LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Overheard at the Jack Kerouac Alley dedication ceremony this past weekend:

North Beach accordion & guitar group wrapping up their set, "Thank you all for coming down to our neighborhood this beautiful spring afternoon." 

And next up, the Chinatown dance troupe captain, "And thank you for coming down to our neighborhood.  Now performing from our end of the alley... "

Neighborhood pride was in full swing this weekend at the inauguration of Jack Kerouac Alley, a small 20 meter-long side street sitting between the San Francisco historic neighborhoods of North Beach (home to many Italian-Americans and numerous coffee shops) and Chinatown (home to many Chinese-Americans and a fortune-cookie factory). 

The event was timely since this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's best-known work "On the Road."  But the plan to close the alley to cars and install commemorative cobblestones was apparently the culmination of many years of lobbying by City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti whose bookstore is a literary landmark in its own right.

The new cobblestone plaques include quotes from other literary figures as well including Li Po & Confucius on the Chinatown side and Maya Angelou & John Steinbeck on the "western" side.  Some of our favorites quotes include:

"Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency." -- Maya Angelou

"The free exploring mind of the individual human is the valuable thing in the world." -- John Steinbeck

"Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes." -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

At the center of the refurbished walk is a spiraling quote from On the Road: "The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great I thought I was in a dream...'' 

Spinning around to read the quote with the murals on each of the side walls and the lanterns above you could surely feel like you are in a dream!

Since City Lights was just there at the alley's westside entrance, we couldn't pass up a visit.  We'd included the North Beach bookstore on our tour last fall of San Francisco Independent bookstores. 

Because of the special event City Lights was particularly filled to the gills for a warm Saturday spring day.  The two employees at the front counter looked harried as they fielded customer questions about the program of performances for the alley dedication, and pulled down Howl t-shirts in customer's requested sizes.  The usually sparsely-populated upstairs Beat Literature and Poetry room was filled with browsers peeking out the windows into the alleyway below where the Chinese dance troupe was performing.

Still the bookstore shoppers looked particularly serious as they browsed the New Releases, the California local authors room, and the English & American literature sections.  There were fewer folks downstairs where the theatre, film, arts, and political studies sections reside -- but all the same the place felt alive with the spirit of the old beatniks and counter-culture writers who must continue to haunt these hallows.  You have to wonder what they'd make of us now memorializing them in the stones of an alleyway!