The first thing you notice is the socks.
Green and blue stripes beneath gray trousers. A flash of mischief in an otherwise gray photograph. Lawrence Ferlinghetti sat at Caffè Trieste with a magazine open in his hands, cap pulled low, reading as the room carried on around him. Cups touched saucers. Chairs scraped tile. North Beach moved past the windows.
I saw him there often. He would ride his bicycle over from his office at City Lights and join the Trieste regulars. Sometimes Jack Hirschman was across the room. Famous poets, but here they were neighborhood men at familiar tables. Someone would stop to talk. A chair would scrape closer. The door would swing open and admit a stripe of cold San Francisco air.
It was always a thrill to see Lawrence, though I tried to play it cool. By then he was so deeply woven into North Beach that his presence could almost seem ordinary. City Lights, Columbus Avenue, Caffè Trieste, Lawrence on his bicycle. They belonged to one another.
He was born in Yonkers on March 24, 1919. His father died before he was born. His childhood was fractured by loss and separation, with years spent between France and New York. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina, earned a master’s degree at Columbia, and later received a doctorate from the Sorbonne.
Between those lives came the Navy and the Second World War. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell, he walked through the ruins of Nagasaki. He later said the sight made him an instant pacifist. The poet known for humor, jazz, and the life of the street had seen what nations could do to ordinary human bodies.
He arrived in San Francisco in 1951. Two years later, he and Peter D. Martin opened City Lights Bookstore. Ferlinghetti established the publishing arm in 1955 and began the Pocket Poets Series with his own Pictures of the Gone World. The books were small, inexpensive, and made for coat pockets. Poetry could leave the universities and move through the streets.
In 1956, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. The following June, police arrested bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao after he sold a copy to an undercover officer. Ferlinghetti, who was away in Big Sur, returned to San Francisco and surrendered. He was charged with publishing obscene material.
On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl possessed redeeming social importance and was not obscene. Lawrence had placed his business, his name, and his freedom behind another man’s words. The decision opened space for American writers and publishers to print work that challenged the boundaries of the time.
People called him a Beat poet, but he never fit comfortably inside the label. He was older than Ginsberg and Kerouac. His war had been different. His education had been different. He preferred the term wide open poetry. He published the Beats, defended them, drank with them, and gave their voices a way into the world, all while remaining stubbornly himself.
His own A Coney Island of the Mind appeared in 1958 and eventually reached roughly a million copies in print, an extraordinary life for a book of poems. Its language was funny, restless, political, and built to be heard. It carried the rhythm of jazz and street talk into crowded rooms.
That is how I remember him. Not as a bronze monument or a relic preserved in an old photograph. An elderly man at a café table in striped socks, reading, his bicycle somewhere nearby. Coffee cooling. Pages turning.
Lawrence died at home in San Francisco on February 22, 2021. He was 101. Losing him felt like losing a living connection to the earlier city and to the Beat Generation. City Lights is still there. Caffè Trieste still smells of dark roast. The streets still climb above North Beach. But the bicycle no longer arrives.
