City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco

City Lights began operations in 1953 as a small paperback bookstore and in 1955 it launched a publishing company in order to help upcoming Beat poets who had to struggle to get their work published.

The bookstore located in the Artigues Building on Columbus Avenue, near the Broadway intersection at North Beach. Initially, City Lights shared this building with many other shops. However, it gained more store space when it occupied the adjacent shops which closed down over time. The Artigues Building, with its beautiful clerestory windows and a small balcony, was a popular city landmark in the earlier days. It was built on the ruins of a previous building that was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

City Lights is considered to be a literary monument that reminds of the city’s Beatnik past. However, the charm of this store lies in the poetry room located upstairs. City Lights Bookstore contains a wide collection of poetry books featuring almost all the American poets till date. It even boasts of having poems, features and write-ups that were never published.