There are very few tourists to San Francisco for whom Vesuvio Cafe does not show up on the radar. Opened in 1948, just in time to host all of the Beat writers that would flock to the City Lights Bookstore when it opened next door in 1953, Vesuvio is now a countercultural landmark. I haven’t looked in the Lonely Planet San Francisco, but I’d bet money it’s listed in there.
Yet, when I went in on a recent weekday mid-afternoon, I joined a mere five or six patrons scattered across the bar’s two floors. On entering, I first noticed a young woman seating near the front window, writing in a journal. Definitely a tourist. A few more minutes would reveal that tourists took to the tables generally, while the locals sat at the bar.
Jazz played over the speakers and the chandelier over the bar flickered with real firelight. Hard to see that much had changed in the past 70 years. One small concession: There was now a wheat beer on draft, which I ordered and then sat at a table near the bar—the best way to split the difference, and putting me in a great position to eavesdrop.
One of the locals had a lot to say, telling the bartender about the great deal he has on his apartment in San Francisco. “My rent went up $275 in 12 years. You look at market rate and it’s like I’m getting $45k a year before I even wake up in the morning,” he boasted. The bartender, a man bordering on elderly but maintaining a level of cool to put most millennials to shame, seemed mildly interested, but probably had his own good deal on a place to live.
Not to be defeated by the bartender’s reserve, the local patron mentioned that his San Francisco apartment wasn’t even the best deal he knew of. He’d been recently to Da Nang and Hoi An, two cities in Vietnam I myself traveled to not long ago. In one city or the other, he stayed in a place for $22 a night with made-to-order breakfast. I stayed in a nice room for that amount in Da Nang, but it didn’t come with breakfast. Anyway. “That’s $600 a month. I thought about it,” he said, meaning thought about moving Vietnam. But then, of course, poof would go the great deal in San Francisco.
I decided to relocate and headed up the stairs aided by the lit sign reading Balcony Seating; Ladies Room, with an arrow pointing to the spiraling staircase. The walls in Vesuvio are barely visible for all of the paintings, posters, newspaper clippings, and yes, lit signs covering them. When I first walked in, they all struck me collectively as a single impression of a thick history, but by now they began to come into focus individually.
A photo of James Joyce was presented on the opposite wall without comment. The stained glass lampshades worked in this setting, a first, perhaps. Just outside the second-floor window, a street sign bearing Jack Kerouac’s name indicated the alley between Vesuvio and City Lights. The headline of a framed newspaper clipping read, “Smoking While Drinking—a High Crime.”
That’s another thing that’s changed inside Vesuvio Café: Smoking while drinking hardly exists anymore, crime or not. Don’t tell the Beats, but it’s better this way.
VESUVIO CAFE | 255 Columbus Avenue | San Francisco
