Pictures &
click pictures to enlarge
City Lights bookstore
founded by San Francisco's
official Poet Laureate,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
North Beach Festival Pictures
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San Francisco
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North Beach is a ideal location for sitting at an outdoor cafe and enjoying an espresso or cappuccino during the day. At night the neighborhood vibrates with some of San Francisco's livliest nightclubs and bars.
Joe DiMaggio, who's father was a fisherman, played baseball in North Beach as a kid at the recently renamed Joe DiMaggio playground. Joe moved to North Beach at the age of one and lived at Valparaiso and Taylor. Another Joe — Joseph Alioto, former San Francisco mayor — was born in North Beach.
Italian immigrants who came from the coastal fishing villages along the gulf of Genova and the Ligurian sea found that California gave them an opportunity to continue doing what they had been doing for a living in Italy — fishing.
The first settlement of Italian fishermen in California was in the San Francisco bay area. As early as 1870 Italian fishermen were providing ninety percent of all fish consumed in San Francisco.
Some of San Francisco's Italian fishermen migrated south around 1871 and settled in what is now known as the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego.
A tribute to Christopher Columbus, blessing of San Francisco's fishing fleet, a festa and other traditional events are all part of North Beach's celebration of it's Italian heritage each October.
Learn more about North Beach’s Italian connection at the The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Also check out virtualitalia.com, the online resource for Italians, Italian Americans and enthusiasts of Italian culture.
The North Beach Festival — San Francisco's oldest street fair — turns Grant Avenue and Green Street into a pedestrian shopping and party mall each June.
North Beach in San Francisco may be best known as home to the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady — who inspired the writing style Kerouac adopted for his successful book ‘On The Road’ and later served as the driver of the psychedelic bus 'Furthur,' with Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters chronicled in Tom Wolfe's 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' — and many other Beatnik poets and writers who lived and performed their live readings here.
ruth weiss — beat poet and friend of Kerouac and Cassady — continued to give live performances in North Beach long after many of the other beat poets had left or died.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach neighborhood in 1953. Based on the idea that good books could be affordable, the all paperback bookstore was the first in the U.S. Ferlinghetti's publishing of Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg—and notoriety from the obcenity trial which followed—helped make City Lights a literary landmark. The bookstore has served for forty-eight years as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals.
A statue of Benjamin Franklin, donated to the city in 1879 by Dr. Henry Cogswell – a dentist who made his fortune during the gold rush — can be found in North Beach's Washington Square. On March 19, 1887, Dr. and Mrs. Cogswell endowed Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, CA.
Cogswell was a temperance advocate who errected water fountain/statues in several cities—Pacific Grove, Washington D.C., Boston, Buffalo, Rochester and Pawtucket—as an alternative to saloons for thirsty passersby. Some included statues of himself and several, like the Pacific Grove fountain, were melted down during WWII metal drives.
The Church of Saints Peter and Paul is on the north side of Washington Square park with Columbus Avenue to the west and Broadway to the south.
After you've taken a virtual tour of San Francisco on iNeTours.com you might want to take a real San Francisco Tour.
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