San Francisco -- The Beat Scene: Bits Of `Cool' In North Beach

Before the hippies and the yippies and the yuppies and the buppies; before techno, grunge, house and cyberpunk - there were The Beats, and their music was The Word.

While most of America reveled in the backyard-barbecue prosperity of the Eisenhower era, the gnawing sameness of suburban life drove hundreds of kids to hop Greyhounds in the late 1950s.

San Francisco was their destination, and the North Beach neighborhood was their mecca. The Beat Scene was born.

Here, girls dressed in black with long straight hair, drank Italian coffee and smoked French cigarettes while boys with goatees read existential poetry and banged on bongo drums.

It all seems innocent and a little silly now. But the "beatniks," as the media dubbed them, were the progenitors of generational upheaval in post-World War II America. Long before '60s icon Timothy Leary said, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," '50s hero Jack Kerouac was extolling the virtues of leaving home for life "On the Road."

The short-lived scene had all but disappeared by the time the hippies and "flower power" descended on San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love.

Bohemian enclave

Originally part of San Francisco's coastline (hence the name North Beach), the Beats' future hangout became landlocked by the city's constant landfilling. Around World War I, Italian immigrants populated its narrow, hilly streets.

After World War II, the children of the immigrants moved to the suburbs, leaving the neighborhood to bohemians who liked the urban feel, cheap rent and remaining Italian coffeehouses.

The Beat Scene lasted from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, becoming more popular and hence less authentic as it aged. By the early 1960s, bus tours were bringing gawking tourists.

Some date the death of the scene to June 1964, when the Condor Club at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway went topless with famed headliner Carol Doda. It marked the beginning of a new era of the intersection as focus of San Francisco's tawdry adult nightlife.

The counterculture packed up and moved west to Haight-Ashbury or east to Berkeley.

Many of the sights of the North Beach bohemian quarter have faded into history. But there are still enough pieces of the Beat Scene for a fun half-day walking tour.

Start at City Lights

Start at the City Lights Book Store, the acropolis of the Beat Scene, where Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl" and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind" can be purchased.

Ferlinghetti opened the store in 1953. Three years later, he was arrested for selling "Howl," famous for Ginsberg's line that he had seen "the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

"Indecent materials," prosecutors claimed. The FBI called Ferlinghetti a "beatnik rabble rouser." But a jury found him not guilty and he was soon behind the cluttered bookstore's counter again.

At Vesuvio

Across what's now called Jack Kerouac Alley is Vesuvio, a onetime Dylan Thomas hangout. The cafe is populated in the evenings by brooding young men and women who read for hours at tables, alongside graying and paunchy veterans of the Beat era swapping stories with old friends.

Look for a faded advertisement for a Beatnik Kit, a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for "straights":

"Don't Envy Beatniks - Be One! Thrill your wife - stun your neighbors! Crash the pad parties unobserved!"

Across Broadway are two old Beat hangouts. Tosca is a coffeehouse dripping in Old World atmosphere. Nearby, Specs was a Beat bar tucked into a small alcove that still celebrates the era with a small trove of memorabilia.

Broadway now is filled with strip joints and adult bookshops, but a few gems remain. Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe used to be a great place to sit back with an espresso and watch the Beat scene walk by. The coffee remains great, but the crowd is more likely to be thrill-seeking out-of-towners trolling sex clubs.

More enjoyable is Grant Avenue, the revitalized heart of North Beach. It's lined with good Italian restaurants, cafes and trendy shops. The Saloon has been serving beer since 1861, though the hippy-dippy paint job looks circa 1969. It's a great place to listen to music on weekends. The battered bar is supposedly the 19th-century original.

Across the street, at the corner of Grant Avenue and Fresno Street, is Caffe Trieste, the oldest surviving coffeehouse in the area, dating all the way back to 1956. This is the spot for a morning cup of coffee, with the sun streaming in the east-facing picture windows. On weekends, amateurs sing opera.

If you are a hardcore beatnik, visit the Lost & Found Saloon. It's now a friendly neighborhood bar, but in the 1950s it was The Coffee Gallery, which, with Vesuvio, was a key java-and-angst hangout.

At the end of the tour, the best place to spend the night is the Hotel Boheme, a boutique hotel with a Beat-inspired decor (444 Columbus, 415-433-9111; doubles from $110). You'll find retro-'50s fabrics and wallpaper in era colors such as sage green, cantaloupe, sweet lavender and, of course, black.

There are Picasso and Matisse prints on the walls, and the small library is stocked with books by Kerouac and Ginsberg. Some rooms feature lampshades of '50s sheet music or adorned with international postage stamps. ----------------------------------------------------------------- IF YOU GO

Making the Beat Scene

The "Beat Scene" revolves around Columbus Avenue and Broadway in North Beach, next to downtown and Chinatown. A quick list of top sites:

-- City Lights Book Store, 261 Columbus Ave., 415-362-8193.

-- Specs, 12 Adler Alley, 415-421-4112. Former Beat Scene bar.

-- The Saloon, 1232 Grant Ave., 415-989-7666. One of the oldest pubs in the city.

-- Lost & Found, 1353 Grant Ave., 415-392-9126. Former Coffee Gallery, now a neighborhood bar.

-- Vesuvio, 255 Columbus Ave., 415-362-3370. The best remaining Beat Scene coffeehouse.

-- Caffe Trieste, 601 Vallejo St., 415-392-6739.

Read: "The Literary World of San Francisco and its Environs," by Don Herron (City Lights, $9.95).

Info: San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, 415-392-4511.