Local before arrival
The poets Ginsberg and Kerouac made it famous in the ’50s, but City Lights is more than a “historic landmark”—it still earns its reputation as the radical indie bookstore everyone loves. The three-story maze of sunlit rooms is the ideal place to get lost for a few hours of browsing through sections like “Muckraking,” “Dada,” and “Balkan Fiction.” The poetry floor alone is worth a pilgrimage; the frequent live readings still evoke the counterculture energy of the Beat founders.
