I'm really impressed that 104 of 148 commenters who guessed about the mystery literary photo I posted on Wednesday correctly identified The Great Gatsby as the novel in question. Four other novels that got some mentions were To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Reasonable guesses all, but the fact that the photo was taken in 1924 was the giveaway.

This question was inspired by an amazing historical mashup of New York City created by the city government, available here. I don't know what non-literary purposes this map must serve, but I immediately realized that if I click on the camera icon and slide it back to 1924, I can see New York City exactly as F. Scott Fitzgerald would have seen it during the period that he lived in the town of Great Neck (represented in Gatsby as West Egg) and traveled frequently to Manhattan. Therefore, since Gatsby was set in Fitzgerald's present time, I was also seeing New York City exactly as Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson would have seen it.

According to Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Matthew Bruccoli, one of Fitzgerald's earliest inspirations for The Great Gatsby was the striking vision of a vast, desolate "valley of ashes" -- a gigantic trash burning operation -- on the road between Great Neck and Manhattan. The infernal vision seemed to provide an ironic counterpoint to the opulent social swirls of New York City and Great Neck, as if the passage revealed some deeper truth about the souls who traveled it. Fitzgerald described a small edge settlement just east of the valley of ashes where a billboard with blazing eyes advertises the services of eye doctor T. J. Eckleburg, and where Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle Wilson's husband George runs a decrepit auto garage.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

Naturally, I tried to locate this exact spot on the 1924 map. Here's a wide view of the whole area, including Flushing Bay at the top and several bridges crossing "a small foul river" -- Flushing Creek.

In 1924, before the Long Island Expressway or Grand Central Parkway existed, Northern Boulevard would have been the main route towards the Queensboro Bridge for a driver from Great Neck. I sketched a line showing the Northern Boulevard route on the map at the top of this page. Northern Boulevard skirts the top of the valley of ashes, so the travellers would have taken the automobile bridge just under the railroad bridge near where the creek meets the bay here.

I spent a lot of time looking at this part of the map, but finally concluded that it could not match the description in the novel. First, the highway (above) does not join with the railroad (below). Second, the town just east of the valley of ashes here is the main section of Flushing, a well-populated village that does not resemble the dusty outpost Fitzgerald describes. After traversing many possible solutions to this puzzle, I came to a firm conclusion. For a reason I do not know, the Gatsby/Buchanan motorcade must have not taken Northern Boulevard all the way into Manhattan, but instead must have turned off the main road to take a shortcut exactly as depicted in the lower line drawn on the image at the top of this page.

This would have taken them on a smaller set of roads through the center of the valley of ashes. Why would they have turned off the main road? I don't know, but it's not too far a stretch to imagine that they would have done it precisely for the scenery, because they wanted to show off the full stark vision of New York City's valley of ashes to their visitor Nick Carraway. Who hasn't sometimes taken the long route on a car ride to impress a guest?

If Gatsby's caravan took this southern route, the railroad and highway would have merged exactly as described in the novel. Here, then, is the bridge they would have crossed. I can't tell for sure that it's a drawbridge, but I'm willing to believe it must be one. The tiny settlement to the right, then, is exactly the spot where Dr. Eckleburg's billboard would have stood, and where George Wilson would have kept his auto garage.

This is therefore the spot where drunken Daisy Buchanan hit and killed Myrtle Wilson in her speeding car after a dizzy and upsetting day at the Plaza Hotel.

Here's a wider view of the larger area around this bridge crossing. You can see the smokestacks near the center.

Desolate enough? Sure, but the future held even more wonderful metaphors for Fitzgerald's masterpiece, because the trash burning operation at Flushing Meadows was closed shortly after The Great Gatsby was written. The creeks were drained and turned into artificial lakes, beautiful Flushing Meadows Park was invented, and this park hosted the 1939 Worlds Fair and then the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. Shea Stadium was built on the Northern side (it was recently replaced by CitiField on the same spot), and every year the US Open Tennis Tournament is held at the tennis center south of the baseball fields. Here's what the same spot looks like in a modern photograph.

And what of the tiny edge settlement itself, the spot where Myrtle Wilson was killed under Dr. Eckleburg's metaphorical eyes? Today it's still desolate, an unremarkable wedge-shaped shopping center next to the Van Wyck Expressway. I'll have to go by and see if any eye doctors operate in the vicinity.

Thanks to everybody who posted a guess about this mystery photo, and thanks to GalleyCat and Jacket Copy for sending readers this way. This blog's tagline is "Opinions, Observations and Research" and I hope with this exercise I've fulfilled some of the "research" portion of that promise. Another Litkicks Mystery Spot will be revealed in these pages soon!