Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
9
City Lights
Look right, down the slope of
Columbus, and you'll get a gorgeous
long view of the avenue and of the
famous Transamerica Pyramid at its
end—one of the best views in the city.
Two blocks down, where Kearny inter-
sects Columbus (stay here for now),
you can see a green-skinned building
with a cupola. That's Columbus Tower
(also known as the Sentinel Building),
which survived the quake by virtue of
being under construction at the time.
The Kingston Trio owned it in the
1960s, when it went to seed; at the
time, the basement contained a record-
ing studio where the Grateful Dead
recorded their second album. The
movie director Francis Ford Coppola
owns the building now; upstairs are the
offices for the production company he
started (now co-owned by his son
Roman and his daughter,
Lost in
Translation
director Sofia). Downstairs,
he sells his Napa county and Sonoma
county wines (p. 242 and 247), and
there's also a little slightly overpriced
but good European-style bistro, Café
Zoetrope ($12 for pasta or pizza).
Directly on your right, at Broadway
and Columbus, you'll find one of the
best and most historic bookstores in the
country,
City Lights
(p. 184), whose tri-
angular building is stuffed on three levels
with volumes, particularly hard-to-find
ones by fledgling presses. Back in the
1950s, its owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
decided that good books didn't have to
be expensive, and he set about publish-
ing new writers who he thought
deserved to be read. One of his choices
was
Howl and Other Poems
by a young
writer named Allen Ginsberg. The
book's homoerotic overtones scandalized
some, and the resulting obscenity trial
(which the poet won) made Ferlinghetti's
bookstore nationally famous among
both literary types and civil liberties
houses continue to attract men at all
hours. Strange to think of a porno-shop
block as having a long and established
heritage, but this one does.
The city's topless scene got its start in
1964 on the opposite (northeast) corner
of Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and
Grant Avenue at the Condor, the tan
building with green cornice and a lower
floor of arched brick. The owner, look-
ing for something to liven up his club,
asked the chief of police if his waitresses
could loosen their bikini tops. They did,
and toplessness wasn't far behind. The
mayor at the time tolerated it by saying,
“Fun is part of our city's heritage.”
Within days, every club in the vicin-
ity had also gone topless. But the person
who gets the most credit, to this day, is
the copiously chested Carol Doda, who
danced a dozen shows nightly at the
Condor and was profiled in Tom
Wolfe's
The Pump House Gang.
Only
around 20 at the time, Doda is still a
fixture on the San Francisco scene, now
as a chanteuse and the owner of a lin-
gerie store in the Marina (at 1850
Union St.). Her specialty? Bras.
In these more prudish days, the
tops—or at least, the pasties—are back
on, and the Condor is outrageously
overpriced. The strip of prurient empo-
ria past the Condor—Big Al's, Roaring
20s, and the Hungry I Club—will give
you a limited feel of what a party zone
Pacific Street was during the Barbary
Coast's heyday.
In the 1960s, that stretch of
Broadway was a prime entertainment
area where you could catch the likes of
up-and-comers like Bob Marley, the
Grateful Dead, Tony Bennett, James
Brown, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand,
John Coltrane, and other greats. The
look of the place, and the illuminated
vertical marquees, still give a sense of
those glory days, but the entertainments
within are either lame or not what your
mother would want you to see.
