Quick answer
North Beach is San Francisco's historically Italian neighbourhood, and there has been no beach here for over a century — the shoreline was filled in during the nineteenth century. Its landmark is City Lights at 261 Columbus Avenue, which published Ginsberg's Howl in 1956 and won the 1957 obscenity trial that followed.
Full transcript
No Beach
First, the name. There was a beach here, in the eighteen hundreds, along the northern waterfront. Then the city filled in the shoreline to make more land, and the beach ended up several blocks inland and underneath the buildings. The name stayed. There has been no beach in North Beach for well over a century. What is here is San Francisco's Italian neighborhood, and it has been since Italian immigrants, mostly from Genoa and later Sicily, settled these blocks in the late eighteen hundreds. Washington Square is the center of it, with the twin spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church on the north side. Joe DiMaggio grew up a few streets from here.
The Trial
At 261 Columbus Avenue is City Lights, opened in 1953 by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin as the first all paperback bookshop in the country. Paperbacks were considered cheap and disreputable. That was the point. In November 1956 Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. In June 1957, two undercover police officers walked in, bought copies, and came back with a warrant. The store manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, was arrested for selling an obscene book. Ferlinghetti was charged too. They won. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that a book with the slightest redeeming social importance is protected. That ruling helped open the door for publishing in America, and it happened because a small bookshop refused to take a book off the shelf.
Upstairs and Around the Corner
City Lights is still independent, still open late, and the poetry room is upstairs. Go up. It is one of the few genuinely famous places in this city that is exactly what it claims to be. Next door is Vesuvio Cafe, where the Beats drank, separated from the bookstore by an alley now named Jack Kerouac Alley, with lines of poetry set into the pavement. And two blocks away is Caffe Trieste, which claims to have brought espresso to the West Coast and where Francis Ford Coppola is said to have worked on the screenplay for The Godfather. Order at the counter. Sit. Sit a while — this is a neighborhood that rewards not being in a hurry.
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