For Beats and other oddballs, the Place was the place to be
During the 1950s, a little joint called the Place on upper Grant Avenue in North Beach was the hippest place in San Francisco. For seven years it was a favorite Beat hangout, famous for its anything-goes Blabbermouth Night, its poetry readings, jazz jam sessions, and its clientele of neighborhood ne’er-do-wells, lunatics and drunks.
The Place was started by an Armenian named Leo Krikorian. After studying painting at Black Mountain College and the California School of Fine Arts, Krikorian joined the merchant marine, where he cleaned engines for a couple of years and saved a few thousand dollars. In 1953, Krikorian’s ship docked in Richmond and he was staying at a hotel in San Francisco, killing time until it was time to ship out again.
“I was walking up Grant Avenue, and I see this sign, ‘Bar for Sale,’ ” Krikorian told Danish journalist and longtime San Francisco taxi driver Jack Lind, author of the 1998 oral history “Leo’s Place.” Krikorian bought the bar with fellow artist Knute Stiles from a Sicilian guy from Chicago for $3,000.
“In the beginning we had a
mixture of Italians, the old landlord’s cronies, a few seamen that I knew and artists who started coming in,” Krikorian said. The bar at 1546 Grant had no name, so Krikorian just called it “the Place.” It was tiny, about 400 square feet, with tables upstairs that could hold 12 to 15 people, and a little pulpit that was soon to become famous.
San Francisco’s bohemian scene was already thriving in 1953, with most of the action on the southern edge of North Beach, in places like the Montgomery Block, Vesuvio, the Iron Pot and the Black Cat. The Place soon became another destination for disaffected refugees from the straitlaced Eisenhower ethos who were drawn by the welcoming vibe, the creative ambiance and the 25-cent draft beer, served in huge fishbowl glasses. The Place, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop and the Coffee Gallery, the latter two of which were located across the street from each other at Grant and Green Street, became the unholy trinity of Beat hangouts on upper Grant.
“Everything was copacetic,” recalled John Ryan, who was a bartender at the Place for four years. “Everybody talked jive talk, like man — that kind of jazz. Everybody knew everybody and everybody was sleeping with everybody, and nobody asked whose boyfriend or girlfriend anybody was. It didn’t matter. Sure we had our squabbles, but it was one big family. It was artistic, intellectual — and boozy. The bars in the Beach were people’s living rooms, that’s where you’d meet your friends, that’s where you had your parties.
“The Place was like a culture center,” Ryan continued. “There was poetry in 14 languages in the toilet, pasted, written, painted on the walls. There were art shows, we had Blabbermouth Night, poetry readings, jazz. There was always something going on.”
Blabbermouth Night was the Place’s most notorious event. Every Monday night, speakers held forth on any subject they wanted from the upstairs pulpit. The evenings were drunken, filled with heckling and wild applause. Whoever was voted best speaker received a bottle of Champagne.
“Most of the speechmaking on Blabbermouth Night was political in nature,” Krikorian said in the oral history. “A lot of it had to do with the cops, who were giving everybody in the Beach a bad time in those days.”
Years before Lenny Bruce was busted in 1961 for lewd language at the Jazz Workshop, Blabbermouthers made frequent use of a four-letter word that had been forbidden by the police. Bartender Jack Langden, who Krikorian said started Blabbermouth Night, would get the ball rolling by taking the pulpit and saying, “Now don’t forget the cops told us we can’t say the word f— in here.”
Everyone in the North Beach scene came to Blabbermouth Night. One of the regulars was Thomas Albright, later to become The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic. Another was actor Tony Randall, who was an expert heckler.
The Place attracted not only artists and writers like Jack Kerouac (who would drink a mixture of port and beer until he passed out), but a crew of weird characters. One of the oddest was “Hube the Cube” (real name Hubert Leslie), who was a guinea pig for a drug testing program held by the University of California Medical Center on Parnassus. “Hube was always stoned on something, he never knew on what, but he was stoned,” Lind writes. “He got $200 a month to swallow every conceivable pill known — and unknown — to medical science.”
A transvestite named Howard Clark was famous for gradually donning more and more women’s apparel as he got drunker, finally ending by chirping like a bird. Another regular, who rejoiced in the moniker Gene the Scrounge, was the biggest mooch in North Beach. “He was the personification of the suck,” another regular named Sue Marko recalled. “People would see him coming and they’d run out the back door. He hit you relentlessly. And if you bought him one drink, you were stuck with him for the rest of the night . ... Frankly, I don’t think he had any redeeming features. I think people just bought him drinks thinking he’d go away. But he never did. He always hung in there.”
The golden age of the North Beach Beat scene lasted only seven or so years. Publicity helped kill it: After Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined the word “beatnik” in 1958, the wire services picked up on it, the national media descended, and hordes of rebels, would-be rebels, gawkers and tourists flooded into North Beach. Police harassment also took a toll. In January 1960, Krikorian closed the Place for good. He told Lind, “I got rid of The Place because the scene had changed. Everything in The Beach changed and I didn’t dig the scene anymore.”
Krikorian had meanwhile opened The Kettle deli in Sausalito, which he ran until selling it in 1977 and taking up homes in Paris and Mill Valley. He died in 2005 at age 82 in Yreka (Siskiyou County).
Graphic artist John Mattos rented the storefront that used to be the Place in 1980 and kept it for a number of years. The old pulpit from Blabbermouth Night was still there, as was the poetry in the bathroom. Mattos left the poetry (it was later painted over) — but not understanding its significance, removed the pulpit, something he says he now regrets. For many years, Mattos got letters addressed to poet Jack Spicer, who was such a Place regular that submissions to his literary magazine were put in a box behind the bar. “Most of the letters used the same phrase, ‘I agree with you,’ ” Mattos says. “Spicer must have written a poem asking people to write to him at the Place if they agreed with him.”
1546 Grant is now a dressmaker’s shop. A jumble of colorful stuffed animals lines the window at mezzanine level, as if in homage to Hube the Cube, Gene the Mooch and their vanished ilk. The Place has been gone for 57 years, but the thousands of people who wander through North Beach every year with copies of “On the Road” in their pockets are still looking for it.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com