Get Involved, Internet: Help save San Francisco’s historic City Lights bookstore
Aux Features great job internet
San Francisco is a city filled with iconic landmarks, but for book lovers, there’s always been one place that stands out among the rest. City Lights Bookstore opened in the city’s North Beach neighborhood in the early 1950s and, along with Vesuvio Cafe across the street, quickly became the number one hangout for writers, readers, beat poets, and proto-hippies. In the decades since, City Lights has remained a cultural institution, a shining beacon of the city’s longstanding commitment to the arts and to intellectual curiosity. Now, like so many businesses around the country, they’re in trouble and looking for a little help.
“Our bookstore has been closed to the public since March 16 and must remain closed for an indefinite period of time,” writes City Lights CEO Elaine Katzenberger on the company’s new GoFundMe page. “With no way to generate income, our cash reserves are quickly dwindling, with bills coming due and with a primary commitment to our staff, who we sent home with full pay and healthcare, and who we hope to keep as healthy and financially secure as possible.”
If Katzenberger and the rest of the City Lights staff fail to make ends meet during this extended quarantine, there’s a distinct possibility the historic bookstore’s doors will remain closed forever. Unfortunately, independent bookstores shuttering is nothing new in this day and age, but the loss of City Lights would mean more than the loss of another place to buy On The Road in paperback. It would mean the loss of a piece of history.
With a projected goal of $300,000, City Lights has already generated over $150,000 from roughly 3,000 generous donors. “We know what a difficult and uncertain time this is for everyone, and we understand that there are many individuals and organizations in need,” Katzenberger writes. “If you’re in a position to support us we’ll be extremely grateful to receive that help.”
If you’re able, you can donate to City Lights’ GoFundMe campaign here.
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12 Comments
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll have to send them a few bucks. I’m still heartbroken about Dark Carnival closing and I live in the Midwest.
Dark Carnival is still open currently. They’ve been on the verge of closing for 3 years now but they’re just barely hanging in there.
Dark Carnival in Berkeley? It was still around as of six or so months ago (though there are a lot of 2017 articles saying it was going to close).
For context, City Lights is easily the most important bookstore in San Francisco, especially for the poetry section upstairs. It’s always a good move to buy some books and head across the alley to the bar Vesuvio to read them over a drink or three.
More than just SF. I mean, as far as independent book stores in the US go, it’s City Lights, Powells, and The Strand. And then the rest, all of which are valuable and wonderful resources.
And Powell’s is in trouble right now too. Buy some books, people!
I’ve done just that more times than I can count. The only part of SF that I can rely on not changing too much.
In anticipation of the obligatory “lol bookstores are dead anyway, and should be because I think saying so makes me look like some kind of tough guy”: you are garbage. Brick-and-mortar bookstores make cities, shopping districts and malls less hell-like with their very presence.
It’s one thing to take sadistic delight in the demise of physical bookstores, but quite another to simply realistically accept that, like music stores selling CDs before them, that they probably don’t have a future, and didn’t even before the pandemic. In the case of particularly historic bookstores like City Lights, probably a more realistic future to prevent them from becoming condos would be to convert to a museum/non-profit run by volunteers which could still sell a few books on the side as souvenirs.
Well, sure, but when someone to feels the need to jump in with the latter, just to score points for being Mr. Realistic or whatever (and not saying you were doing that, but someone always does), they effectively make it the former.
Well, sure, but when someone to feels the need to jump in with the latter, just to score points for being Mr. Realistic or whatever (and not saying you were doing that, but someone always does), they effectively make it the former.
Loren Eiseley credited the source of one of his own books as the sight of what he first took as a dust-free spot on the upper spine of a narrow book on a shelf-full of dusty books deep in a library’s stacks. The clean spot was actually not the spoor of a recent reader, but the carapace of a large bug slowly gnawing on the leather cover of … a revelation that changed Eiseley’s entire understanding of the history and precursors of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.Serendipity can be everything, but it requires presence and context and unexpected treasures on the periphery of what one thought one was seeking. Brick and mortar bookstores have been been flowing fountains of serendipity for me my entire life…