Thoughts about home (and Beat San Francisco)

This past weekend, Jillian and took a great walk around the city. We took the MUNI to the Ferry Building and got breakfast, walked up the Embarcadero to Fisherman's Wharf, down through North Beach, and back to downtown, where we grabbed the MUNI back home to Potrero Hill. In a sense, we were celebrating our choice to come back to NY early. Ever since we made that decision, we've both felt re-energized about exploring the city. It's nothing against San Francisco, but knowing we're going back to NY in less than a month lightens our spirits tremendously, and it also injects an urgency into our appreciation of California. We'll be flying back to New York on November 20, two days before our sublease on the San Francisco place runs out. Instead of finding another place here in SF, we decided to go with our home sickness and be in New York for Thanksgiving. Our place in Brooklyn is still sublet through the end of the year, but our good friend Jackie has been been kind enough to let us stay in one of the bedrooms of her Upper West Side apartment for the end of November and December. So, really, it's all worked out for the best -- we're getting a great taste of SF, we'll get a better taste of Manhattan (we haven't lived there since college), and, best of all, we'll be back home in Bay Ridge in no time at all!

So back to our day. North Beach is a pretty famous San Francisco neighborhood. In addition to being being San Francisco's Little Italy, it was also the epicenter of the Beat Movement, the 1950s/1960s U.S. artistic explosion led by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights Bookstore in 1953 on Columbus Avenue, which, in addition to being a cutting-edge bookstore and cultural landmark for the Beats, was also a book publisher. Most famously, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's famous, controversial, and influential Howl and Other Poems.

In addition to being a pretty cool bookstore, the building is a very important cultural landmark, especially for me. The Beats, and specifically Allen Ginsberg, were what got me into creativity and writing. Reading them and learning about their achievements opened up to me a whole world of possibility and change. They were really where I learned about being cool. Just standing in front of the City Lights Bookstore feels special. Just to think that very important events took place here, to just be there, is very humbling. Here's a picture I took of the store's facade:



There's a another thread of connection with me and Ferlinghetti. Even though he opened his store in North Beach, he made his permanent San Francisco home in Potrero Hill, where Jill and I are living right now. And it's also rumored that Allen Ginsberg probably wrote most of "Howl" while staying in Potrero Hill with another Beat figure living in the neighborhood, his partner, Peter Orlovsky. To have all these connections and associations with these towering figures of my imagination, oh, it's just great.

I was able to find some video of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the 1960s in Potrero Hill. It's got some nice footage of the neighborhood back then, and you hear him reading a neat poem about San Francisco. Enjoy!



And lastly, this afternoon, while standing on our porch, making some phone calls, I was struck by how beautiful the neighborhood looked. In the blazing afternoon sun, the rolling hills, with houses upon houses cascading toward the horizon, oh my goodness, it was just wonderful. Jillian and I don't regret our decision to leave, but we definitely will miss this place. Check it out:



See you soon, New York!

-Niko