Travel: Sleeping With Allen Ginsberg

The Hotel Bohème, in North Beach, San Francisco.

In a year when San Francisco is grandly observing the centennial of its devastating 1906 earthquake, smaller, less cataclysmic anniversaries tend to slip by unnoticed. But just the same, through the fall of 2006 a bookstore in North Beach is quietly marking the fiftieth birthday of a literary sort of earthquake—the publication of Howl and Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg.

Though Ginsberg’s famous first reading of Part I of “Howl” didn’t actually take place in North Beach (it happened on Fillmore Street, in Pacific Heights, to chants of “Go, go go!), North Beach is the neighborhood most wedded in the public imagination to the Beat movement. And that is where visitors go to soak up the remnants of the counterculture movement. What few of them realize is that after hanging out in the same cafes and bars once frequented by the Beats, they can actually sleep in a room where Ginsberg frequently stayed. And best of all, the hotel is practically across the street from the place where it all began.

The Hotel Bohème is located on Columbus Avenue, the main drag of North Beach, its entryway tucked between an Italian restaurant and a family-run pastry shop. The building, constructed as a hotel and boarding house in the 1880s by the Italian Capurro family, was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake but was quickly rebuilt. Today’s incarnation—styled as an homage to San Francisco in the fifties—is the result of a renovation in 1995, and Ginsberg is said to have been a regular guest until he died, in 1997. His room, number 204, is on the smallish side but feels cozy, with an iron canopied bed and a small bay window in which he was often seen typing on his computer.

What better way to immerse yourself in the Beat period—one of the most colorful and provocative eras of American intellectual and creative life—than by gazing at the heart of North Beach from the same window? At the center of it all, spiritually as well as geographically, is City Lights, the bookstore that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a partner opened in 1953, at the cusp of what became known later as the Beat movement (Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1954). From its inception the store has been a place of political expression and free speech, and its in-house press is still publishing alternative poetry.

Ferlinghetti printed the first edition of “Howl”—which eventually topped out at 3,600 words—after hearing Allen Ginsberg, then unknown, debut it at Gallery Six in San Francisco in October 1955. The day after the reading, Ferlinghetti wrote the poet a note quoting the one Emerson dashed off to Whitman after hearing him read Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

He added, “When do I get the manuscript?”

A year later the first edition of Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights Press, to relatively little fanfare. Then when the second printing was being shipped from the printer in London to San Francisco, customs officials seized 520 copies, leading to an obscenity trial for Ferlinghetti. The trial was widely publicized, and many artists and writers (as well as the American Civil Liberties Union) came to Ferlinghetti’s (and Ginsberg’s) defense. In the end, Howl and Other Poems prevailed, and Ferlinghetti won the case when Judge Clayton Horn ruled the book not obscene.

Ferlinghetti, now 87, is still writing and painting, and he is so beloved in his neighborhood that North Beach named a street after him (he is often seen wandering the area when he’s not presiding over events at his shop). His own collection of poems, Coney Island of the Mind, is one of the most popular books of poetry in the country, with more than a million copies in print.

This year the store celebrates Howl and Other Poems’ fiftieth anniversary with a series of events running through the fall of 2006 and a special edition of the book.

The Hotel Bohème is at www.hotelboheme.com. City Lights bookstore and publisher is at www.citylights.com.

—Amy Weaver Dorning is a freelance writer in San Francisco.