Vesuvio Cafe

This guide to Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach opens with a ringing phone behind the bar: Henry Miller waiting in Big Sur for a friend who keeps promising to drive down. That friend is Jack Kerouac, still at the bar with a drink. The guide traces Vesuvio's 1948 founding by Swiss immigrant Henri Lenoir as a room for painters and writers, and the October 1955 night Neal Cassady stopped in on his way to the reading that is remembered as the start of the Beat movement. Listen for the alley beside City Lights that later took Kerouac's name.