📍Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, NY 11367, USA
1945 – 1959“Paul Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, in October 1941, and in 1945 his family moved to Kew Gardens Hills, a quiet, largely Jewish neighbourhood of red-brick houses and tree-lined streets in Flushing, Queens. His father, Louis, was a bass player and bandleader who later became a teacher, and his mother, Belle, was an elementary school teacher. He has described his childhood world as one in which music and baseball mattered most: he played stickball in the streets and was a devoted New York Yankees fan. Art Garfunkel lived a few blocks away, and the two boys met at Public School 164 in 1953, when they appeared together in the sixth-grade production of Alice in Wonderland; Paul played the White Rabbit and Art the Cheshire Cat. They became inseparable, went on to Parsons Junior High and Forest Hills High School together, and spent hours harmonising in each other's homes. They loved the Everly Brothers and doo-wop, and Paul taught himself guitar. In 1957, as teenagers calling themselves Tom & Jerry, they had a minor hit with Hey Schoolgirl and appeared on American Bandstand. Paul went on to Queens College, and in the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel became one of the most successful duos in music, with songs like The Sound of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Paul later wrote some of the best-loved songs of his generation as a solo artist, and the streets of Queens echo through many of them.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today