City Lights - The Howl Trial

City Lights - The Howl Trial

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

City Lights opened at 261 Columbus Avenue in 1953, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin as one of the country's first all-paperback bookstores. It soon added a publishing house, and in 1956 it printed Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.

In 1957 customs officers seized a shipment of the book, and police arrested store manager Shigeyoshi Murao and then Ferlinghetti for selling obscene material. The trial that followed drew national attention. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem had social importance and was not obscene, a decision that helped widen legal protection for literature in the United States.

In 2001 the city named City Lights a landmark, the first time it gave that honor to a business rather than a building. The lane beside it is now Jack Kerouac Alley, named for the author of On the Road.

More on Wikipedia: City Lights Bookstore · Allen Ginsberg · Jack Kerouac

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom