BORN TO STAY: FANS BUY COTTAGE
The tiny house where Bruce Springsteen wrote ‘Born to Run’ sold yesterday for $280,000. (Photo courtesy of Susan McLaughlin)
The Long Branch cottage where Bruce Springsteen wrote ‘Born to Run‘ and other songs from his 1975 breakthrough album was purchased yesterday by a trio of New Jersey fans who say they simply want to keep it from being torn down.
One of the three, 28-year-old Ryan DeCarolis, of Lincroft, plans to live in the 828-square-foot house, and says he looks forward to greeting fans on pilgrimages to a place he and his partners consider a rock and roll shrine.
“The previous owner told us to be ready for the fans,” DeCarolis told RedBankoRBit.com on Tuesday, hours after he and his partners closed on the $280,000 purchase.
DeCarolis bought the house, at 7-1/2 West End Court in the city’s West End section, with longtime friends Kim McDermott, of Little Falls, and her older brother, Gerald Ferrara, of North Arlington. The house had been listed at $299,000, as oRBit reported when we broke the story of the property’s availability in August.
Despite the price drop, “the house sold for way more than it’s worth because it’s rock history,” said McDermott, who owns a preschool.
The three have no plans to alter the property, though they would eventually like to “restore it correctly,” DeCarolis said.
Their immediate aim, McDermott said, was simply to keep the house from falling into the hands of someone who would take advantage of the property’s commercial zoning by knocking it down and replacing it with a business structure.
“Would it be turned into a parking lot or a condo? Not on our watch,” she said.
Ferrara, who works in the glass business, said he learned about the property’s availability when his father forwarded him a link to the original report on oRBit.
“I said to Kim and Ryan, man, we should buy this thing,” Ferrara said. “I was kidding.”
But the more they talked about it, the more the three fans were convinced that someone should safeguard the structure for posterity. They arranged to get a tour, which for Ferrara evoked the opening line of “Thunder Road” one of the songs written there: “The screen door slams...”
“I kept thinking of that line,” he said.
“The Springsteen fans that we are, I said, ‘if we don’t do this, what happens to this place?’” McDermott said. “We don’t want it to ever be anything than what it is.”
The fact that DeCarolis, a state employee, needed a place to live simply added to their determination, they said.
Posted
December 16, 2009
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