North Beach Neighborhood Historical Walking Tour: 1957 Howl

In 1957, San Francisco police arrested the manager of a small bookstore at 261 Columbus Avenue for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and the obscenity trial that followed ended in acquittal. That shop, City Lights, still opens onto the sidewalk, and it is the first stop on this neighborhood historical walking tour of North Beach: a free, self-guided route of about a mile and a half from Beat Generation haunts through the Italian heart of the district to Coit Tower.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin founded City Lights in 1953 as an all-paperback bookstore, and Ferlinghetti's publishing arm released Howl three years later. The store became a city landmark in 2001. Step inside to see the upstairs poetry room, then exit and look at the narrow lane on the shop's south side. It was renamed Jack Kerouac Alley in 1988, and its pavement carries embedded lines of poetry, so look down as you walk through.

On the far side of the alley stands Vesuvio Cafe, a bar at 255 Columbus Avenue that has been pouring since 1948 and drew the same writers and painters who browsed at City Lights. Its stained-glass and painted facade make it easy to spot. You do not need to drink to take in the scene; the corner itself, with the bookstore, the alley and the bar facing each other, is the image most people come to North Beach for.

Walk north on Columbus Avenue and notice how it slices diagonally across the neighborhood's right-angled blocks. The street was cut through in the 1870s as Montgomery Avenue to link downtown with the northern waterfront, and it took the name Columbus in the early twentieth century as Italian immigrants, many from Liguria and Tuscany, made North Beach their home. Look back toward downtown for the classic framing: the Transamerica Pyramid, completed in 1972, rising at the end of the avenue.

At Broadway and Columbus you pass the edge of the old nightlife strip, where the Condor Club made national headlines in the 1960s. Today the corner is busier with traffic than with history, so do not linger. Continue up Columbus past Grant Avenue, where the cross streets climb toward Telegraph Hill. Caffe Trieste, on Vallejo Street at Grant, opened in 1956 and is often credited as one of the first espresso houses on the West Coast; it is a good place to read about what you have just seen.

Columbus brings you to Washington Square, laid out in the city's early years and now the living room of North Beach. Mornings here belong to tai chi groups and older residents on the benches, and the lawn fills with picnickers by afternoon. Near the center of the lawn, look for the statue of Benjamin Franklin donated in 1879, and on the Columbus side, the bronze memorial to volunteer firefighters paid for by the estate of Lillie Hitchcock Coit.

The twin white spires on the north side of the square belong to Saints Peter and Paul Church at 666 Filbert Street, completed in 1924 and often called the Italian Cathedral of the West. Joe DiMaggio, who grew up in the neighborhood, married his first wife there in 1939, and the steps were the backdrop for photos with Marilyn Monroe after their 1954 City Hall wedding. Mass is still celebrated in Italian and Cantonese, so be quiet and respectful if you step inside.

From the square, walk east on Filbert Street and start climbing. The grade steepens sharply after Grant Avenue, and the final stretch to Pioneer Park follows Telegraph Hill Boulevard, which has a sidewalk. At the top stands Coit Tower, finished in 1933 with money left by the same Lillie Hitchcock Coit to beautify the city she loved. Honest advice: if hills are not your thing, the 39 Coit bus climbs to the tower from Washington Square.

The real treasure is inside the base, where artists of the federally funded Public Works of Art Project painted murals of California life in 1934. Farm workers, dock laborers, a busy city street and a library reading room cover the walls, and some scenes stirred controversy for their politics during the waterfront strikes of that year. The lobby murals are free to view; going up the elevator to the observation deck is ticketed and has its own hours.

North Beach mixes several crowds at once: tourists with paperbacks from City Lights, longtime Italian American families heading to church, Chinese seniors from neighboring Chinatown doing their morning exercises, and dog walkers on the hill. The unspoken rule on Telegraph Hill is that the stairways and lanes are people's front doors, so keep conversations low and do not block the narrow paths with tripods or groups.

The best time to walk is a weekday morning, when Washington Square is calm and the light falls on the church facade from the east. Weekend afternoons bring crowds to Coit Tower and long waits for the elevator. If the line at the tower is long, skip the elevator and take in the views from the parking circle at the top, which looks over the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz and the northern waterfront for free.

The Central Subway's Chinatown station on Stockton Street is a short walk from the start, and the 30 Stockton and 8 buses run along the edges of North Beach. The Powell-Mason cable car runs a block west of Washington Square if you want an old-fashioned way back downtown. North Beach can be windy and cool even in summer, so bring a layer for the top of Telegraph Hill.

If time or energy is short, the flat loop of City Lights, Columbus Avenue, Washington Square and the church covers the Beat and Italian chapters without the climb. Ask Karpo APP to fit the walk around a lunch reservation or a bookstore stop, and it will suggest which order keeps the uphill section for when you are fresh. Every stop listed is a public street, park, church exterior or civic monument you can visit on your own.