70 years later, City Lights remains an ode to San Francisco

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One windy day in 1950, a Navy veteran and literary critic named Lawrence Ferlinghetti stepped off the ferry on the Embarcadero, traveling across the country by rail. After just spending time in France, San Francisco’s jagged outline of white buildings and hilltops immediately captured his imagination, drawing comparisons to Mediterranean ports on the other side of the world.

“I thought maybe Atlantis had risen from the sea,” he wrote in 1998.

Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco, hoping to become a successful artist, and ended up opening the City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue in North Beach in 1953.

Seventy years later, City Lights has outlasted countless other bookstores, libraries, and Ferlinghetti himself, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 101. Still filled with anti-authoritarian literature, stories and poetry against the backdrop of San Francisco’s technological transmutations. The lights of the big city are largely preserved in amber.

City Lights was founded in the North Beach area of ​​San Francisco in 1953. City Lights Books Provided

Back in 1998, in the dot-com era, Ferlinghetti was acutely aware and worried about the precarious position of the poetry-focused bookstore in San Francisco.

The City of San Francisco had just named Ferlinghetti its first Poet Laureate, and shortly thereafter he wrote an essay that served as the “inaugural address” to his 2001 book. San Francisco Poems. He predicted the city’s eventual decline as an artistic enclave, citing a 1998 San Francisco Bay Guardian article that described it as “a city undergoing a radical transformation from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from all over the world to a homogeneous, affluent enclave.”

Then and now, North Beach is often referred to as a tourist trap—a spoof of Little Italy—and at the time, Ferlinghetti feared that this negative reputation would engulf his beloved artist colony.

“This past weekend, North Beach looked like a theme park literally overrun with tourists, and kitsch was king,” he wrote. “What happened to him? What gives a free poetic life? What destroys the poetry of the city?”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened City Lights in 1953. | Contributed by Ilka Hartmann/City Lights Books

Luckily, Ferlinghetti had at least one answer to his question: he created the City Lights non-profit foundation to keep his bookstore and publishing house alive. He also encouraged poets to make news.

“What did I mean […] was that the poets should stop muttering in their beards in front of a private audience and say something important to the world,” he wrote.

Ferlinghetti’s “populist manifesto” resonated in 2023, at a time when San Francisco finds itself at the dangerous crossroads of technocracy and poverty. City Lights turns 70 this year, but we probably have a lot to learn from its first decade in North Beach.

City Lights employees pose for a group filmed outside a bookstore in the early 1990s. | City Lights Books Provided

Ferlinghetti originally conceived the idea for City Lights with a San Francisco State College sociology professor named Peter Dean Martin. They hoped to publish and sell books by authors with anti-authoritarian ideas, the first volume of which was Ferlinghetti’s 4×6 pocket poetry collection. He then commissioned other writers and poets to contribute to the Pocket Poets series.

City Lights brought its greatest creative potential to the Beat Generation, a boyish club of nonconformist writers with a penchant for jazz and spoken word and a complete dislike of academic elites such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs. and Gary Snyder.

The fourth book ever published by City Lights was a peyote-filled revelation of the death of an entire generation by conservative political and cultural forces.howl by Ginsberg. Initially, the authorities did not count verses like “The asshole is holy!” to be particularly outspoken, immediately arresting Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges. The case ultimately set an important precedent for First Amendment rights. Because the poem has literary value, the court ruled that howl by definition is not obscene.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti poses with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, 1956. | Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

howl was in good radical company on the shelves of City Lights. Co-owner Peter Dean Martin was the son of Italian labor organizer Carlo Tresca, who was murdered on the streets of New York in the early 1940s by the mob. Thus, City Lights’ political literature was anarchist-oriented from the beginning, distributing two anarchist newspapers in Italian until they both went out of print in the 1960s.

Always a poet who shared his time with an artist, publisher, and community organizer, Ferlinghetti remained a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing a collection of poems called coney island of mind in 1958 it sold over a million copies.

Ferlinghetti’s legacy is immortalized within the walls of the bookstore and beyond. It extends to an alley next to City Lights, which he fought to restore and rename after Jack Kerouac, a friend of Ferlinghetti’s who frequented the bookstore. Ferlinghetti lent Kerouac his cabin in Big Sur, where he wrote the book of the same name in 10 days in 1961. Ferlinghetti’s influence can still be felt in the neighborhood at Café Vesuvio, a historic beatnik establishment, and throughout the city.

Writer Jack Kerouac reads a book in City Lights. | City Lights Books Provided

City Lights marketing and communications partner Natalie Longwell told The Standard that the bookstore has a series of events planned for its 70th anniversary in the spring and fall of 2023 that have yet to be announced.

Ultimately much more than a bookstore, City Lights feels both like a relic from a bygone era and timeless, a place with a sense of belonging that is reflected in the poems contained on its shelves. The first poem Ferlinghetti ever wrote about San Francisco, “Far Over the Harbor,” describes the quiet rooftop of North Beach rising above the noise of the city, a moment caught between transience and permanence. He describes a woman hanging sheets to dry between clothespins:

she tilts her head

in silent laughter

and in a choiceless gesture then

shakes out golden hair

being in the endless expanses of the sea

among the inflated white shrouds

stand out with bright steamers

let the kingdom come

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