Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco

nytimes.com

26 pointsmykowebhn19 comments

What a delightful article. On my first visit to City Lights I bought a copy of Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island if the Mind” and a copy of Dharma Bums (Kerouac’s best book). I didn’t really know what Lawrence looked like (pre-internet days). I asked how often he came into the book store, the clerk said: “He is upstairs now”. I walked up that narrow wooden staircase, looked at him, he looked at me. I said “hi”, he smiled, I left. Really,really wish I had been brave enough to say more. Hadn’t realized it was him when I went up there before and picked out one of his books.

City Lights is one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I feel its fiction collection is second to none.

There are a handful of novels I use to judge how broad (and good) a bookstore's fiction collection is. Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers, Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities, and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke. I would say 90 percent of the bookstores out there would not have any of these three books in stock, and certainly not Barnes & Noble. The last time I checked, City Lights had all three in stock.

Thanks for sharing. Just wanted to add that I too think Dharma Bums is Kerouac's best book, I really enjoyed reading every page.

I had no idea the history behind City Lights. But I loved it for very obvious reasons.

1. it's open late. almost nothing else is in SF. 2. it has a wonderful basement where the shelves are almost haphazardly placed.

Why is NOTHING in this city open late? Including restaurants. Who wants to eat at 6:30?!

Because SF is a town, not a city. And with the cost of doing business only on the rise there isn't room for places to be open during non-peak hours anymore. The number of coffee shops and restaurants that stay open later has noticeably decreased in my 19 years of living in SF.

Believe me I wish it were different but there are diners that are open late.

Dave Chappelle goes to Grubsteak when he's in town and they're open till 4AM. Or you can go hang out with the USF students at the 24hr Starbucks over in Laurel Hts.

SF is a party city. There's a shitload going on every night all night, it's just a bit underground.

The CA 2AM last-call is at least partly responsible.

Enjoy that basement with haphazardly placed shelves while you can. Before long, an ADA lawsuit will wipe it out. Lawyers and disabled people team up to do this on purpose, searching for places to sue. It's not normally a disabled person randomly showing up and being inconvenienced; this is an industry. For example, in my neighborhood every business on a particular street got hit all at once. These teams know exactly what to look for, and will use the smallest insignificant violation to start a lawsuit.

I loved this article because it totally avoids the "SF has changed so much because of techies" cliche

Unfortunately, Ferlinghetti's San Francisco is long-gone; the artists have moved on. Tech rules the City now.

are there any pockets of artists left? I don't mean famous ones, there's probably someone who can pay enough to compete with tech-workers

What about on the East Bay? Isn't there a more lively artist community in places like Berkeley, Oakland, or El Cerrito?

My impression is that there was recently a "golden age" for art in the east bay which is now waning, in large part because it's not seen as an affordable destination for young artists.

During my pit-stop in SF last November, I made a point of attending the famous monthly underground art variety show (Tourettes without Regrets) in the east bay, because I happened to be there that day. I was shocked to see the audience and performers were much older demographically than I remembered when I lived in the area 5 years ago; most attendees seemed to be over 30 rather than under 30.

So, anecdotally, it seems to me that the artists who established there years ago may still be there, but the east bay's not attracting new artists as much as it once was.

I have been in Oakland for about ten years and the only young people I know who still go to the art/variety shows have been enabled by family wealth. The culture is still here because people are drawn to this area specifically for it, but it feels hollow at this point, none of it is coming from an organic place.

The fallout from Ghost Ship Fire destroyed most of the communal artist spaces. What's left is carefully hidden now.

But rents had doomed it anyways. Artists need spaces, time and spare money to work. And high rents consume all three.

there are still a few hundred in SF. every fall there is an open studios (www.artspan.org)...like someone else posted about the east bay, the average age is getting up there. numbers are dwindling pretty rapidly because of health and displacement issues.

Only the ones with rent control from 10+ years ago, which the techie-YIMBY types are for the most part opposed to as well to make more room for them. Fortunately there is some positive backlash brewing in local politics which is focusing on expanding tenant protections and actual affordable housing. See for example Dean Preston and the very active SF DSA chapter.[1]

Another challenge: affording commercial gallery space.

[1] https://www.votedean.com/

>YIMBY types are for the most part opposed to as well to make more room for them

I'd like to say, that's an extremely uncharitable and untrue view of YIMBY positions. When you have intense housing pressure, landlords will abuse the law if they think they can get away with it.

This is instead of legislating locking people into place (for example, having to commute 10 miles across sf like one of my friends does due to rent control "lock" in).

I would rather rents be dropped by matching demand. It's working in Seattle, it's working in Portland. Building housing to match the influx of people moving into all cities (there are more people today than when they were built), in combination with moderate rent control and strict tenant protection is the only way out of this mess.

> It’s working in Seattle...

Not for artists it’s not.

“in spite of decades of indisputably strong development, Seattle’s share of cost-burdened renters has barely budged.”

“...by overbuilding housing for the wealthy, Seattle has achieved some short-term improvement in affordability for the middle class, at the expense of substantial displacement and continued upward pressure on the most vulnerable. In this, it is similar to California as a whole, with the state’s 300,000-unit surplus for above-moderate income earners, in spite of Seattle’s proportionally superior housing production. As the city considers a greater emphasis on inclusionary zoning, even supporters of robust development have begun to question some of the core assumptions of supply-side models.”[1]

[1] Seattle, a Cautionary Tale for Supply-Side Housing Advocates https://knock-la.com/seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-si...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com