By: Kyrie Sismaet By: Kyrie Sismaet | April 5, 2022 | Food & Drink Lifestyle Feature Story Culture Clubs and Bars
April is National Poetry Month, and no other institution was as vital to San Francisco’s creativity and literary culture than the seemingly quaint Vesuvio cafe in North Beach. While unassuming and modest from the exterior, the 255 Columbus Avenue venue actually played an integral role in blossoming San Francisco as a literary and cultural mecca that it still is today.
Little did Vesuvio Cafe know that upon their opening in 1958, that it would immediately be flocked with the nation’s most prolific poets, writers, and activists of the midcentury. Along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti opening the landmark City Lights Publishers & Bookstore next door, the constant presence of luminaries Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg as regular patrons established the humble venue and its greater North Beach neighborhood as the new home for a rising counterculture movement.
Famously known as the Beat Generation, vanguards of this time emphasized utilizing poetry and the art of the written word to respond to the devastations left behind by WWII and reinvigorate city culture. The San Francisco Renaissance is what this proliferation of art and creativity was titled, with works from this era all applying dissenting poetry as critical elegies to a calamitous and dismal post-war period.
“The night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,” as Kerouac describes it, began on the evening of October 17th, 1955, as fellow writer Neal Cassady led a group of “howling poets through Vesuvio. These literary pioneers were headed to Six Gallery for a poetry reading, and the spectacle became Kerouac’s inspiration for The Dharma Bums.
His later work, On the Road, was also influenced by Vesuvio’s inspirational aura, along with poet Allen Ginsberg’s notable Howl, which he introduced at the cafe’s own intimate reading in 1955. This raw, honest, and considerably erratic poetry style identified San Francisco as the birthplace of West Coast poetry, as compared to New York’s surrealist approach.
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers neighbors Vesuvio Cafe and is equally historic and monumental.
Today Vesuvio cafe and nearby City Lights Booksellers & Publishers are not only historic reminders of San Francisco’s great cultural epoch, but are also enduring anchors in North Beach for patrons and tourists new and old.
Stepping into the tight two-floored bar feels like an inspirational time machine. Cozy and eclectic, the walls are adorned with memorabilia and the bar full of creative and affordable cocktail classics such as the Bohemian Coffee.
It’s no wonder many stop to visit or even spend their day writing here, feeling fueled by stories of ragtag artists who did likewise to ignite a renaissance movement, which may even be resurging.
A newfound interest and appreciation in Beat ideas, art and counterculture seems to be sparking within the younger generations, and whether Vesuvio’s legacy plays a part in it or not, the cafe will remain open for it all.
Photography by: Aliis Sinisalu/Unsplash
