In the 1950's, the North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco was an enclave of Italian immigrants filled with culturally specific restaurants and groceries familiar to anyone who has ever grown up in an ethnic neighborhood. As with a dynamic that we have noted before with the Coventry Road section of Cleveland, North Beach began to attract a more bohemian crowd who found the relaxed atmosphere and low rents to be desirable.
This was aided somewhat when the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened a small bookstore in the neighborhood where one could find inventory not to be found in other stores. As the genre of literature he promoted became dominant, and as he also opened a small publishing press for those who could not find support in the mainstream industry, the City Lights Bookstore became the magnet for those who would transform the Italian neighborhood to that of the counter-culture.
 |
| Looking every bit the Frisco poet |
In the midst of it all, opened in 1956, was the Caffe Trieste. Its owner, Giovanni Giotta, missed the real espresso and cappuccino of his hometown in Italy and opened the only place outside of New York's Little Italy where one could find the real thing.
[A note for those younger than I: In the days before ubiquitous, boutique coffee shops, espresso was basically mud in a cup and cappuccino was mud topped by a blast from a can of Reddi-Wip. No, I'm not kidding.]
As both City Lights and Caffe Trieste opened around the same time, a trip to North Beach could include both on the itinerary and the coffeehouse offered the perfect place to read some volume purchased from Ferlinghetti. Shortly afterwards, it would become a perfect place to write something to be published by Ferlinghetti.
Hence, one could order a proper espresso in the Caffe and be surrounded by habitues such as Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Kenneth Rexroth. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 100, still frequents that large, copper cappuccino steamer. Paul Kantner, one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane and creator of the "San Francisco sound" in rock music, made it his home away from home; and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the draft of the screenplay for The Godfather in a quiet corner. Well, not so quiet when he was there, as he wrote with a portable, manual typewriter.
Giotti, commonly addressed as "Papa Gianni", would preside over his small, corner business for sixty years, surrendering his mortality at the age of 96 in 2016. In addition to brewing the first, and still authentic, cup of cappuccino on the West Coast, Giotti was also an amateur musician who would share that talent with anyone who would come through his door.
From his obituary:
By the early 1970s, more than a dozen coffee shops dotted North Beach, but none was as musical as Caffe Trieste. Gianni and his son Gianfranco began performing for the cafe on Thursday mornings in 1970. The concerts grew so popular they were switched to Saturday afternoons.Mr. Giotta, who had studied opera in Trieste in his early 20s, would be joined onstage by Gianfranco, a semiprofessional singer, and Mr. Giotta’s wife, Ida; his other son, Fabio, would sing and accompany on accordion. The family would perform solos, duets and full choruses, primarily from Italian and French operas. Favorites were “Chella Lla,” “Figaro,” “Katerine” and “Funiculi, Funicula.” Professional singers visiting San Francisco began to stop in.
While Giotta would open other branches of Caffe Trieste in other areas of northern California as his success grew, the original was the only one that maintained that neighborhood cache and, as it turned out, the only one to survive his family's legal battles over his will. After a few months of concern that this literary and artistic landmark would close, it was saved when cooler heads prevailed.
While North Beach is no longer the artistic cauldron it once was, and San Francisco currently is working through some traveler-unfriendly realities, one may still enjoy an honest cup, gaze upon the collected photographs of those who made the culture of the American Century, and marvel at what it is to be in the right place and the right time and reap the rewards of hospitable service to one's neighbors.
