San Francisco and what to do in it

Both parents got their first shots, thanks again caek.

Man, Ferlinghetti really did seem like he'd be there forever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead/2021/02/23/37b2a134-edd5-11df-abf5-a1622994c5f5_story.html

End of several eras.

Awww, that's a bummer... he complimented one of my selections at the register on time, and I walked out in a glow.

But 101 is hardly a tragedy; and the store has somehow survived.

That is sad, he did seem like he'd be around forever. Was really happy to have been able to visit City Lights when we were in San Francisco a few years ago, sadly I didn't see him in the shop that particular day.

one of bffs used to work there

oh yeah? gossip or gtfo

*leans forward*

he liked working there, but he quit because he had to move out of his rent controlled apartment in SF, so he moved to Oakland, and the commute to North Beath in terms of time and public transit wasn't worth it. ... plus before he'd worked at City Lights, he worked at Adobe, and I think he was over being the bookstore guy.

time and cost of public transit, rather

I still have (somewhere) a copy of issue #1 of Search & Destroy (June 1977) which used City Lights as their mailing address.

it was like being the "record store guy" for 20 years ... you get old, it gets old.

Search and Destroy was founded and published by V. Vale in 1977 while working at City Lights Bookstore. Vale received initial donations from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to finance this zine that he hoped would be a clone of Andy Warhol's Interview. Mixing interviews, articles and photos, Search and Destroy presented well-written pieces documenting punk and new wave music and their accompanying aesthetic.Featuring a review of a punk show in San Francisco at the 'Gabba-Hey Gardens;' an interview with the band Crime, a collage centerfold of various punk/new wave bands; 'The Politics of Punk' by Nico Ordway and a short piece by Allen Ginsberg on New Wave.

xp Albert -- Vale has a bunch of those (or at least some) that he brings with him and sets up at a merch table when he does talks

Vale is a lovely person to talk to, I've been to his apartment.

City Lights is, tbph, not that good a bookstore, but I'm still glad it's there.

I will honestly say, though, that if I could have guaranteed Modern Times' survival at the Valencia Street location for twenty more years, I would have been fine with City Lights shutting down. And I'm a poet! Modern Times was just a better store.

(For one, City Lights doesn't carry used books, which means that a majority of the stuff they have just isn't worth looking at imho)

I like(d) Dog-Eared Books a lot though I think ilxor bamcquern has some story about that place when he applied to work there once upon a time.

I know this is the SF thread, but I do miss Issues (in Oakland) -- I had to actually google where to buy my annual Slingshot day planner this year! (yeah I know 1st world lefty problems)

City Lights is a fine bookstore. Keep in mind there are hardly any bookstores left. It's all new books, yes, but I think the variety in stock is good. Or at least, it largely matches my tastes.

there are lots of bookstores left tbr

Alley Cat, that weird one in the alley in the Financial District/SoMA, Moe's, Green Apple, Bird & Beckett, Books & Bookshelves....

Alley Cat is ten times the bookstore that City Lights is, imho, and Moe's is one of the best in the US at this point.

Ferlinghetti RIP

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead.html

Moe's is NOT in San Francisco!!!! omg!!!!

it is great though

Of course it's great, and it is more great because I can get to it from Oakland without paying to cross a bridge or go under one.

There used to be a few more bookstores, it's true. Remember when there were several in the Castro? What about Red Hill Books in Bernal, which was a sister store to Dog-Eared? When I lived in the Excelsior, right near Manila Oriental Market, I would sometimes walk into the valley and up into Bernal and browse at Red Hill, then take a book to Wild Side West and sit outside drinking a beer and reading.

Yeah, a lot of bookstores in SF are closed. A lot in Berkeley are closed now too. Fuck I haven't actually been inside a bookstore in a year, I should just go to Moe's this weekend and buy something.

"that weird one in the alley in the Financial District/SoMA" formerly Wilkenson's or something like that; some other people took it over. I mean, I love it (or did, when I worked downtown), but it's barely a shop, it's some shelves in display cases. I did buy some pristine Sinatra LPs there one day though. I wonder if they're still going considering no one is in the financial district during the day anymore?

RIP to cranky old man Ferlinghetti, who yelled at me for creasing spines and then lectured me about the word 'praxis.'

What destroys the poetry of a city?

Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture. But cities are gradually learning that they don't have to let it happen to them. Witness our beautiful new Embarcadero! And in San Francisco right now we have another chance to stop Autogeddon from happening here. Just a few blocks from here, the ugly Central Freeway can be brought down for good if you vote for Proposition E on the November ballot.

And for another destroyer of poetry and peace, how about those killing machines, the Navy's Blue Angels, who have just carried out their annual attack on the City? But the poetic life requires Peace not War. The poetic life of the City, our subjective life, the subjective life of the individual is constantly under attack by all the forces of materialist civilization, by all the forces of our military-industrial perplex, and we don't need these warplanes designed to kill and ludicrously misnamed the Blue Angels. They dive upon our city every year, in an frightening militarist and nationalist display of pure male testosterone. I've seen old Vietnamese ladies in Washington Square diving under the benches! Do we really need to be reminded yearly how our planes have bombed Third World countries back to the Stone Age? In San Francisco, of all places, do we really need "bombs bursting in air to prove that our flag is still there"? What would Saint Francis say? Perhaps the City could disinvite them next year.

I could go on until I'm singing to your snores, but I'll mention just one more destroyer: Chain stores, or chain gangs. Corporate chainstores wipe out long-established independents, killing off local color, local traditions, and -- in the case of bookstores -- literary history. I've been to other great cities on poetry tours and found not a single independent bookstore left in neighborhoods where chain gangs have moved in. It's an old story by now, but it's time to revise a lot of old stories! If so much of this City's population doesn't want chain stores, as the Bay Guardian suggests, why can't the City government take a united stand against them? ......But to get to the positive side of things, I have quite a wish-list for the City. I've proposed that North Beach, with its long literary history including Mark Twain, Jack London, Ina Coolbrith, William Saroyan, and many others including Beat writers, be officially protected as a "historic district", in the manner of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and thus shielded from commercial destruction such as was suffered by the classic old Montgomery Block building, the most famous literary and artistic structure in the West until it was replaced by the Transamerica Pyramid. I do hope someone will pick up this ball and run with it.

And I've already proposed that a small wooden house on Treasure Island or in the Presidio be made a Poet's Cottage where future laureates might live or work and conduct poetry events or even an annual city poetry festival. The Mayor and the important journal Poetry Flash are already behind it, so I hope it will happen...

And since we are in the Main Library, let's remember that the center of literate culture in cities has always centered in the great libraries as well as in the great independent bookstores. This Library should have l0 million dollars a year to spend on books, more than twice as much as presently allotted. It also needs more space, since evidently this new state-of-the-computer postmodern masterpiece doesn't have as much shelf space as the Old Library next door -- that classical Carnegie-style library with its great turn-of the-century murals -- and I believe the people made a great mistake in passing the Proposition to remove the building from the library system. It might not be too late to reclaim it as a Library Annex, even though the Proposition to get rid of it has already been partially implemented. All it would take is another Proposition on the ballot to retrieve it, just as the Central Freeway Proposition may soon very well succeed in reversing an earlier misguided vote.

Other outrageous things on my wish-list include: One -- give bicycles and pedestrians absolute priority over automobiles, and close much of the original inner city to cars, including Upper Grant Avenue. Two -- make the City a center for low-power alternative radio and TV, with tax breaks for the broadcasters. Three -- uncover our city's creeks and rivers again and open up the riparian corridors to the Bay. Five -- Paint the Golden Gate Bridge golden. Six -- tilt Coit Tower -- think what it did for Pisa!

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco's inaugural Poet Laureate dedication
San Francisco Public Library
Tuesday, October 13th, 1998

(the Central Freeway came down less than 5 years after this address!)

uh ... some of the central freeway came down prior to this address ... I remember my first place in SF back in August 1996 was at Hayes and Octavia (or Laguna? I forget) and there was definitely some significant parts of freeway missing that were there prior to October 17, 1989

hell yeah fuck the Blue Angels

Is there a good book about the development of SF over the decades? This part piqued my interest:

uncover our city's creeks and rivers again and open up the riparian corridors to the Bay

Would love to know more about those and how they were covered up.

SF the city or the Bay Area in general? ... a friend of mine wrote a book recently (though maybe it was just a series of essays) about creeks and rivers in the South Bay in re development and stuff. ... There's also that one book that's pretty well regarded about California and water but I think a lot of it focuses on the Central Valley and SoCal

I can tell you that creeks are a big deal in terms of development and planning and such now ... and that (at least in Oakland) you have to fill out a bunch of forms if your project is anywhere near a creek.

It's good to know where the creeks were so you don't buy property near them. Those areas tend to flood.

San Francisco has been especially fucked with over the last 150+ years - extensive landfill, ships buried, lakes filled in, creeks covered up, etc. And that continues to this day with the scraping of Rincon Hill and the like.

there were some articles in the Chronicle about efforts to uncover some of the creeks in the Tennessee Hollow watershed of the Presidio that were covered over decades ago when the army owned it (Thompson Reach, Quartermaster Reach), as well as Dragonfly Creek

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Habitat-restoration-sites-in-the-Presidio-14867941.php

The rivers, wells and spring in SF have mostly been built over but still exist underground (~15 feet below street level). Many buildings in Civic Center and parts of Hayes Valley/SOMA have pumps pushing groundwater into the sewers.

The BART tunnels through Civic Center and the Mission pump out 2.5 millions gallons of water a week.

My neighborhood park is built on top of a spring which constantly floods and has rampant irrigation problems despite being on top of a hill.

map ca. 1890

http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/SFTopoCreeks.html

The giant hole beneath the new "Sales Force" bus stop was built for trains that will probably never be extended that far, but still has to be maintained forever... water pumping, security, lighting, A/C etc.

A worker found a woolly mammoth tooth in that hole.

If you're interested in SF creeks (and the sewers that replaced them), you should definitely get this one too: https://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=492

Annoyingly, its not online but it is free.

I got super interested in this when my street's sewer would over flow into my house in heavy rains. Fortunately they doubled the capacity a few years bakc.

Cool, thanks for the recommendations!

There's also that one book that's pretty well regarded about California and water but I think a lot of it focuses on the Central Valley and SoCal

does yr dad love the movie Chinatown, y or n? ... Like yr dad is like my mom and that is one of her very favorite movies.

there are creeks all over fucking Berkeley, Strawberry Creek in particular, which runs under my neighborhood and contributes to an excessively high water table. There have been drives to 'daylight' more of these and it's happened in a couple of places, but not where it was first proposed, which was immediately downtown at the entrance of the University. The plans were pretty cool.

As a former member of the "talent" for Kink, I can attest to the fact that a section of creek runs through one of the dungeons deep in a sub-sub-basement of that building.