The Transamerica Pyramid is the tallest building in San Francisco
** Following Big Sur ** and a privileged stay in Post Ranch Inn , the last stop of the trip is San Francisco . Without being aware of it, Robert Mitchum is going to respond to Woody Allen in this report: in a sequence of 'Back to the Past', Rhonda Fleming tells the famous actor that she doesn't know New York . “You should go sometime”, replies a hieratic Robert Mitchum; “So you would understand why I am in San Francisco” . The best film noir to illuminate an authentic city. The most hidden buildings, the graphics of the shops, the mist of the bay, everything in the city has a San Francisco flavor.
Then there are the icons. The rack railways, the Golden Gate Bridge, ** the Alcatraz prison **, the vertiginous slopes where the Steve McQueen's legendary chase sequences, 'Bullit', with his green Mustang that inaugurated a genre of its own in cinema. And that when one drives in San Francisco, one is content to dodge the shadows of the streetcars and the skids on the rails and with keep vertical on the slopes of Nob Hill.
The Golden Gate seen from a helicopter from San Francisco Helicopters
Dirty Harry's town It is the great American city of the counterculture . In the 1950s the North Beach neighborhood was home to the beat generation. You were going to buy a donut and you could come across Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady . In the 1960s, the Victorian houses of Haight Ashbury gave birth to the Hippie movement , with its flower power, its lysergic passion and its summer of love. At the donut shop were **Janis Joplin, Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, Cassady** (not to be missed).
In the 70's the Castro neighborhood became the first gay neighborhood in the world. One of his neighbors was Harvey Milk (Cassady was Ginsberg's lover, but died in 1968 and did not give him time to move to the neighborhood and continue the party), the first politician who openly recognized his homosexual condition and who came to nickname himself as ‘the mayor of Castro street’ . Retired police officer and former councilman Dan White, offended by his vindictive policies, shot him at City Hall, killing him in 1978.
A couple of musicians in Santa Cruz, a coastal town near San Francisco
Very close to Castro, in the elegant Zuni Cafe (1658 Market St.), the choreographer of the prestigious San Francisco Ballet, Ricardo Bustamente, introduced me to Rick Welts , which curiously is the first major manager in US sports to have openly declared his homosexuality . He did it in May 2011, 33 years after Harvey Milk's death, in a story published by the New York Times. Welts is the president of the Golden State Warriors basketball team and the NBA, he told me, is not exactly a very gay-friendly universe.
Today, the proper neighborhood to go for a donut is Mission. Much of the underground and bohemian activity has moved to Valencia Street and its surrounding streets. The origin of so much counterculture in San Francisco, the bastion where everything was conceived and where our great American route ends, is nothing more and nothing less than City Lights Books , a bookstore. Its founder in 1953 and still owner, New Yorker Lawrence Ferlinghetti , beat poet and editor, acknowledges that he chose San Francisco because it was the only city in the US where it was possible to buy good wine at a good price . It should not be forgotten that a few kilometers to the north are the generous wine-growing regions of Sonoma and Napa.
Counterculture fever broke out when Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl and Other Poems' and was arrested for obscenity. The trial served so that all Americans knew what the beat movement was. The verdict agreed with the publisher, who had, like the beatniks and San Francisco, an unbeatable advertising campaign in all media.
City Lights remains intact at the original location, 261 Columbus Avenue in North Beach. It opens every day until dawn and it is during the hours when its three floors of literature are most agitated . On the upper floor there is a large window with views of the backyards of the soul of San Francisco. Next to the glass swings a rocking chair and a handwritten sign proclaims, in English: "Pick up a book and sit down" . The blonde beaches of ** Los Angeles **, the sandstorms in the desert of ** Death Valley **, the forests of ** giant sequoias ** under the snow, Dirty Harry in ** Big Sur **, the most lively and rogue San Francisco. Almost three thousand kilometers on the highway later, he sat down and read.
This report was published in issue 49 of the magazine Condé Nast Traveler.
San Francisco Cogwheel Tram
The legendary City Lights bookstore