Canva / Bryan Berlin via Wikimedia Commons
Kevin Bacon has called the Upper West Side home for about as long as anyone can remember — but this summer marks a milestone that even the Footloose star seems a little stunned by.
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In a video posted to Instagram Friday, Bacon retraced the streets where his New York life began, stopping outside the buildings, the old restaurant, and the part of Central Park that turned a wide-eyed teenager from Philadelphia into a lifelong New Yorker. And the details he shared about those first years — the rent, the roommate, the questionable street food — are exactly the kind of neighborhood lore worth holding onto.It was 50 years ago this summer, in 1976, that a 17-year-old Bacon packed a suitcase in his hometown of Philadelphia, hopped on Amtrak, and — after transferring to the No. 1 train — landed on the Upper West Side “with a suitcase and a dream,” as he put it. He timed the reflection to the country’s 250th birthday, noting that the summer marks a milestone of his own. “In a lot of ways that summer felt like the beginning of my life,” he said.
His first stop was his eldest sister Karen’s fifth-floor walk-up, where she let him sleep on the couch for a few months while he hunted for a place of his own.
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He found one nearby: Bretton Hall at 2350 Broadway, where he’d live for four years. The first apartment ran him $325 a month for a single room — and Bacon didn’t even land the good part of it. “I slept in the kitchen,” he recalled. “My roommate had the bedroom because he was a grand piano player and needed a place for his piano.”
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Then there was the job. Back in 1976, 250 West 72nd Street was home to a spot called the Allstate, where Bacon waited tables on and off for about four years. The cafe closed in 2007, according to The New York Times, and in 2013 the address became the final home of the beloved Emerald Inn, which had relocated from its longtime perch on Columbus Avenue before eventually closing for good after 82 years in business. Bacon credited the restaurant with giving him some of his closest friends and favorite memories. “It was, for a kid, my version of college,” he said, describing a sense of fraternity and “magical times.”
That same summer, Bacon set his sights on a new identity: disco roller skater. “Maybe as a way to meet other disco roller skaters,” he joked. He found his scene at Central Park’s Skate Circle, which became a weekend mecca for the pastime in 1995 — skaters trading tricks and picking up moves while boom boxes blasted WBLS, powered by a cord somebody had pried into a lamppost at the base. He can still hear the Chic and Kool & the Gang basslines, he said, and remembers the whole crowd grooving to that pounding bass. One guy rolled up a cooler full of Heineken; another was selling “beef on a stick that was questionable.” Bacon ate it anyway. “Lot of hot sauce,” he said. “Good times.”
Bacon’s affection for the neighborhood never faded. He has lived on the Upper West Side since that first summer in 1976, and it’s where he and wife Kyra Sedgwick — married since 1988 — raised their two children, Travis and Sosie. The couple, among the area’s most enduring celebrity residents, now split their time between their Upper West Side apartment, a Connecticut farm Bacon bought in the early 1980s, and a home in Los Angeles. The son of a Philadelphia architect who broke into film a couple of years after arriving in New York, Bacon has never stopped calling the West Side his anchor.
Half a century after he dragged that suitcase up to his sister’s couch, the neighborhood clearly still holds him. “Magical times, man,” he said.
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