The Beat Museum

This guide to the Beat Museum in San Francisco opens on a spring night in 1965, when comedian Lenny Bruce, out on bail and rehearsing a routine in the Swiss American Hotel that once stood on this corner, pushed too far into his own performance. That corner, across from City Lights bookstore, later drew founder Jerry Cimino and John Allen Cassady, son of the restless driver and muse Neal Cassady, who hauled a private collection of Kerouac letters and first editions cross-country in an Airstream they called the Beatmobile. Look up at the window across the way before you step inside.