San Francisco - Alison Bing [58]
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THE FIERY, FEISTY HEIRESS
In 19th-century San Francisco, fire engines were usually pulled by horses, but they had to be pushed up steep inclines by firefighters, who until 1866 were well-to-do volunteers. There were some 16 squads in all, and No 5 had the advantage of being urged on by its mascot, the self-appointed fire cheerleader and eccentric heiress Lillie Hancock Coit. She was the ultimate groupie: she could drink, smoke and play cards as well as any off-duty firefighter, rarely missed a fire or a firefighter’s funeral, and even had the firehouse emblem embroidered on her bedsheets. Eventually she split town to join the bohemian scene in Paris, but she left $5000 (about $50K today) in her will to each firefighter in the No 5 company, and funds to construct the monument to the city’s firefighters now known as Coit Tower (opposite).
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BEAT MUSEUM Map
1-800-537-6822 (1-800-KER-OUAC); www.thebeatmuseum.org; 540 Broadway; admission $5; 10am-6pm Mon & Tue, to 10pm Wed-Sun; 15, 30, 41, 45
The Beat goes on, and on – OK, so it rambles a little – at this truly obsessive collection of SF literary-scene ephemera c 1950–69. The banned edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is the ultimate free-speech trophy, and the 1961 check Jack Kerouac wrote to a liquor store has a certain dark humor, but some items are head-shakers: did those Kerouac bobble-head dolls and yo-yos ever really go into mass production?
Enter the museum through a turnstile in the back of the store, grab a ramshackle reclaimed theater seat redolent with the accumulated odors of pot and pets, and watch fascinating films about the Beat era’s leading musicians, artists, writers, politicos and undefinable characters. Upstairs there are shrines to individual Beats with first-hand remembrances and artifacts, and first editions of books that expanded the American outlook to include the margins. Downstairs in the store, you can buy poetry chapbooks and limited-run editions of obscure Beat titles you won’t find elsewhere, and entry to this part is free.
SAINTS PETER & PAUL CHURCH Map
415-421-0809; www.stspeterpaul.san-francisco.ca.us; 666 Filbert St; admission free; 7:30am-4pm; 15, 30, 41, 45
Wedding cake was the apparent inspiration for this 1924 triple-decker cathedral with its lacy white towers, and in its downtime between masses in Italian and Chinese, the church pulls a triple wedding shift on Saturdays. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe had their wedding photos taken here, though they weren’t permitted to marry in the church because both had been divorced (they got hitched at City Hall instead).
True to North Beach literary form, there’s poetry by Dante in a glittering mosaic inscription over the grand triple entryway: ‘The glory of Him who moves all things/penetrates and glows throughout the universe.’ How very Ginsberg-meets-the-Beatles.
BOB KAUFMAN ALLEY Map
off Grant Ave near Filbert St; 15, 30, 41, 45
What, you mean your hometown doesn’t have a street named after an African American Catholic-Jewish-voodoo anarchist Beat poet who refused to speak for 12 years? The man revered in France as the ‘American Rimbaud’ was a major poet who helped found the legendary Beatitudes magazine in 1959 and a spoken-word bebop jazz artist who was never at a loss for words, yet he felt compelled to take a Buddhist vow of silence after John F Kennedy’s assassination that he kept until the end of the Vietnam War.
Kaufman’s life was hardly pure poetry: he was a teenage runaway, periodically found himself homeless, was occasionally jailed for picking fights in poetry with police, battled methamphetamine addiction with varying success and once claimed his goal was to be forgotten. Yet like the man himself, this hidden alleyway in his honor is offbeat, streetwise and often profoundly silent.
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NORTH BEACH BEAT
Walking Tour