A walk retraces San Francisco's literacy past

By Joanna Biggar
Maturity News Service

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Twain mocked its foggy summers. Rudyard Kipling, arriving in 1889, was nearly struck down by a cable car and.witnessed a Chinese "who had been stabbed in the eye".

He concluded that San Francisco "is a mad city -inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty."

But to Maya Angelou, who as a black 13-year-old moved from the segregated South to San Francisco’s Fillmore district in the 1940s, the new city was magical. She wrote: "I became dauntless and free of fears, intoxicated by the physical fact of San Francisco."

Moody fogs, insanity, freedom, beauty, intoxication these have.always lured writers to San Francisco.

Visitors, too, can discover this literary city. The best way is by foot.

Consider, for example, scaling the heights of its literary twin peaks, Telegraph and Russian Hills. Telegraph Hill, which is crowned by Coit Tower and marked by serpentine streets with quaint houses and Mediterranean gardens, was called by French writer Simone de Beauvoir "a miniature Montmartre."

Below the hill is North Beach, whose original settlers, Sicilian and Genoese fishermen, made this district San Francisco’s "Little Italy."

Along with Italian restaurants came taverns — and with the taverns, writers. Early inhabitants included mark Twain, poet Joaquin Miller and satirist Ambrose Bierce. Young Jack London was an habitue of the bars. Later, North Beach spawned the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s.

To see for yourself, go to Washington Square at Columbus and Union. Take a three-minute bus ride up Union to see the magnificent views from Coit Tower. Also check out the wonderful frescoes done by artists employed by the Depression-era public-jobs program, the Works Progress Administration.

A short walk down the road leads to the rustic Filbert Steps that-descend to Montgomery Street. There, gaze across a retaining wall to No. 1360, the classic 1930s-style apartment building on Montgomery’s lower level.

Framed by the bay and Bay Bridge, this landmark was made famous in the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s "The Maltese Falcon," starring Humphrey Bogart. Here, Bogart also met Lauren Bacall in "Dark Passage." A cardboard silhouette of Bogie looks out a window.

Now go down Montgomery as it sweeps toward the financial district. As you approach Broadway, look to the flat-roofed wood houses on the left. In No. 1010, Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg wrote his famed poem "Howl" in the early 150s.

Turn right down Broadway, and just across Columbus you’ll see the heart of Beat San Francisco: the City Lights Bookstore.

When poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened it in 1953, it was the first all-paperback bookstore in the country. It soon became a center for European literature and the poets Ferlinghetti published. A back room is dedicated to the heady Beat days and the poets who used to hang out there.

Among them was Jack Kerouac, who wrote the Beat manifesto "On the Road." His picture dominates the mural behind City Lights on Jack Kerouac Street, one of 13 San Francisco streets renamed for artists.

Cross Kerouac Streetand repair to the Beat hangout Vesuvius for refreshment, or go through the street and left one block to Pacific. Take the bus through Chinatown to Jones Street.

You are now on Russian Hill, named for Siberian sailors allegedly buried here. Since the 1850s, writers and artists have clung to its steep slopes as tenaciously as the bougainvillea.

The ghosts of three literary women loom large here.

The gray-eyed beauty, magazine editor and poet Ina Coolbrith, became a literary intimate (and perhaps more) of the 1860s generation, including Bret Harte and Mark Twain. She pushed classics on young Jack London and became California’s first poet laureate in 1915.

Just east of Jones on Broadway, at No. 1067, is her home. Return to Jones for the spectacular view, then follow the nearly hidden stairway to Taylor, and across it enter Ina Coolbrith Park.

Return to Taylor and go downhill to the steep wooden stairs leading to Macondray Lane, by all accounts the fictional Barbary Lane of Armistead Maupin’s sensational "Tales of the City." Here the endearing, wacky Mrg. Madrigal (played by,Olympia Dukakis in the public television series) ran the boardinghouse where many of Maupin’s characters lived.

At the lane’s far end, climb the steep stone steps of Leavenworth, turn right on Green, then right on Hyde. On the left is Russell, prophetically a dead-end street. At No. 29, free spirits Carolyn and Neal Cassady-lived with Jack Kerouac in a menage a trois.

Carolyn Cassady outlived the other two to paint, write and have the last word in her 1990 memoir "Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg."

(Photo: Jack Kerouac Street, bordering the famed City Lights Bookstore in the heart of San Francisco's North Beach, is one of the many streets named for authors in this literary city. Photo credit: Ann Hawthorne.)