Historic Status Urged for S.F.’s Beat Bookstore

SAN FRANCISCO —  The birthplace of the counterculture Beat movement may soon be recognized by the very establishment that its devotees railed against.

The Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board voted unanimously Wednesday to recommend landmark status for City Lights Bookstore, the quirky building where Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and a 1950s literary bunch known as beatniks drank coffee and questioned authority. The city Planning Commission and the county Board of Supervisors will now decide whether to grant the status.

The alternative bookstore has catered to bohemians and book lovers since it opened in 1953. Long before modern bookstore chains installed cappuccino machines, City Lights scattered stools and cafe tables throughout the store to encourage browsers, dawdlers and debaters.

In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the store’s co-founder and current owner, and his associate at the time, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges after City Lights published and sold Ginsberg’s sexually graphic poem “Howl” to an undercover police officer.

The two were acquitted, but the trial and the bookstore’s practice of featuring books and holding readings by writers far outside the mainstream put San Francisco on the literary map.

In a new era of chain bookstores and dot-com-driven real estate prices, the landmark status would put the 1907 building on the architectural equivalent of an endangered species list, making it difficult tear down.