The A. Cavilli Bookstore. Taken from American Italian
Historical Association Western Regional Chapter website
The A. Cavalli Bookstore at 255 Columbus Ave opened in 1913 as North Beach’s leading Italian book and newspaper seller. The building was designed by Italo Zanolini who was also responsible for North Beach’s other Italian Renascence Revival jewels, Casa Fugazi (now home of the notorious Beach Blanket Babylon) and the Venetian Gothic Bank (currently housing E’ Tutto Qua Café [who served tiger prawns to my wife about the same size as our house phone]).1 In 1948, the French artist Henri Lenoir took over the bottom floor of the Cavalli Building and opened the soon to be famous Vesuvio Café as a place to drink with his bohemian friends.2 It would be a result of fate, not foresight, that five years later Lawrence Ferlinghetti would open his City Lights Bookstore just across the alleyway from Vesuvio, creating a symbiotic relationship between the bookstore’s emerging generation of writers and poets and the bar that saw to the powerful thirsts that comes with the territory of American writers. The Vesuvio website claims that it was on November 17, 1955 that Neil Cassady first brought Jack Kerouac to the bar on their way the legendary Six Gallery Reading where Allen Ginsberg first preformed “Howl”3 (though I assume this is a typo because everybody else places the reading on October 74). And so began the Beat legacy of Vesuvio, with many a reading at City Lights to be missed because of an author’s unwillingness to leave their barstool. Apparently, Kerouac couldn’t even by pried away to meet one of his heroes, Henry Miller, in Big Sur. Every hour Kerouac would call Miller from the bar phone to tell him he was leaving the city now, only to sit right back down at the bar, never to leave San Francisco that night.5
Henri Lenoir. Taken from the San Francisco Public Library Online Archives.
Word got around that Vesuvio was the cool place to drink and the reputation endured as the 50’s Beats turned into the 60’s hippies and beyond. Richard Brautigan was a regular, right up until death (though I can‘t verify the validity of it, Brautigan supposedly left my favorite suicide note of all time before he shot himself in 1984, simply saying, “Messy, isn‘t it?”) ; Charles Bukowski is said to have been 86ed for tearing the place up; Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Donavan were also frequent patrons when in town.6 Owner Herni Lenoir himself is credited with the cultural contribution of introducing the black beret to San Francisco, the Beats and eventually the enduring Beatnik stereotype right down to Ned Flanders’s abusively hip father.7 The bar has changed little over the years aside from the tiled murals on the inside and outside of the bar by artist, Shawn O’Shaughnessy (who largely worked for drinks) and the mysterious scrawl below the stain glass window outside that reads, “We are itching to get away from Portland, Oregon.” It is purportedly a reference to a turn of the century flea infestation throughout all of Portland that caused many residents to wait out the epidemic in San Francisco (Unfortunately, I was not able to find any information on the infestation in the excessive amount of time I spent through digging online archives for a reference to a Portland flea or lice infestation so we’ll have to take the passed down story’s word for it).8
The crowd at Vesuvio on this Tuesday afternoon is a fairly typical sampling in my experience as I go in to talk to my long time friend, bartender, and half of the indie-duo David and Joanna, Joanna Lioce. There is a middle aged African American man, quietly sipping a pint of beer and reading a collection of Camus essays; a tattooed hipster impressing his girlfriend with a list of now defunct bands he’s seen play live; a large group of local elderly foodies sitting in the window comparing nominations for the best sea bass in town; and - “You-hoo!” a shrill voice cuts over the regular chatter. As everybody looks around for the source of the cartoonish call, another “You-hoo!” emerges from a lady on the second floor. She is wearing a pink visor and a Penn State sweatshirt, she’s leaning out over the railing, waving one hand to the bartenders and holding a wineglass in the other, tilted just so as to inadvertently spill tiny drops of red wine on the floor twenty feet below. “Can you turn up, Urethra?” she calls down.
“Did she say urethra?” Mike the bartender asks Joanna.
“I think she means Aretha Franklin,” Joanna points to the muted television showing the national anthem of a baseball game.
“Yeeeaassss,” the women bellows.
“No. I can not do that,” Mike simply says to her. “Did that woman really just you-hoo me? Who you-hoo’s other people?” He turns to me, “See, that’s why I can’t help you with any stories about this place. I try to forget everything.”
-tourists.
I don’t mean to denigrate tourists by any means. The more often we are able to be tourists somewhere the luckier we are. But when you live in a tourist town like San Francisco you begin to notice certain public spaces that try to appeal to anyone, from anywhere, but end up feeling artificial and contrived. Take the alley that runs between City Lights and Vesuvio, connecting Columbus Ave and Grant Ave, that until 1988 was known as Adler Place, but carries the guide book accessible moniker Jack Kerouac Alley.9 The now walking-only street is bedazzled in recently laid cobblestone, a three-story Mexican style mural, brightly painted tiles and metal plates with quasi-profound lines from writers who spent time in San Francisco, from Kerouac to Maya Angelou to the Chinese poet, Li Po. It is a great example of San Francisco’s admirable attempts to highlight its colorful history, but pushes the boundary of good taste with a garish hodgepodge homage to diversity, honoring the memory of everybody and nobody.
Kerouac is certainly a complicated person to venerate (as all people are). His books brilliantly capture the romance of “the road” as dark alternative to the American dream, where a person can spend a life between the cracks with freedom and adventure on the other side of every back door. Also, by nearly every account he was a boorish drunk, a vindictive maudlin and a macho bully.
It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who successfully petitioned the city to change the street name in 1988, but it remained, as he described, “a place for fish trucks and garbage.” So it was Ferlinghetti again who then proposed the revamping of the street in 2007 into an urban-use monument to literature.10 I can’t blame the book seller and the city for seeing an opportunity to capitalize on nostalgia for the Beats and/or promote local history and artists. Looking forward to a career in Public History I need let go of my rolling eyes and sarcastic comments about Mickey Mouse wearing a beret and goatee. Hell, as a man in his mid-thirties I need to do that.
On all the nights that I went into Vesuvio only to find it filled to the brim with herds of German tourists in fanny packs, entire sororities of “woo-woo” girls and grizzly barflies that look like they’ve been there since 1948 and have little patience for all the damn woo-wooing after shots of Jagermeister, I went across the street to Specs. It turns out that I was carrying on a long tradition of getting away from the scene by dodging traffic across Columbus and dipping into the hardly lit and indisputably dive bar, officially named Specs Twelve Adler Museum Café. According to bartender Tony Lioce, former editor at the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News and on-goingly Joanna’s father, the location at 12 Saroyan Place was “either a biker bar and then a lesbian bar, or a lesbian bar and then a biker bar” before Richard “Specs” Simmons took the location over in 1968.11 Specs instantly served as an alternative scene to Vesuvio for locals as the Beat movement had long since dried up and even its spawned hippie movement was dying out. As celebrated columnist and Specs regular, Herb Cain, described the bar as a place for bohemians rather than Beatniks and made this distinction, “Bohemians were more political in nature. Beatniks were about getting stoned getting laid and living in some squalid place together. Although, there were a lot of weekend, middle-class beatniks. You got a lot of kids from the suburbs who would buy a beret and dark glasses and try to act nutty. The old bohemians who lived in the neighborhood would make fun of these weekend hippies.''12
Some of items on display at Specs Twelve Adler Museum Cafe.
At Specs the poets and painters mingled with strippers (whose backstage of the establishment above was connected to Specs by a stairway), blue collar workers, occasional celebrities and labor activists. “Oh, yeah, Specs is one of the classic real big lefties,” Tony tells me. “When I got hired here, he didn’t care about graduate of Brown University, editor for the LA Times, awards, nothing to do with that shit. What mattered was three things: I was Providence, he was from Boston… I took a piss next to Muddy Waters one time, he found that out somehow, he’s a real music nut… and the thing that cemented it was I was involved in a labor strike in 1973 and got locked up. Through no fault/credit of my own, I was pushed into a police man, who got pushed into a truck. I was only in the can for like twenty minutes, but he didn’t care. Providence, piss next to Muddy Waters, labor strike… This is the best job I’ve ever had.” According to Tony, Specs came into the money to open the bar by playing a role in the writing of the Kingston Trio hit, “M.T.A.”, a jovial protest song about the Massachusetts Transit Authority, and the original 45 still hangs on the wall behind the bar.13
Specs fills up as the sun goes down, drowning out any conversation my recorder can hope to pick up, and thanks to the Lioce’s insistence that I never see the bottom of my glass, my memory won’t pick up too many conversations either. I chat with Romalyn, a pretty young girl sitting on the window sill who was actually married at the bar, and Momo, the bearded painter who keeps trying to tell me about his strange relationship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but is constantly interrupted by his highly inebriated friend smacking the back of his head with the giant ring on her finger. I say goodbye, give half my cigarettes to Momo and make the walk back to BART, deciding that I really need to spend more time in North Beach.
Notes-
1. Robert Celli, “Living History, One Drink at a Time or 60 Years and No End in Sight,” The Semaphore, 186 (2009), accessed on October 8, 2011, http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Vesuvios.
2. Joanna Lioce (Vesuvio bartender) in discussion with author, October 11, 2011.
3. Vesuvio main page, accessed October 8, 2011, http://www.vesuvio.com/index2.html.
4. “Oral history interview with Wally Hedrick, 1974 June 10-24”, Archives of American Art, accessed on October 8, 2011, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-wally-hedrick-12869.
5. Vesuvio main page.
6. Joanna Lioce discussion.
7. Sam Whitting, “Ghosts of Beat Generation Haunt North Beach,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 1995, accessed October 8, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1995/11/26/PK14204.DTL.
8. Joanna Lioce discussion.
9. Carl Nolte, “Kerouac Alley has face-lift,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2007, accessed October 8, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/30/BAG4NOUONC1.DTL.
10. Carl Nolte, “Kerouac Alley”.
11. Tony Lioce (Vesuvio and Specs bartender) in discussion with author, October 11, 201.
12. Julian Guthrie, “Since 1968, Specs Twelve Adler Museum Cafe -- Specs to you -- has thrived as a North Beach holy spot”, San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 2004, accessed October 13, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/26/BAG2C4HM0A1.DTL&ao=2.
13. Tony Lioce discussion.
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