Still on the road
William Burroughs’s 1959 novel, Naked Lunch, begins: “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper….” This opening line taps into all the major themes of the Beats: paranoia, corrupt authority, addictions of every kind; and beneath the fear, the desire for new art forms, a new Romanticism, and a raw sound never heard before—a “howl,” as Allen Ginsburg’s signature poem describes it.
In 1948, Jack Kerouac proclaimed the “beat generation,” with all the cultural meanings of that word: a beat to music; a beating from a nightstick. The origin of the Beats was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but they spread to San Francisco and the Northwest, and so began the era that established the city’s countercultural identity and created such iconic places as City Lights Books, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti still appears for readings. Most other places are gone, including Six Gallery on Fillmore Street, an underground exhibition space where Ginsburg first read “Howl,” appearing along with five other great poets of the time.
Info
Address 540 Broadway Street, San Francisco, CA, 94155, www.kerouac.com, +1 415.399.9626 | Public Transport Bus: 8X (Columbus Ave & Broadway St stop); 12 (Pacific Ave & Grant Ave stop); 30 (Stockton St & Columbus Ave stop) | Hours Daily 10am–7pm| Tip Just down the street on Adler Place is one of the city’s great dive bars, Spec’s—a living remnant of the beatnik era.
The vibrations of the Beats can still be felt in an odd little museum located in the back of a bookstore on Broadway, half a block from City Lights, across the alley from the Hungry i strip club. Downstairs you’ll notice Neal Cassady’s 1949 Hudson coverd in 5,000 miles of dust, prominently displayed among artwork, news articles, and various artifacts. The Hudson was donated to the Beat Museum by Walter Salles. It is not the original car but a prop used in the shooting of the movie On The Road. In the two small rooms upstairs are pieces of period furniture and signed first-edition books by Kerouac and others. The museum features readings, film viewings, and a two-hour guided walking tour that winds through North Beach exploring the places where these iconic writers lived and loved.
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