October 29, 2026
A 2.61-acre gated Bixby Canyon parcel at 39350 Coast Road, Big Sur, formerly owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, City Lights co-founder, and publisher of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Offered by his son, Lorenzo Ferlinghetti, and listed by Alex Brant of Compass.
What made this listing different from a standard land sale was the due diligence already in place before marketing: well work with a source-capacity review, geotechnical and percolation investigation, septic planning, site planning, preliminary residence concepts, and county coordination — plus a cleared building site, an existing cabin, a meditation hut, and historic trout ponds, with a residents-only path along Bixby Creek to the beach below Bixby Bridge.
The honest constraint, stated in the coverage itself, is also the point: building in Big Sur is governed by Monterey County's Local Coastal Program, one of the toughest coastal rule sets in the country, and any future home — or a potential split back into the original two lots — requires county approval and buyer investigation.
Two facts, stated plainly: the property was listed at $2 million in June 2026 and later shown at $1,950,000 in MLS records, so check the live listing for the current price. And Jack Kerouac stayed at Ferlinghetti's first Bixby Canyon property, closer to the ocean — the cabin that inspired the 1962 novel "Big Sur" — not at 39350 Coast Road itself, which Ferlinghetti bought in the early 1970s a couple hundred yards away.
Also featured, per the listing's September 2026 media mailing (no direct link shown here): San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury News, The Real Deal SF, and a Carmel Pine Cone article (pages 38 and 45). A separate Carmel Pine Cone listing advertisement ran July 24, 2026, page 7A.
Not coverage of this listing, but context for Bixby Canyon:
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