The Paris Review - Farewell to Ferlinghetti
City Lights Books/Twitter We didn’t drive in over the bridge. That was one surprise. I remember thinking we’d see the Transamerica Pyramid piercing the fog, or the bay sparkling in the distance. Instead, when I first visited San Francisco in the eighties, we arrived by tunnel. The BART train from Berkeley spat us out into the noisy, echoing heart of downtown. This was 1984, the city in near collapse, AIDS a full-blown crisis—the Reagan administration mocking its sufferers. As my family trudged up Kearny Street, we were stopped every few paces. Men whose clothes were in tatters asked u...
Source: theparisreview.org