Woody Guthrie Last Home — 59-13 Mermaid Ave, Brooklyn

59-13 Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, was the home where Woody Guthrie spent time with his third wife Anneke and his family during the late years of his life, before Huntington's disease — which had also afflicted his mother — incapacitated him entirely and he was moved to hospital. Mermaid Avenue and the surrounding Coney Island neighbourhood became the subject of a celebrated collaborative album by Billy Bragg and Wilco in 1998, who set a collection of Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics to new music. The resulting albums — Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II — introduced Guthrie's words to a new generation and demonstrated the inexhaustible quality of his creative output.

Guthrie had been hospitalised intermittently since the late 1950s as his Huntington's disease progressed. He spent long periods at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey and at Brooklyn State Hospital, where young Bob Dylan visited him in 1961 — a pilgrimage that was one of the defining moments of Dylan's early development, and that he has described in Chronicles and in the song 'Song to Woody'. Guthrie died on 3 October 1967 at Brooklyn State Hospital.

The Mermaid Avenue house is a private residence in a working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood close to the Coney Island beachfront. The street itself — ordinary, residential, unremarkable — is now a pilgrimage site for fans who know its musical significance from the Bragg and Wilco recordings. Various Brooklyn cultural organisations have documented Guthrie's Coney Island connections.