Jersey Home Where Bruce Springsteen Wrote ‘Born to Run’ on the Market
For $299,000, you can own a piece of rock ’n roll history.
It’s not the kind of ‘celebrity’ home you mind have in mind, but there’s plenty of Hollywood legacy behind the place where The Boss himself penned the infamous album, “Born to Run.”
Bruce Springsteen called this place home for only a year between 1974 and 1975, but what he did within that year would put him on the map. He rented the place after his second album, ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’, didn’t meet the level of success that he had hoped. So he moved back to his birthplace in Long Branch, NJ, where he hunkered down to write his first real break-out album.
The two-bedroom, one-bathroom home might be small at a mere 828 square feet, but it’s in a great spot. Only a couple of blocks from the beaches of Jersey Shore, this property could make the ideal summer home for vacationers who prefer to stay somewhat close to home when school’s out.
The bungalow – complete with a huge American flag waving off the front porch – seems to be priced at a premium, considering similar homes on West End Court and surrounding streets for sale are listed somewhere between $170,000 and $275,000.
Obviously the value of Springsteen’s history is embedded within the price of the home, and any buyer with an affinity for the legendary rocker would be willing to pay that premium.
The home is even featured (very briefly) in ‘Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run’, a documentary made in 2005. Springsteen was filmed outside the property where he admits was the first house that he ever lived in on his own.
The current owners – hard-core Springsteen fans Jerry Ferrara, Ryan DeCarolis, and Kim McDermott – purchased the home in 2009 for $280,000 with intentions to transform the place into a museum-ish tribute to the “Born in the USA” singer, but that never panned out. According to the owners, they simply never ended up having have the time to keep up the intended preservation of the authentic Springsteen nostalgia. Aside from the new roof, new floors and new siding, the planned renovations never got finished.
They hope the new owners will have somewhat of the same intentions that they did, and will preserve the spirit of Springsteen’s classic album that began here.
Up to now, the prospective buyers who have viewed the home and have expressed some level of interest in it have no intentions of actually living in it. Instead, it seems as though people just want to buy it for its history.
And that’s exactly what the current owners want.
