What was the name of the New York bar where Allen Ginsberg met Neal Cassady in 1947?

Allen Ginsberg met Neal Cassady at New York’s West End Bar in 1947.

The meeting connected two people who would become central to Beat literature. Cassady’s restless personality, conversational energy, and traveling life later influenced fictional figures in the novels of Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg, meanwhile, developed into one of the most prominent poets of the postwar American avant-garde.

The West End Bar stood near Columbia University and became a gathering place for students, writers, musicians, and other members of New York’s bohemian scene. Its location helped make it part of the social world surrounding the young writers who later became associated with the Beat Generation.

The bar is sometimes confused with Greenwich Village venues linked to later Beat readings and friendships, such as the White Horse Tavern. Those places were important to the broader literary history, but the documented 1947 meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady occurred at the West End Bar.