They grew up a half block from each other. Two of the world’s greatest purveyors of felinity—one associated with New Orleans cats, the other with London cats—spent their wonder years on Westminster Street. Both left this street more than a century ago, but the residue of genius remains. When Tennessee Williams and T.S. Eliot lived there, Westminster was a tony neighborhood bordering a world’s fair park.

In the shadow of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, Westminster Street stretches from the park to a burned out ’50s jazz district called Gaslight Square, so cool it was hot, where Miles Davis mesmerized drunken white people, barely masking his disdain, and Kerouac and Lenny Bruce held court. It’s a street where I lived as a fledgling copywriter for the ad agency that created the brand for Busch Beer. I had no heady part in promoting the beer, certainly not in creating it. But I drank enough of it to fill an elevator shaft with piss.

Gaslight Square is long gone, victim of greed and drugs and whorehouses and crime and the fear that comes from it. Somehow the stately mansions on that street survived.

When I lived there in the ’70s, I often awoke to gunfire. The mansions were struggling from the neglect that happens when landlords won’t invest in upkeep. Families wouldn’t risk living there, for good reason. The neighborhood had turned apocalyptic outside my bedroom window. Prison-like iron bars blocked the window’s fire escape.

One morning I went out to the curb to start my car, turned the ignition key and nothing happened. I opened the hood to find my battery gone. I missed work for an entire morning, riding buses, tracking down a battery, installing it. Next morning, I went out to start my car. Nothing. My new acquaintance, the thief, got a brand new battery. What a dumb ass, I cursed myself. From that day until I left the neighborhood, I parked the car behind a backyard fence, a tight squeeze through the alley and a narrow gate, but safe from the clutches of the grab-and-go auto parts merchants.

Still, the mansion I shared with six other tenants showed the grandeur of the Gilded Age. Gas lamps on the walls had been converted to electric, but they still wore tiny linen lampshades.  Every room felt the warmth of a fireplace, even the bedrooms. The upstairs floors had been divided into apartments. Mine had a walk-in closet with an octagonal window, and a poem, an ode to the closet window, scrawled on the closet wall and signed by Ogden Nash. I never wrote down that poem, and can’t find anything similar in Nash’s anthology. It was an unrecorded one-of-a-kind poem, and if, in the intervening years, it was painted over or the wall was knocked out, the poem is gone for good. What a dumb ass, I cursed myself again.

Today the neighborhood has stabilized, and life along the street is safer, like it was back when two young poets lived in houses on either side of the Ogden Nash poem.