San Francisco might be renowned as one of the few American cities it is possible to get around on foot, but walking here is not for the out of shape. The famous streets can be very steep indeed and those street cars are there for a reason.
"Well, yes. That's true," admits Scott Lettieri, as the gentle incline of Montgomery Street threatens to turn into something that might test an experienced fell walker. "But this is nothing compared to the historic buildings tour. Now those guys really climb some hills."
Of course there are no shortage of tourist activities to occupy the time in San Francisco, but few can be as interesting as spending a couple of hours following Lettieri around the less vertiginous sidewalks of north beach and Chinatown as he reveals those neighbourhoods' long and rich literary histories. For Lettieri, it turns out, is a man who not only walks the walk, he also talks the talk and outside an anonymous wooden slatted apartment building that is 1010 Montgomery he pulls out a battered paperback book and begins to read aloud.
Fifty years ago at this address, Allen Ginsberg wrote his seminal beat poem Howl and began the process of transforming a group of kooky young misfits into a fully fledged literary movement. The epic work begins: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." Over the subsequent half a century the critical reputations of Ginsberg's famous friends and fellow Beats such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs have also taken a few batterings. But while their work has slipped in and out of vogue, their memory and the way they conducted their lives and careers still exerts a powerful allure. The Beat movement was technically born in New York, but it was in San Francisco that it found its spiritual home.
Howl was published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and owner of the soon-to-be-legendary City Lights bookshop. Its publication led to his arrest for selling obscene material. The subsequent legal battle made him and Ginsberg underground stars and trailblazed the publication of other supposedly obscene modern classics such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Naked Lunch.
I met Lettieri just opposite the bookstore in a scruffily friendly Mexican cafe. First impressions did not reveal many clues as to San Francisco bookishness and it later proved that the place has nothing to do with literary history whatsoever. Lettieri was just partial to a fiercely invigorating breakfast-time fish burrito. But back over the road at City Lights an atmosphere of almost evangelical zeal promotes a belief in the power of the printed word to change hearts and minds and make the world a better and more progressive place.
The shop has occupied the site at 261 Columbus Avenue since opening in 1953 and can still justly claim to be most famous independent bookshop in the world. Back then, it was the first all-paperback bookshop in America. For many years, the basement was occupied by a Chinese electrician who spent all year making dragons for the New Year celebrations, there was an Italian travel agency in the main room and a barber's shop upstairs. These days, the shop occupies all three floors of the triangular plot and it now sells hardbacks, but the ethos is the same. It still takes no federal funding, still has pigeon holes for itinerant poets to pick up their mail and the hand scrawled signage - painted by Ferlinghetti and looking like placards from a demo - still announce the different sections as well as making statements of intent such as "No Shoes, No Shirt, Still Service." The slightly precious way it treasures its radicalism might be old-fashioned, but it seems to get the message across, and I was assured that no George W Bush voter had ever crossed its threshold. On the way out, Lettieri points out examples of hot, new local writing talent including a debut novel called Sinner's Paradise: the author is one Scott Lettieri.
Along with the identification of landmark buildings, Lettieri's tour provides a stream of energetically delivered 50s tittle-tattle such as the story of Ginsberg fleeing to San Francisco after being caught in bed with beat legend Neal Cassady by Cassady's wife. But while the tour majors on the Beats, it also reflects San Francisco's earlier literary history.
This was a town built by the California gold rush. Between 1844 and 1860 the official population increased from 50 to nearly 60,000 people and there were more English language daily newspapers - 13 - than there were in London. The country's first literary journal, The Golden Era, was started here - its office is further down on Montgomery and is now a rather expensive antiques shop - and gave early work to Mark Twain who had by this time already fought on both sides in the civil war, dabbled in politics and silver mining before becoming a spectacularly vituperative muckraking journalist who laid into corrupt policeman and rival newspaper writers.
The list of SF-associated writers is an impressively vigorous one; Jack London was born in the city as were Robert Frost and Alice B Toklas. Robert Louis Stevenson passed through and Dashiell Hammett got a job with the Pinkerton detective agency here. Later came John Steinbeck and Truman Capote who, in the bohemian cafe The Black Cat, denied he was a writer with a drink problem by explaining he was, "a drinker with a writing problem".
While most of the tour is through "little old wooden north beach" as Ferlinghetti called it, we duck into Chinatown and the Li Po bar on Grant Avenue which was a popular Beat drinking den. By all accounts the decor - lino on the floor and a large Buddha overseeing all - hasn't changed much. Li Po, Lettieri points out, was an eighth century Chinese poet who shared an interest in many of those things closest to beat hearts; sex, alcohol, poetry, "Drinking with friends washes away the sorrow of a thousand years" is a line of his that surely resonated with them.
Further down Grant, just opposite the huge Dragon Gates that mark the entrance to Chinatown, is the Triton Hotel which specialises in reasonably priced funkiness. The location is terrific and, for those that fancy it, there's free tarot readings - and free wine - in the lobby every evening. There's also a 24 hour yoga channel on the TV which, depending on your degree of jet lag, can be either amusing or a bit disturbing.
Some of the suites have been designed by celebs with The Red Hot Chilli Peppers room - in fact done on their behalf by a designer - having furniture looking like guitar cases and a leopard-skin floor. The Woody Harrelson suite - done by Woody himself - is subtitled Woody's Oasis and has a wall sized photograph of a redwood forest and lots of muted browns and greens. A piece of cloth rolls down over the TV screen with a scrawled message from the actor: "turn off the television, turn on your mind". A sentiment that would have appealed to the Beats, one imagines.
The walk ends in the Bar Vesuvio opposite City Lights where a Jack Kerouac cocktail is included in the price of the tour. Tacky and inauthentic? In fact no. The Beats exerted a curiosity factor for sightseers from nearly the beginning, and this bar, where most of the leading figures - as well as Dylan Thomas - got monstrously drunk at one time or another put up a sign saying "Don't Envy Beatniks ... Be One!" to encourage the many civilian gawkers.
The bar still hosts readings and the day I was there the poet Jack Hirschman, a bona fide Beat, was in the audience listening to a woman poet declaim, in the classic Beat delivery, against the Iraq War. And it was in this bar that Jack Kerouac, near the end of his short life, once again got drunk and so blew a last chance to meet his hero Henry Miller. Kerouac had become increasingly embittered about being pigeonholed as a Beat and denied a place in the canon of great American writers.
The new street sign outside the Vesuvio, at first sight, confirms his fears. The walkway between the bar and City Lights that used to be called Adler Place is now Jack Kerouac Alley with graffiti featuring him, Ginsberg and the rest adorning its shabby doorways. But far from being condemned forever to a cliched sleazy alley at the side of the City Lights shop, the new signage in fact indicates that, in the end, Kerouac was granted access to the American literary pantheon. In 1988, the San Francisco board of supervisors renamed a dozen city streets and Jack Kerouac Alley has taken its place on the San Francisco map alongside streets commemorating, among others, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London and Mark Twain.
Way to go
Getting there: British Airways (0870 8509850, ba.com) flies direct from Heathrow-San Francisco from £309 return including taxes.
Where to stay: Hotel Triton, 342 Grant Ave (+415 394 0500, hoteltriton.com) rooms from $129 excluding taxes.
Where to eat: Burritos at Taqueria El Zorro, 308 Columbus Avenue and Broadway.
Activities: San Francisco Literary Tours (+415 441 0140, sfliterarytours.com), $25pp. Meets every Saturday at noon in front of City Lights. Other times can be arranged.
Recommended reading: Sinner's Paradise by Scott Lettieri is published by The Creative Arts Book Company.
Further information:
Country code: 001
Flight time Heathrow-San Francisco: 11hrs.
Time difference: -8hrs.
£1 = $1.78.
