by Gary Kamiya
From the 1930s on, the neighborhood’s politics also played a role in attracting writers and artists. As the poet and City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalled, many of North Beach’s Italian American residents were anti-Mussolini leftists. They were part of San Francisco’s strong left-wing, pro-labor, pacifist, and anarchist tradition, one exemplified by the city’s leading literary figure, Kenneth Rexroth. It was nurturing soil for the rebellious Beats.
And finally, there was simple geography. North Beach is to San Francisco as the Campo de Fiori is to Rome: a sacred space. There is a reason that Juana Briones, the city’s mother, ran her dairy ranch on what is now Washington Square. Protected by Nob and Russian Hills on the west and Telegraph Hill on the east, with Columbus, the hinge of an ancient geological syncline, running diagonally between them, North Beach is San Francisco’s lyrical heart, its oldest and most beloved quarter.
Beat ground zero was upper Grant Avenue. The three blocks between Vallejo and Filbert were lined with weird and wonderful watering holes: the Place, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, the Coffee Gallery, Caffe Trieste. The hepcats also frequented City Lights and Henri Lenoir’s bar Vesuvio on Columbus. (Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour provides an exhaustive list of the sites.) But the event that launched the movement, triggered the San Francisco Renaissance, and made Allen Ginsberg the most famous poet in America took place not in North Beach but in the Marina, on a street now filled not with angelheaded hipsters but with upscale pickup bars.
Ginsberg ended up in San Francisco after Carolyn Cassady caught him having sex with Neal at their San Jose home and threw him out. In the city, Ginsberg made what turned out to be his last attempt to live a “normal” life: He cut his beard and hair, put on a suit, got a job as a market researcher (!), and moved into an apartment at 755 Pine on lower Nob Hill with a pretty ex-roadhouse singer and her son. But when Ginsberg confessed that he and Cassady had been lovers, the singer moved out. Although Ginsberg soon met his longtime partner, Peter Orlovsky, he had hit rock bottom. At 29, he described his life as a “monstrous nightmare.” He had been unable to write since coming to San Francisco and was considering applying to graduate school.
But in August, Ginsberg sat down at a typewriter—which he never worked on—and started to improvise in the spontaneous style Kerouac had taught him, using long lines inspired by both his poetic mentor William Carlos Williams and by jazz saxophone solos. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving mystical naked …” Ginsberg was off like a ski jumper, a lifetime of rage and yearning like a great wind at his back. But as Steven Watson notes in his superb history of the Beats, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960, the crucial creative moment came when Ginsberg typed the line “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy / who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love.” Watson writes, “At this point mentally declaring the poem unpublishable, Ginsberg felt free to ‘write for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.’ “By the end of the day he had written seven pages.
San Francisco makes one appearance in Ginsberg’s poem, and it’s a doozy. A few days after he started his long poem, wandering through downtown San Francisco stoned on peyote, Ginsberg stared up at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Its upper stories, crowned with the star above the Starlight Room, suddenly appeared to him to be a robotic death’s head, glowing red—the fearful embodiment of soulless capitalism. The clanging of the Powell Street cable car sounded like the word “Moloch,” the ancient god to whom the Ammonites offered child sacrifices. Ginsberg sat down in a cafeteria off Union Square and began writing. His nightmare vision became the “Moloch” section of the poem he called “Howl.” Modern American poetry, not to mention drinking at the Starlight Room, has never been the same since.
Two months later, Ginsberg mailed out 100 mimeographed cards that read: “Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M.C. Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.”
The Six Gallery was a cooperative art gallery in a former auto repair shop at Fillmore and Greenwich. (It subsequently became a rug store where, sick transit, I once bought a kilim.) On October 7, 1955, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Peter Orlovsky drove to the gallery in Ferlinghetti’s battered Austin. A large crowd had gathered, among them Jack Kerouac, who was too shy to read himself but collected money and returned with gallon jugs of cheap red, which he handed to the audience. Rexroth, the poets’ father figure, introduced the readers: Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder.
Ginsberg came to the lectern about 11 P.M. He started out slowly, but as he got deeper into the poem, he began to sway rhythmically, waving his arms, intoning the long lines like a cantor. When he finished reading 12 minutes later, he recalled without false modesty, he dissolved in “tears which restored to American poetry the prophetic consciousness it had lost since the conclusion of Hart Crane’s The Bridge.” Rexroth was also in tears. The audience was ecstatic, stunned, overwhelmed. Lamantia said the atmosphere was “like bringing two ends of an electric wire together.”
Afterward the dazed and euphoric poets went to Sam Wo in Chinatown and then six blocks north on Grant to the Place. They all knew something big had just happened. That night, Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram that consciously echoed one of the famous salutations in American literature, Emerson’s message to Walt Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Ferlinghetti wrote. “When do I get the manuscript?”
Ferlinghetti published Howl and Other Poems the next year. When the San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao on obscenity charges, the ensuing trial and publicity made Ginsberg and his poem world-famous. In 1957, On the Road was published to a rave review in the New York Times. In 1959, the last and strangest of the three seminal Beat works, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, was published abroad by Olympia Press; its American edition appeared in 1962.
By then, the Beat moment had passed. The wild success of On the Road created a media feeding frenzy, the first of its kind. Watson describes the Beats as “American literature’s first rock stars,” and the comparison is apt. In the first example of commodified dissent, the media both reported on and created the Beat Generation. The popular TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis featured a goateed, bongo-playing Beat character named Maynard G. Krebs. Tour buses drove down upper Grant, filled with spectators looking for “beatniks”—the witty phrase coined by Herb Caen just after Sputnik launched. Vesuvio featured a sardonic sign, now on display at the Oakland Museum, that said “This is the only authentic bohemian atmosphere this side of Daly City.” The “angry young men” and their “real gone chicks” were explored in a million pop-sociology pieces. In a precursor of Beatlemania, women went crazy over the handsome Kerouac, babbling on the phone to his unfortunate girlfriend, “You’re young. I’m 29, and I’ve got to fuck him now!”
But Kerouac’s overwrought fans, male and female, were lusting over a figment of their imaginations. They mistook him for his wild hero Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), but he was nothing like Cassady. Kerouac was a shy, religious, sexually insecure, politically conservative man, who was also an alcoholic. He was unequipped to handle the notoriety. To celebrate his success, he went on a five-week drunken spree in New York, but the availability of “girls girls girls” did nothing to soothe his uneasy spirit. Eventually he moved back in with his mother, where his already virulent bigotry—he was racist and anti-Semitic—worsened. When he died at age 47, he was drinking a quart of Scotch a day. He was never able to regain the innocence, the vulnerability, the sense of reaching for something that could never quite be grasped, that made On the Road a sad and brilliant flare in the American night.
The glory and the curse of the Beats was that they insisted on an art of utter spontaneity, of unmediated expression, of naked self-expression—an art as raw and dangerous as life itself. At their best, the Beats were able to touch primal wellsprings. But their insistence on collapsing the distinction between art and life held two opposite dangers. On the one hand, it threatened to tip them into madness, drugs, or death. And on the other, it could lead to formal sloppiness. Intensity of living does not always translate into artistic achievement.
In this sense, San Francisco was the perfect city for the Beats. For more than any other American city, San Francisco represents the apotheosis of unmediated experience. Its beauty can overwhelm the artistic response to it. Artists here are always at risk of merely gesturing at the self-sufficient world—a good move for a Zen master, not so good for an artist. Whether San Francisco itself can be held responsible for the Beats’ artistic shortcomings is dubious, but variations on this critique run throughout the city’s history, and when there’s this much smoke, artistic fires must have gone out somewhere. San Francisco’s tendency toward navel-gazing provincialism, itself largely the result of the city’s stupefying beauty, did not help. As Kevin Starr notes in explaining why Frank Norris, one of the city’s greatest writers, did his best work in the East, “San Francisco’s isolation might give rise to a splendid originality, but it could also lead to narcissism and a self-justifying tolerance for the third-rate.” Kerouac himself said he thought that “California is white like washlines and emptyheaded.”
The Beats flamed out fast, but their free-spirited rebellion still inspires. It does so because one day the young Allen Ginsberg sat down at his typewriter and dared to tell his truth, because Jack Kerouac was able to transform a road trip into an odyssey that would fill a generation with excitement and hope. The Beat meteor shot through long ago, but late at night in North Beach you can sometimes still see its traces, like the taillights of a big car hurtling west.
Chapter 41
The Haunted House
1712 Fillmore Street
A geologist would call the block of Fillmore Street between Post and Sutter a “triple junction.” It’s one of those three-way collisions where a swanky part of town crashes into a seedy one, while a completely different quarter sideswipes both of them. In 1974, my cousin Jonathan and I were house-sitting four blocks away, at Pine and Buchanan, in a majestic, decaying Victorian with a big psychedelic mandala painted in an alcove.
We didn’t know it at the time, but our building was a weird precursor to the Summer of Love. In 1965, that stretch of Pine Street had been a pre-Haight hippie scene, with half a dozen houses filled with longhairs and dealers. The downstairs unit had been home to the legendary hippie newspaper the Oracle. Across the street, at 2111 Pine, a rooming house once stood; some of the itinerant musicians there played in a vanished after-hours jazz club three blocks away called Bop City. The rooming house was managed by a guy named Bill Ham, who invented psychedelic light shows.
Our block was mostly black and pretty run-down. We used to walk down to Kim’s Market at Pine and Fillmore (now a Kiehl’s, which sells $50 bottles of shampoo) to buy our daily $2 ration of sausages, carrots, and potatoes. If you turned right on Fillmore, in a block you would come to California Street, the city’s great north-south dividing line. California was and is the unofficial border of Pacific Heights, the swankiest neighborhood in town. Turn left and you would quickly end up in the unswankiest neighborhood in town.
Past Kim’s Market, as you walked toward Bush, the block was a grab bag, with a venerable Japanese restaurant rubbing shoulders with a jumping jazz and R&B joint called Minnie’s Can-Do Club. In the block after Bush, things started to become disheveled, a no-man’s-land traversed by Japanese, blacks, and a few confused tourists looking for Japantown. Once you crossed the ugly, multi-lane Geary Expressway, you were in the heart of black San Francisco.
Some years after I moved out of the neighborhood, I happened to find myself on Fillmore between Post and Sutter. I remember being subliminally aware that there was something odd about the east side of the street. Its feng shui was wrong. In particular, there was something weird about a row of five stately Victorians. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.
It took me a few decades, but I finally learned why that block felt off. Those five Victorians were not built there. They were saved from the wrecking ball, raised up from their original sites, and plunked down on Fillmore. The block felt weird because the setbacks were too deep.
It is appropriate that this line of Victorians stands out. For one of its buildings has a history so rich and strange that an entire book could be written about it. The house at 1712 Fillmore is San Francisco’s version of Joyce’s 7 Eccles Street. It is a universe on a 27 1/2-by-93-foot lot.
In or around 1895, a three-story Victorian, built in the exuberant Queen Anne style that was the last hurrah of Victorian architectural excess, was erected at 1690 Post Street, just east of Buchanan, in the Western Addition. The name Western Addition is a link with the Gold Rush days, when the city did not even include all of Nob Hill. In 1851, San Francisco’s western limit was Larkin Street, a few yards west of my house on Jackson. A year later, the booming city extended its boundary 13 blocks west to Divisadero. The area north of Market Street between Larkin and Divisadero became known as the “Western Addition.” Despite the fact that the “addition” is now 160 years old, the name has stuck. A more suitable name, considering the way the city has treated the neighborhood and its residents, might be the “Western Subtraction.”
The Western Addition was a solidly middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhood. Streetcar lines carried its merchants and professionals to their offices in downtown San Francisco. By 1900 its residents were mostly native born, three-quarters of them to immigrant parents from countries like Germany, Austria, Ireland, and France. A significant number of them were Jews, mostly from Germany, attracted by San Francisco’s lack of overt anti-Semitism and business opportunities. By the 1870s, Jews made up 7 to 8 percent of the city’s population, the highest percentage in any city west of New York.
The first of the neighborhood’s three great transformations was a result of the 1906 fire. Displaced working-class people from the burned-out downtown and South of Market areas poured in. The stately single-family Victorians were divided into rooms and flats. The neighborhood became more densely populated, poorer, and much more ethnically diverse. Large numbers of working-class Filipinos, Mexican Americans, and Jews moved in. So did the two ethnic groups whose fates would become entwined in the neighborhood, and in that wooden building on Post Street: African Americans and Japanese.
Blacks began arriving in San Francisco before the Gold Rush, but never in great numbers until World War II. As Albert Broussard notes in Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954, the lack of factory jobs and the distance from the South discouraged black immigration, but so did the “politely racist” attitudes held by many white San Franciscans. The early city had no racial covenants for blacks and no ghettos, but it was only the fact that there were so few blacks that created the illusion of unusual tolerance: The white citizens of San Francisco shared many of the racial prejudices of their fellow white Americans. After 1906, increasing numbers of blacks moved into the Western Addition. By 1930, almost half of all the 5,000 blacks in the city lived in the neighborhood.
So did most of the Japanese. The first Japanese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in 1869, establishing the first and oldest Japantown in the United States. (One of the most influential early immigrants, a devout Christian and future newspaper editor named Kyutaro Abiko, established an agricultural colony of fellow Japanese in Livingston in the Central Valley, soon followed by a colony in Cortez, near Turlock. My Japanese grandparents emigrated to the Cortez colony in the early 1920s; my Nisei father was born in nearby Turlock in 1925.)
The first Japanese in San Francisco lived in South Park and on Dupont (Gra
nt) in Chinatown. Like many other ethnic groups, they moved to the Western Addition after 1906. The willingness of the neighborhood’s landlords, many of them Jewish, to rent to Japanese did not sit well with many whites: In 1907, the Chronicle ran a scare piece about the Japanese “invasion” of the Western Addition titled “A Greater San Francisco or a Lesser Nagasaki—Which?”
The Western Addition was one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country; writer Jerry Flamm calls it San Francisco’s “Little United Nations.” The Japanese population was a mixture of older, first-generation (Issei) immigrants, most of whom were not U.S. citizens, and their second-generation (Nisei) children, almost all of whom were citizens. For convenience, I will refer to them all as Japanese Americans.
At some point after the quake, the majestic Queen Anne Victorian at 1690 Post Street was divided into apartments. Sometime before 1920, the Nippon Drug Company opened on its ground floor. In 1930 the co-owner of Nippon Drugs was a man named J. Hatsuto Yamada, who lived eight blocks away at Bush and Divisadero.
By 1940, more than 5,000 Japanese Americans were living in Japantown. There were more than 200 Japanese-owned businesses. Some owned property; the exact percentage is unclear. Many worked as domestic servants, the famous “Japanese houseboys.”