Jack Kerouac Alley

This narrow alley connecting Chinatown to North Beach used to be a nameless service lane where garbage trucks turned around. Now it's named after one of the most famous writers in American history, and the story of how that happened is pure San Francisco.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti — the poet, publisher, and founder of City Lights Bookstore right around the corner — petitioned the city in nineteen eighty-eight to rename this alley after Jack Kerouac. Ferlinghetti argued that Kerouac had transformed this neighborhood into literary geography, that North Beach was to the Beat Generation what Montmartre was to the Impressionists. The city agreed.

Look at the ground as you walk through. Literary quotes are embedded in the pavement — lines from Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, John Steinbeck, and others. The alley is a physical bridge between two worlds: step through from the Columbus Avenue end and you're in North Beach, the Italian-American neighborhood that became the Beat capital. Step out the other side on Grant Avenue and you're in Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in North America. Two cultures, two histories, connected by a walkway decorated with words.

Now, Kerouac himself. He spent significant time in this neighborhood in the nineteen fifties, drinking at Vesuvio bar — which is right next to City Lights — and soaking up the North Beach scene that fueled his writing. There's a famous story about the night Kerouac was supposed to meet Neal Cassady, his great friend and muse for the character Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac went to Vesuvio first, just for one drink. He got so drunk he never made it to the meeting. Cassady waited. Kerouac kept drinking. That's the Beat Generation in a single anecdote — grand plans derailed by the gravity of a good bar.