The Great Gatsby: From the Eggs to the Plaza

Nick's summer begins on one of a pair of "enormous eggs" that jut into Long Island Sound, twenty miles from New York. He rents a small house at the very tip of West Egg, fifty yards from the water and squeezed among millionaires, for eighty dollars a month. On his first night he sees his neighbour Gatsby step onto the lawn and stretch his arms toward the dark water, where a single green light shines far away. Readers place West Egg at Great Neck's Kings Point, the new-money peninsula.

Location precision: West Egg is invented; the pin marks Kings Point, the part of Great Neck it is read as.

Across the courtesy bay glitter the white palaces of fashionable East Egg, and Nick drives over to dine with Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Their house is a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay, its lawn running a quarter of a mile from the beach to the front door, where Tom stands in riding clothes. Daisy's dock carries the green light Nick saw from West Egg: Gatsby later tells her, "You always have a green light that burns all night." The old-money East Egg stands for Port Washington's Sands Point.

Location precision: East Egg and the Buchanans' house are invented; the pin marks Sands Point, the peninsula East Egg is read as.

Halfway between West Egg and New York, the road meets the railroad beside "a valley of ashes", a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat. The blue eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg brood over it, and one afternoon Tom forces Nick off the train here: "I want you to meet my girl." The real model is thought to be the Corona Ash Dumps in Queens, where some 50 million cubic yards of ash piled up, one mound 90 feet high. Work on the 1939 World's Fair grounds levelled the mounds; today it is Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.

Location precision: The valley of ashes is invented; the pin marks the park on the old Corona dump that is said to have inspired it.

Visitor guidance: Flushing Meadows–Corona Park is a public park, the fourth-largest in New York City.

The party in Myrtle's apartment ends, and Nick finds himself lying half asleep in the cold lower level of Penn Station, staring at the morning Tribune and waiting for the four o'clock train. Later, working in the city, he strolls over 33rd Street to the same station on mellow evenings. Fitzgerald's station was the McKim, Mead and White building of 1910. Its above-ground part was demolished from 1963, but the underground platforms and tracks remain in today's station.

Visitor guidance: The old station filled the plot between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets; today's Penn Station sits on the same site.

Gatsby's house is "a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side", plus a marble swimming pool and forty acres of lawn and garden. All summer music drifts out of it, and people are not invited to the parties: they just go. Nick gets a formal note via a chauffeur in robin's-egg blue. Beacon Towers, Alva Belmont's white-stucco mansion in Sands Point, is one suggested model; it was demolished in 1945. Oheka Castle, another, is now a hotel offering mansion tours.

Location precision: Gatsby's house is invented and scholars name several models; the pin marks the site of Beacon Towers.

Gatsby drives Nick into the city, "fenders spread like wings", scattering light through half of Astoria. He flashes a white card at a motorcycle policeman and is waved on. Then comes the bridge, "with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars", and Nick's famous line: "The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time." A hearse heaped with blooms passes them. The bridge was completed in 1909, and Manhattanites call it the 59th Street Bridge.

Visitor guidance: The bridge's lower level has a walkway and a bike lane.

"You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza," says Tom, and the group takes the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel. Daisy asks for ice for the mint julep while Mendelssohn's Wedding March rises from a ballroom below. In the argument that follows Tom reveals Gatsby's bootlegging, and Daisy chooses to stay with Tom. On the drive back, Gatsby and Daisy's car strikes Myrtle. The hotel, built 1905–1907, still stands at 768 Fifth Avenue as a National Historic Landmark.

Visitor guidance: The Plaza stands on Grand Army Plaza at the southeast corner of Central Park.