Beat Museum able to reopen with loan of Ferlinghetti personal effects.
Ferlinghetti’s home furnishings loaned to hall
“The whole setup is very special, and his desk is gorgeous and timeless.” Lucien Krauss of Bay City, Mich., on the “Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Home” exhibit at the Beat Museum
Jerry Cimino was on the verge of putting his entire collection in storage and leaving the Beat Museum closed for a second year, and maybe for good, when he got an offer that instantly changed his business plan.
Soon he was in the apartment of the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the first time, with an offer from Ferlinghetti’s son, Lorenzo, to borrow what he wanted for Cimino’s storefront on Broadway. The delivery was even made in Ferlinghetti’s old red pickup.
On Friday, June 25, the museum returned from the dead with the exhibition “Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Home,” consisting of the famed writer’s wooden writing desk and swivel chair on rickety wheels, his 3,000page dictionary from 1959, and hats. Lots of hats.
“I was thinking of calling this show ‘A Man of Many Hats,’ ” Cimino quipped from the North Beach museum. “We’ve got six of his hats, and there is a story behind every one.”
The Beat Museum’s reopening, which came together in a onemonth frenzy of remodeling and repurposing that had Cimino emptying glass bookcases to turn them into display shelves, was unannounced beyond a few red signs in the window that proclaimed “Open.” But Beat disciples somehow have a way of knowing. Lucien Krauss of Bay City, Mich., was with her mother, Kate, who was in the position of having her 27yearold daughter explain a cultural significance that completely escaped her the first time around.
“It’s a very humbling experience,” said Krauss. “The whole setup is very special, and his desk is gorgeous and timeless.”
Ferlinghetti, who died Feb. 22 at age 101, never considered himself a Beat poet, much less a Beatnik. But he was a stabilizing figure for Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Gins
berg and other wouldbe writers who used Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, as a gathering place, a publisher of their work, a warm place to read and a lender of last resort.
The upstairs poetry room at City Lights remains a necessary first stop for fans who come from around the world, including Cimino, who went to City Lights directly from the airport, before checking into his hotel, upon arrival from Washington, D.C., in 1983.
“Lawrence is the reason I got into the Beat generation,” said Cimino, an excitable curator who could barely contain himself behind his face mask. “To have his desk and chair here makes a physical connection as opposed to words on a page.”
Even before the COVID19 outbreak closed down the city, the Beat Museum was facing an existential threat. The building, a converted hotel, which replaced the city jail after it collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, needs a seismic upgrade that requires the museum to close for at least a year. It also lacks the funding to move into a temporary storefront, which Cimino believes is crucial to keep the museum going.
“If we had to go into storage, we were afraid people would forget about us,” said Cimino, who runs the place with his wife, Estelle, who serves as chief financial officer and on the side works the oldtime cash register at the turnstile entry.
The pandemic postponed all of this for a year, and when the 15year lease expired on April 30, Cimino was preparing to face the end when the landlord agreed to a monthtomonth extension with a rent break to be made whole down the road.
“That allowed us to survive,” Cimino said.
But the Beat Museum could still be gone by the end of the year if the retrofit job is expedited to happen this year and it cannot find a permanent home. And finances are as monthtomonth as the rent.
“Without support from the community or the city, we will likely not survive another iteration of the Beat Museum,” said Cimino.
Opened in 2006, the museum’s permanent collection centers around the 1949 Hudson used in the 2012 feature film “On the Road,” based on Kerouac’s 1957 novel. There is a wool jacket that Kerouac wore during his “Dharma Bums” phase with Gary Snyder, and a striped referee’s shirt that Cassady wore while chauffeuring writer Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the psychedelic tour bus called Furthur.
But most people have never seen this Ferlinghetti stuff. Nobody who was not invited to his apartment on Francisco Street has ever seen his writing station, his World War II naval officer’s dress blue coat with its bars and service medals, his mortarboard from earning his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, his bronze statue of Athena that Ferlinghetti was awarded in Rome or the original portrait that he selected for the cover of “Ferlingetti’s Greatest Poems,” published in 2017.
Ferlinghetti’s address was always kept secret, but Cimino knew the address and for 20 years dreamed of being invited up those stairs.
“To be in the room where Lawrence Ferlinghetti died was an amazing moment,” Cimino said. “We have always had other Ferlinghetti stuff in the museum, but not things that he lived with every day.”
To adequately convey it, the entire gallery has been reorganized to build a dramatic narrative that arrives at “Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Home” as the last stop before hitting the exit turnstile, and a bathtub full of used paperbacks, $2 each.
The Friday reopening was under the radar, but by the next morning a tour group of students from the Harker School in San Jose arrived for their annual Beat field trip and were greeted by Ferlinghetti biographer Neeli Cherkovski, Dennis McNally and Cathy Cassady, oldest of Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s three children.
Cassady spent her childhood among the Beats and thought she’d seen it all, but she said she’d never seen this.
“It was unexpected to see that Lawrence Ferlinghetti could be so prolific and creative at that small wooden desk,” said Cassady, who drove two hours from her home in the Sierra foothills. “Definitely worth the trip.”