Instructor

The Beat Museum is dedicated to spreading the spirit of The Beat Generation, which is defined as a spirit of&nbsp;tolerance, compassion, and having the courage to live your individual truth. The Beats, as in beaten down and beatific, were a collective of writers, artists and thinkers that congregated in 1950s San Francisco.The Beat Museum is home to an extensive collection of Beat memorabilia, including original manuscripts and first editions, letters, personal effects and cultural ephemera. Located in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, we occupy the same ground that was once the epicenter for Beat activity during the 1950s.The Beat Museum has been independently owned and operated since its inception in 2003. We are dedicated to carrying on the Beat’s legacy by exposing their work to new audiences, encouraging journeys—both interior and exterior—and being a resource on how one person’s perspective can have meaning to many.

Website

The Beat Museum, located on 540 Broadway, is a small, one-room museum with artifacts from the Beat era. The Beat Museum's collection includes photos, letters, a signed copy of Ginsberg's Howl, and Neal Cassady's striped referee-style shirt. At this site you can learn more about the influential people of this generation, and have a glimpse at life during this exciting time in American history. 

Beat Museum

San Francisco, CA is a city that is frequently lauded for its diverse population and its notable architecture. However, the city also has an incredibly rich literary history, housing one of the country's oldest libraries and serving as both home and inspiration for many members of the legendary Beat Generation. Highlights of this tour include the Beat Museum, popular hangout spots for writers of the Beat Generation, and landmarks and art which pay tribute to these artists.

Ina Coolbrith came to California with her family on a wagon train in 1851. She attended school in Los Angeles, and as a young woman Ina made San Francisco her home (1). Coolbrith published her first poems in the Los Angeles Star and California Home Journal. In the 1860s, she published poems in The Californian, The Galaxy, and several issues of Overland Monthly, for which she also served as a co-editor (2,3). Coolbrith held literary salons at her Russian Hill home that were well attended by America's artistic elite. Coolbrith, Bret Harte (the editor of Overland Monthly), and fellow poet Charles Warren Stoddard became known as the "Golden Gate Trinity" of the San Francisco literary scene in the 1860s and 70s (4).Coolbrith moved to Oakland to take a job at the Oakland Library Association in order to support her mother, her infirm sister, and her sister's children (5). While working there, Coolbrith published her first monograph, A Perfect Day and other Poems, in 1881. It was reviewed well by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who said of the volume, "I know that California has at least one poet" (6). She is also known to have mentored Jack London, who frequented the Oakland Library as a young man (7).In the fall of 1892, Coolbrith was let go from the Oakland Library Association (8). Famed naturalist and friend John Muir suggested she pursue the librarianship of San Francisco, but Coolbrith responded, "I am disqualified by sex;" San Francisco required its librarian to be a man (9).Losing the Oakland job gave Coolbrith more time to focus on her poetry. She published a second monograph: 1895's Songs from the Golden Gate, a book made up of new verses she'd published in The Century as well as a reissue of well-received poems from her previous volume.Coolbrith became the librarian at the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association in 1898, and in 1899 she was invited to act as part-time librarian for the Bohemian Club (10). During this time, she worked on a history of early California literature as well as giving readings and talks on California literary history (11).Coolbrith's home at 1604 Taylor Street was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Though she escaped alive, her personal library of over 3000 volumes, much of her correspondence, and her nearly-finished manuscript on the history of early California literature were lost (12). Coolbrith, by now a pillar of the American literary scene, was the focus of fundraisers by Mark Twain and others, who built her a new home at 1067 Broadway on Russian Hill. Her salons resumed, and her poetry flourished (13). Coolbrith was named Poet Laureate of California in 1911.

Ina Coolbrith Park is a hidden treasure in Russian Hill that offers spectacular views of the city and San Francisco Bay. In 1947 the park was dedicated to California's first Poet Laureate, Ina Donna Coolbrith (1841 - 1928), as it is located near her former home at 1604 Taylor Street. Ina Coolbrith inhabited a literary and artistic circle that included Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, and Jack London. She was a librarian at the Oakland Library Association, the San Francisco Mercantile Library, and the Bohemian Club. Her monographs: "A Perfect Day and Other Poems", "Songs from the Golden Gate", and "California" are available today in print and ebooks.

Ina Coolbrith Park

This alley was formerly known as Adler Alley until 1988&nbsp;when it was named after Kerouac. Jack Kerouac Alley, as it is known today, is home to murals that celebrate the life and work of Kerouac and other Beat writers following a dedication&nbsp;ceremony in April 2007. the alley is situated between City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe - both of which are historically significant in their own right and were frequented by Kerouac and his fellow Beat Generation writers during the 1950s. The alley is open for the public and is accessible for pedestrians only; no cars or bikes may enter the alley.&nbsp; Kerouac lived the majority of his life in New York, but his time in San Francisco shaped the influential writer. Many of Kerouac's books are set in San Francisco or include at least a mention of the city. For example, San Francisco is one of the settings for Kerouac's most famous novel&nbsp;On the Road&nbsp;which is based on his travels through the United States with his fellow Beat authors.&nbsp; In addition to paying homage to Kerouac, the alley also features murals that pay tribute to other authors, poets, political leaders, and social movements related to the history of San Francisco. There are several large murals along the walls of the alley that are&nbsp;shared by the City Lights Bookstore. The alley also includes quotes from various poets and writers such as John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou. The alley is perhaps most notable, however, for the subject of one mural which is a recreation of&nbsp;Mexico City artist Sergio Valdéz Rubalcaba’s painting "Life and Dreams of the Perla River Valley." The mural depicts Mexican&nbsp;revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magon watching over their indigenous community.&nbsp;

Jack Kerouac, author of "On the Road," was a leading member of the group of writers who are collectively known as the Beat Generation. Many of Kerouac's books were set in San Francisco, a city where Kerouac had many misadventures and affairs as chronicled by his own writing. Jack Kerouac Alley was dedicated in his honor in April 2007. The alley depicts a giant mural of Kerouac, images depicting his travels, and quotations from both his works as well as other Beat authors who were based in San Francisco. 

Jack Kerouac Alley

Vesuvio Cafe was founded in 1948 by Henri Lenoir, an art enthusiast whose goal was to create an artful, bohemian atmosphere for likeminded souls to gather. The cafe opened in an Italian Renaissance styled building that was constructed during the first World War. The cafe's interior featured a plethora of art and colorful decor which appealed to numerous patrons, the most notable of which were Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. Other notable patrons include Bob Dylan and Francis Ford Coppola.&nbsp; The bar/cafe is located along Columbus Avenue next to City Lights Bookstore, a neighborhood establishment opened by Lawrence Ferlinghetti who was also one of the Vesuvio Cafe's famous patrons. The bookstore and cafe are located at the famous Jack Kerouac Alley which honors the Beat writer with inscriptions and murals honoring the literary and cultural history of both San Francisco and its diverse community.&nbsp;&nbsp; In an effort to preserve and emphasize the importance of the Beat writers and the literary culture which led to the cafe's status as a cultural and historical landmark, cafe owners Janet and Christopher Fein have incorporated the bar's history into its decor. The interior of the Vesuvio Cafe is filled with paintings and historical photos in addition to a plethora of memorabilia commemorating its connection to the Beat Generation.

Vesuvio Cafe was established in 1948 and is located next to City Lights Bookstore. Together with City Lights Bookstore, one of the walls of the cafe forms Jack Kerouac Alley. Kerouac often frequented the cafe along with many of his fellow beat writers, leading to the cafe becoming a historical site as well as a popular tourist destination. Today, the cafe is still incredibly popular, and those who visit are greeted with a plethora of memorabilia from the Beat Generation. 

Vesuvio Cafe 

City Lights founder Lawrence&nbsp;Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, but eventually left&nbsp;to go to&nbsp;college&nbsp;at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a ship's commander, and then&nbsp;he did his graduate studies at &nbsp;Columbia University. In 1950, Ferlinghetti received his&nbsp;PhD from&nbsp;l'Université de Paris. In 1951, Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco where, according to a brief biography1, "he&nbsp;taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism" before opening City Lights with Peter D. Martin in 1953 and eventually establishing the publishing company in 1955.The bookstore is historically known for attracting many well known writers and artists, and Ferlinghetti was notorious for publishing anti-authoritarian and cultural-critiquing works through his Pocket Poets Series. According to a brief biography, "his publication of Allen Ginsberg's&nbsp;Howl &amp; Other Poems&nbsp;in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. (He was overwhelmingly supported by prestigious literary and academic figures, and was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance."Ferlinghetti has received many honor over the years, including the Los Angeles Times' Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the American Civil Liberties Union's Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in August 1998, and&nbsp;in 2003, he received the&nbsp;Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Author's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. Additionally,he was elected to the&nbsp;American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, the National Book Foundation awarded him the inaugural&nbsp;Literarian Award. In 2007, he was named Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2012, he was awarded the &nbsp;Douglas MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award from the San Francisco Art Institute.

The world-renowned bookstore was founded in 1953 by Beats poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. In 1955, City Lights was expanded to include a book press, too. The site was the country's first all-paperbound book store and was well known for stocking  anti-authoritarian titles. Since the press was established, City Lights has published over two hundred titles and continues to print several new titles annually. Additionally, the shop offers three stories of book shelves stocked with everything from unique and rare to new and popular titles.

City Lights Book Sellers & Publishers

In 1953, Allen Ginsberg arrived in San Francisco with a letter of introduction from William Carlos Williams. San Francisco was fertile literary ground at the time, with a number of young writers emerging in what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Though scholars disagree about the degree to which there was a literary "movement" in San Francisco at the time, it is almost universally agreed upon that if the Renaissance had a founder, it was Kenneth Rexroth. Two years after his introduction to Ginsberg, Rexroth hosted the Six Gallery poetry reading. It was here that Ginsberg gave an early reading of a draft of "Howl," a poem he worked on while living in the Montgomery Street apartment. "Howl" was published in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore, and the notoriety garnered by its publication made Ginsberg, the Beats, and the San Francisco Renaissance national news. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyosi Murao were arrested on obscenity charges, Ferlinghetti for the book's publication and Murao for its distribution. After a long trial, "Howl" was ruled not obscene, and the ruling led to the publication of other previously banned works of literature.

For a few years in the mid-1950s, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg lived and wrote in an apartment at 1010 Montgomery Street. It was in this apartment that Ginsberg wrote his controversial poem "Howl," which would eventually lead to obscenity charges for the author. 

Former Home of Allen Ginsburg

The Black Cat Bar located at 710 Montgomery St., San Francisco California, was first established in 1906 on the corner of Eddy and Mason in the Tenderloin district. Some notable regulars included the writers John Steinbeck and William Saroyan, and entertainer Bette Davis. Gay establishments like the Black Cat had a fraught relationship with prostitution, which brought the attention of police during periods of vice crackdowns. In 1921, the bar lost its dance permit and closed for over a decade, after women were observed mingling too much with guests, signaling possible prostitution. As the 1954 police raid and ensuing press scandal at nearby Tommy’s Place/12 Adler Place shows, the connection and connotation of queer bars and nightclubs with prostitution persisted long after the Black Cat’s closure, and became more prominent during the moral panic of the 1950s. San Francisco has had a long history of opposing reform movements in the name of maintaining its particular reputation for being a “wide open town,” including anti-alcohol efforts like the temperance movement. This created an environment in which queer spaces could become established. During Prohibition, San Francisco was one of the “wettest” cities: speakeasies and bootlegging operations abounded. Thus, following Prohibition, liquor interests held significant sway in the city. Furthermore, state-level control of alcohol regulation fell to the state’s tax board, which was less inclined to focus on vice control. As a result, nightclubs and entertainment abounded post-Prohibition, including the Black Cat, which reopened during this time. Sal Stoumen purchased the club in the 1940s, and like many other establishments during the war era and the late 40s/early 50s, began to serve an increasingly gay clientele, and found itself on the armed forces list of “off limits” establishments as a result. Police raided the bar in 1949, but this did not dampen the bar’s popularity, driven by its performances by female impersonators, particularly José Sarria. Sarria and other performers’ and staff’s “defensive” interactions with tourists and heterosexual couples, according to Nan Alamilla Boyd, “defended their space from being overrun by tourists and outsiders” by “enforcing a culture that assumed everyone in the bar was gay—and gayness was not simply the norm but a preferred way of being.”(59). For example, heterosexual men entering with a woman would be greeted with calls like “I didn’t know I was merely another woman” or “Why haven’t you ever told me you were married?” (58). The bar became one of the most prominent examples of gay bars as a visible institutions, and performances like Sarria’s did much to create “a unified and resistant bar-based gay and transgender community.” Sarria, in his campaign for city supervisor in 1961, coined the phrase “gay is good!” Gay bars began to become the center of an explicitly politicized movement. As the stories of The Black Cat and Tommy’s Place tell, gay and lesbian communities that “fought to defend their territory from police intrusion… came to understand the power of collective action. Their choice to legally defend themselves with the right to (group) public association rather than (individual) privacy rights inserted new ideas and new language into a nascent movement for lesbian and gay civil rights” (Boyd 17). Owner Sal Stoumen took the state to court following the 1949 raid, and in 1951 the CA Supreme Court issued a decision that ruled that simply having homosexual patrons was not sufficient grounds for suspending its liquor license, and that it was not illegal for gay people to simply assemble. Despite the growing resistance and political solidarity within the city’s gay bars and nightclubs, the years ahead would see greater crackdowns in San Francisco, spurred on in part by the creation of the CA Dept. of Alcoholic Beverage Control and stricter laws, during the era of McCarthyism and what has become known as the “The Lavender Scare.” Despite Stoumen’s efforts, The Black Cat finally closed in 1964 under this pressure, after the bar lost its liquor license in a raid on October 31, 1963. However, the mark left by the Black Cat, Stoumen’s decade-and-a-half-long battle, and Sarria’s calls for solidarity, would not be lost.

Not to be confused with The Black Cat of Los Angeles (site of a landmark gay rights protest in 1967), the Black Cat bar was a bar and club located here from 1906-1964. The bar garnered an increasingly gay and tourist clientele beginning in the war years, leading to a raid in 1949. A 1951 State Supreme Court case over its liquor license was one of the earliest cases establishing legal protections for LGBT Americans. In the years following, spurred in particular by the performances of José Sarria, who later went on to be the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States. The Black Cat is a key example of how the gay public spaces became an integral part of the queer community in San Francisco.

The Black Cat Bar

The Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial was erected in San Francisco, California, in 1897, nearly three years after the author's death, to honor his memory, legacy, and the brief period he lived in the city. It was originally designed by landscaper Bruce Porter and architect Willis Polk. The monument still remains standing to this day. Engraved on the monument is an excerpt from Stevenson's travel memoir, Across the Plains, which reads: <blockquote>"To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little, to spend a little less - to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence - to renounce when that shall be necessary, and not be embittered - to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy."</blockquote>During his time in San Francisco, between December 1879 and March 1890, Stevenson lived near what is today Portsmouth Plaza at 608 Bush Street. His time in San Francisco was not particularly fruitful or pleasant. Upon his arrival from Monterey, California, following his partial recovery from a critical illness, he discovered he would now have to live on less than $0.40 a day as he struggled to begin his writing career. Subsequently, he once again became critically ill and was eventually nursed back to health by his soon-to-be wife, Fanny Van de Grift. Upon his recovery, the two soon married and departed to Napa. Today, the monument is a popular site for literary tourists.

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of classics such as "Treasure Island" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," lived in San Francisco for a short period between 1879-1880. While there, he struggled with his writing career and eventually fell severely ill. After his recovery, he married and soon departed for Napa. However, in remembrance of the author's time in San Francisco, this monument to him was erected in 1897. 

Literary Tour of San Francisco

Beat Museum

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information