And it was the great Italian bankers, like North Beacher A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy and the Bank of America, who arranged the financing. North Beach's cafes and bars spawned the West Coast Beat poetry movement in the Fifties. The likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman stirred the soul and pricked the collective conscience. Today poets, writers and serious readers haunt bookstores like the very literary City Lights. Art students trek up steep Chestnut Street to the renowned San Francisco Art Institute.
Life is more leisurely and decidedly European in North Beach.
Each caffe has a character of its very own. At least twice a day, a flock of chattering, wild parrots flies north along Columbus. The swift, colorful birds that no one can account for dart to the west at Lombard and zip two blocks up Russian Hill to the lush gardens of the crooked block. The Square, more accurately a lopsided pentagon, contains a statue of Benjamin Franklin and not, as you'd expect, George Washington. The park is North Beach's piazza and the crossroads of the community.