In 2016 a mural was painted on the ramp using Bob Gruen's iconic 1975 photograph of the four original Ramones standing together — the image that defines the band visually. The complex has since been renamed Fanwood Estates. The mural and the ramp have become a pilgrimage destination for punk fans from around the world, a monument to the improbable idea that four misfits from a Queens parking structure could change popular music permanently.