City Lights illumnates beat times

SAN FRANCISCO

The gallery where Allen Ginsberg first read his seminal poem "Howl" is now a rug store, and the Vesuvio Cafe draws more out-of-towners than bohemians. Taggers have misspelled Neal Cassady's name in Jack Kerouac Alley. The Cellar, where jazzmen backed poets in the 1950s, is just another restaurant basement.

But for the most part, San Francisco does not turn loose of its heritage gently, and this year's case in point is the landmark bookstore at Broadway and Columbus Avenue. City Lights Books, the great Beat heart of literary San Francisco, celebrates its 50th anniversary next month.

"Fifty years," Lawrence Ferlinghetti, its poet-founder, mused recently.

His beard was white, his voice was faint and a silver stud winked from his 84-year-old earlobe. Downstairs, where other stores would have put bestsellers, signs encouraged readers to check out Jean Genet's 1986 "Prisoner of Love" and James Tracy's 2002 "Civil Disobedience Handbook." A goateed kid wooed his nose-pierced girlfriend with "Love Is a Dog From Hell" by Charles Bukowski. Books, and only books, crammed every ledge and crevice. A tourist asked in vain to buy "some kind of bumper sticker."' "Fifty years," Ferlinghetti said, his pale eyes merry. "That's a long time standing on the same street corner, isn't it?" The West Coast has older bookstores, bigger bookstores, cleaner and better-lighted bookstores, but none as improbably famous as City Lights. Launched on a shoestring, pillaged by shoplifters, busted three times for publishing and selling books that authorities deemed immoral, it has nonetheless managed to achieve a stature not even Ferlinghetti could have predicted.

Even as the bookstore has flourished, however, the city that produced it has profoundly changed. North Beach, then populated by Beats, is now dominated by tourists. Most of the writers who made City Lights' reputation are gone. San Francisco's literary scene has scattered, and its artists have yet to recover from the crippling rent hikes of the dot-com era.

Ferlinghetti, who is so closely associated with the store that it is impossible to think of them separately, had a heart bypass operation several years back. Although he now is in good health, and the store has for years been run by others, passage in all its forms has become this anniversary's poignant subtext.

(Begin optional trim) "City Lights is practically the only thing left of San Francisco's once-flourishing North Beach-based literary culture," said California State Librarian Kevin Starr. "But what's happening there is a question, not just about the place's future but about that of the city's culture, because Lawrence belongs to that culture.

"And that question is, is San Francisco just a boutique city? A theme park? Or do creative forces still coalesce there?" (End optional trim) City Lights has been more than a bookstore since its opening day. To visitors, it is a North Beach icon. To bookworms, it is a literary mecca. To baby boomers, it is a way-back machine to their discovery of "On the Road" or Zap Comix. To bums, it is where they could come in from the cold fog and sit reading for hours, free.

Booksellers, meanwhile, hold it up as a case study in the plight and pluck of independent bookstores. City Lights' profit this year will be "maybe a thousand dollars," said Nancy Peters, who became a partner in the bookstore in the mid-1980s and handles its day-to-day operations.

The tourism slump, combined with competition from chains and a seismic retrofitting that necessitated a yearlong shutdown of most of the building in 2000, slowed business so that, for a while, she said, she feared she might have to lay off some of the store's 15 employees.

But even in the store's fattest years, Peters said, it cleared only about $20,000. Customers stole books prolifically, sometimes selling them on street corners a block away. Even the Beat poet Gregory Corso once broke in and emptied the cash box, she said. City Lights was among the last major stores in the city to install equipment near the doorway to deter theft. For years, a sign warned patrons: "If you get caught stealing books, the police will not be called. You will be publicly shamed." (Begin optional trim) More costly, however, has been the store's refusal to court the masses with, say, Danielle Steel or stuffed Harry Potter owls or guides to the Atkins Diet. Though San Franciscans spend more per capita on books than residents of any other U.S. city, even the locals have only so much in common with City Lights' inventory. Francis Ford Coppola said he once went in looking for a book on conservative author Ayn Rand "and was told in no uncertain terms that they didn't and wouldn't carry it. "I just figured it was just their zealot book buyer," he said.

But Ferlinghetti explained: "We never considered it a business. It was a way of life." (End optional trim) Poet Gary Snyder remembers the store from his first days in the city, when he was a young dockworker, fresh out of Reed College. "It was unique from the very beginning," he said, "in that it had such a focus and stock, not only of poetry but of cogent and current politics, history - issues that were arising in our minds." Within two years, the store had begun publishing small books of poetry. Within three, it was making headlines. "Lawrence published his `Pocket Poets' series, which was a new idea at that time, and then Allen had the famous reading of `Howl' at the Six Gallery, and the very next day, Lawrence asked Allen to let him publish it," remembered Snyder, who also read that night.

Ferlinghetti had "Howl," an epic indictment of bourgeois culture, printed in Great Britain. It was declared obscene as its second printing passed through U.S. Customs. Federal authorities ultimately released the books, but when City Lights began selling them, the San Francisco juvenile authorities - citing the potential impact on children - sent two young-looking undercover agents into the bookstore.

Murao sold them a copy of "Howl," and within hours, he and Ferlinghetti were charged with willfully printing and selling lewd and indecent material. The ACLU, which took the case, brought in university professors and authors to defend the poem's literary merit. The landmark 1957 acquittal and ruling set modern legal standards for determining obscenity.

"Howl" became one of the best-selling poetry books in U.S. history - surpassed only by Ferlinghetti's own "A Coney Island of the Mind," published two years later - and City Lights became internationally famous.

City Lights would be raided twice more, in 1966 for selling the poet Lenore Kandel's erotic "The Love Book," and in 1969, for selling the subversive and sexually explicit Zap Comix. In both cases, the charges were dropped, only to burnish the store's reputation as a bastion of free speech. There were offers to expand, but Ferlinghetti refused.

"Bookstores aren't like the grocery business," he said. "You get a supermarket for books, and it doesn't feel like a bookstore anymore. Right from the beginning we had a motto: `A literary meeting place.' " And what a meeting place it was. There were the Beats - Kerouac and Corso and Ginsberg and Snyder and Cassady, muse and memoirist. There was Kenneth Rexroth, the pater familias of the local poetry scene. Henri Lenoir, the bohemian who founded Vesuvio's, lived upstairs in what is now the bookstore's poetry section. There was Ray the Barber, who cut hair in a nook. It became the store's foreign fiction annex after the haircutter was caught dealing drugs and locked up.

In recent years, Ferlinghetti and Peters have sought to ensure City Lights' future. In 1999, with the aid of a Small Business Administration loan, they bought its wedge-shaped 1907 building for just under $1 million. In 2000, the City of San Francisco declared it an official landmark. Ferlinghetti has set up a foundation to guide City Lights after his death "so the government doesn't end up getting it all," he said.

The store's survival "has been both an affirmation of nostalgia and a constant struggle against it," said Oakland poet and critic Jack Foley. In the last decade, it has remained at the cutting edge of politics and ideas.

But the cutting edge gets co-opted in an Internet minute, and the quest for authenticity now must compete with the allure of mass marketing. The Beats, such rebels to the youth of the Eisenhower era, now are the stuff of Gap commercials. And their West Coast paradise - once so seemingly free, with its bohemians and cheap apartments - now is bohemian only in the sense that it is fashionable now to seem so, and its homes are affordable only to the comfortably mainstream.

"About two years ago, I'm standing on Broadway and Columbus across from City Lights, and I look at the store, the whole fandango, the whole facade, and my heart went to my feet," said Neeli Cherkovski, a poet and the author of a 1979 Ferlinghetti biography. "I thought of all the Starbucks and Gaps and all the flattening out of sensibility and all the Orwellian kind of one-ness. And I thought, `It's so beautiful. And yet how fragile it is.' "