North Beach
Bohemian streets and Italian cafes once hosting a landmark obscenity trial over banned poetry.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to North Beach in San Francisco starts with an ordinary June morning in 1957, when police walked into City Lights bookstore and arrested the man behind the counter for selling a slim paperback of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. It traces how Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the shop four years earlier, how customs agents had already tried to block copies printed in London, and why this cheap-rent neighborhood of Italian bakeries and late-night poetry drew Ginsberg here in the first place. From there it follows the case into a courtroom, before a judge named Clayton Horn. Walk past Vesuvio Café and The Place and picture the readings that used to spill out of them.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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