Grant Avenue

Jack Kerouac Alley, formerly Adler Alley or Adler Place, is a one-way alleyway in San Francisco, California, that connects Grant Avenue in Chinatown, and Columbus Avenue in North Beach. The alley is named after Jack Kerouac, a Beat Generation writer who used to frequent the pub and bookstore adjacent to the alley.

City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.

Big Al's was one of the first topless bars in San Francisco and the United States since the mid-1960s. It was the first bottomless bar in San Francisco. It is next to the Condor Club, where the strip-club phenomenon began; and as of 1991, claimed to be one of the largest porn stores in San Francisco.The adult book store closed its doors in 2009. It was later replaced by a sandwich store, and is currently a cigar shop. Both businesses kept the venue's name and iconic neon sign. A San Francisco landmark, the site has been featured in several films and TV shows, on postcards, and in tourist brochures.

The Condor Club nightclub is a striptease bar or topless bar in the North Beach section of San Francisco, California The club was a small bar on the corner of Columbus and Broadway for most of the 1900s. Known as the Pisco Bar, it was purchased by Mario Puccinili who called it Pucci's House of Pisco. It was sold a couple of times and in 1958, was owned by Gino Del Prete. Pete Mattioli became Gino's partner in 1958 and promoted the club, which became a jumpin’ jivin’ entertainment center of North Beach, featuring George and Teddy and the Condors. In 1963, they hired a cocktail waitress named Carol Doda. She went on to fame wearing and dancing in the new topless swimsuit on June 19, 1964. The club has thrived since that date. The club is located at the corner of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. The large lit sign in front of the club featured a picture of Carol Doda. The sign had red lights on the image of her breasts. She was the first topless entertainer there and the most famous. Her première topless dance occurred on the evening of June 19, 1964.The club went "bottomless", with the dancers performing fully nude, on September 3, 1969. In 1972, bottomless nude dancing became illegal in establishments that served alcohol in California, but Carol Doda continued dancing there topless until 1986. A bizarre death occurred at the Condor Club in November 1983. Bouncer Jimmy Ferrozzo and his girlfriend, exotic dancer Theresa Hill, decided after hours, to have sexual intercourse on the famous white piano on which Carol Doda made her entrance, being lowered from the ceiling by cables. They accidentally hit the "on" switch, and the piano rapidly rose to the ceiling, trapping the couple. Ferrozzo was asphyxiated, while Hill survived only because she was thinner than her companion.The club closed in 2000, but soon reopened as a sports bar/bistro. Between 2005 and 2007, it was Andrew Jaeger's House of Seafood & Jazz, a branch of the owner's original restaurant in New Orleans. However, in August 2007, it once again became the Condor Club, once more featuring go-go dancers. The current Condor Club is branded as "San Francisco's Original Gentlemen's Club."

The Beat Museum is located in San Francisco, California and is dedicated to preserving the memory and works of the Beat Generation. The Beat Generation was a group of post-WWII artists who challenged the social norms of the 1950s, encouraged experimentation with drugs and sexuality, practiced various types of Eastern religion, and desired to grow as humans. Also known as 'The Beats', they became famous in the 1950s and remain influential today. While dozens of personalities were involved in the formative years of the movement, the most celebrated members were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.Some musicians are also considered to be part of the Beat Generation’s legacy including The Doors, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Tom Waits. Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins are examples of authors influenced by the Beat generation.The Beat Museum is dedicated to spreading the values of the Beat Generation, “Compassion, Tolerance, and of Living One’s Own Individual Truth.”. Its collection holds thousands of pieces of memorabilia from the era, hundreds of photographs of the Beats and their contemporaries, and an extensive book selection.

Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe (also known as "Specs") is a historic bar, located in the North Beach district of San Francisco. The bar is known to be "home to a menagerie of misfits, from strippers and poets to longshoremen and merchant marines." Notable patrons have included Thelonious Monk, Jack Hirschman, Warren Hinckle, and Herb Caen.

Ping Yuen and North Ping Yuen (sometimes collectively called The Pings) form a four-building public housing complex in the north end of Chinatown, San Francisco along Pacific Avenue. In total, there are 434 apartments. The three Pings on the south side of Pacific (West, Central, and East Ping Yuen) were dedicated in 1951, and the North Ping Yuen building followed a decade later in 1961. Some of the largest murals in Chinatown are painted on Ping Yuen, which are prominent landmark buildings taller than the typical two- or three-story Chinatown buildings that date back to the early 1900s. The formal effort to build Ping Yuen started in 1939 after Chinatown was called "the worst [slum] in the world"; it was the first public housing project completed in the neighborhood, and unlike the typical single room occupancy housing of Chinatown, featured private bathrooms and kitchens for each apartment when the first building opened in 1951. Like most buildings in Chinatown, it was designed by western architects with Chinese thematic elements. Although it was touted as potentially drawing more tourists to the area, it soon became known as a dangerous place, with the July 4 shooting over fireworks sales that occurred at Ping Yuen leading to the Golden Dragon massacre of 1977. The murder of Julia Wong in 1978 inspired residents to go on a rent strike, led by future mayor Ed Lee, for improvements to building maintenance and security. Ownership of Ping Yuen passed from the city to the Chinatown Community Development Center in 2016, which is continuing to work with residents' associations to improve conditions.

The Saloon, located at 1232 Grant Avenue in North Beach, is currently the oldest tavern of San Francisco and for decades has offered dancing and live music.

Vesuvio Cafe is an historic bar in San Francisco, California, United States. Located at 255 Columbus Avenue, across an alley from City Lights Bookstore, the building was designed by Italian architect Italo Zanolini and finished in 1916.

The Ma-Tsu Temple is a Taoist temple in San Francisco's Chinatown. Founded in 1986, it is dedicated to Mazu and has foundational ties to the Chaotian Temple in Beigang, Yunlin, Taiwan.Its founding has been described as reflective of both a change in Chinese American demographics following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the rise of a transnational Taiwanese-American community economically enabled by the Taiwan Miracle of the 1980s.The temple was originally located on Grant Avenue before moving to its present location on Becket Street in 1996. It is not to be confused with the Tin How Temple two blocks to the south, which is likewise dedicated to Mazu (carrying one of her popular names in Cantonese), but was founded in 1910 and is the oldest extant Taoist temple in Chinatown.

Caffè Trieste is an internationally known coffeehouse, retail store, and former franchise in San Francisco. The original cafe, opened in 1956, was the first espresso-based coffeehouse on the West Coast of the United States. Caffe Trieste is considered a San Francisco institution and a local hub for poets, writers, and beat culture.

Molinari Delicatessen is a delicatessen in San Francisco, California's North Beach, established in 1896, making it one of the oldest delis in the United States. They make their own brand of salami, as P.G. Molinari and Sons, Inc, which is sold nationwide, and which won a gold medal award in Italy.