2000-06-21 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco -- Lisa Knight made a beeline for the poetry room upstairs at City Lights. She had come 5,000 miles to the legendary North Beach bookstore, looking for the work that launched the Beats and put San Francisco back on the literary map in the late 1950s.

"I've always wanted to read this," said Knight, 27, a London schoolteacher visiting the city with her boyfriend, waving a slim paperback volume of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

"And to think that he got arrested for it," she marveled. "That's just beautiful."

Actually, it was Ginsberg's publisher and the co-founder of City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was charged and acquitted for putting out the allegedly obscene book in 1957.

But in the interests of forgiveness, compassion and everlasting Buddhahood, let's just say that young Knight made a pilgrimage to the shrine and found what she needed.

In a time of consolidation and corporate blandness, City Lights still emphasizes works outside the mainstream. There is a section called "Stolen Continents" about the U.S. war against the Indians. "Commodity Aesthetics," meaning pop culture, gets shelf space near "Muckraking," "Anarchism" and "Class War."

Now, perhaps sensing the need to protect an endangered species, San Francisco is about to confer official landmark status on the wedge- shaped 1907 building on Columbus Avenue. Today, the Landmarks Preservation

Advisory Board will recommend that City Lights Bookstore become Landmark No. 228.

"It's really a great honor," said Ferlinghetti, San Francisco's first poet laureate and arguably its reigning literary lion. "It doesn't happen that often to buildings. And it's nice to be recognized for imparting some landmark literary quality as well."

Landmark designation makes it much harder to tear down an old building, and the City Lights recommendation will still need approval from the City Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. Not that either body would be crazy enough to vote against it.

City Lights, of course, is best known as the spiritual home of the Beat writers who shocked Eisenhower America and primed the country for Rock 'n' Roll and the '60s revolution. Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and other mainstays of the movement all used the bookstore as a hangout and meeting place.

But over the years, tens of thousands of kindred souls have simply gone there to read, browse or bask in a lovingly tended atmosphere of high ceilings, tiled floors, creaky stairways, cafe tables and visual reminders of the Beat era's finer moments.

In the main room, there are pictures of Ferlinghetti posing with a sign reading "Banned Books," a naked Ginsberg, with his right hand raised and left hand covering his genitals, and buddies Kerouac and Neal Cassady standing shoulder to shoulder in bleached-out black and white.

In the brick-walled basement, one of City Lights' original rooms, the spirit seemed alive the other day as David Louie, 27, freshly unemployed after a stint as a research analyst, looked for books to take on a trip to China.

"I'd thought it would be good to find something for the trains," said Louie, dressed in a white T-shirt and a black Yomiyuri Giants baseball cap. "I've been coming here since I was 16, whenever I wanted to find a 'zine or alternative paper or something outside the mainstream."

Louie's choices: two formidable academic books on how the East is perceived by the West and an illustrated Sex Pistols biography called "The Filth and the Fury."

Upstairs, Malcolm Goode, 31, was perusing a fat picture book about Muhammad Ali. He and his friends, in town from Boston for a day after attending his brother's wedding in Lafayette, picked City Lights as one of their stops.

"I think it's a lot more intimate than a Barnes and Noble," Goode said. "The books are more risque, less antiseptic, more gritty and colorful. Friends of mine love it. We were tooling around and we came here."

City Lights was tiny when it opened in 1953. Only the entrance vestibule and basement were used for bookselling, and a small upstairs room was home to the publishing arm. But the store gradually expanded, taking over an adjacent travel agency in the '70s and an upper-floor apartment in the '90s.

The building was seismically retrofitted and painted yellow last year. Workers had hoped to unearth some funky Beat artifacts during the foundation work, but they came up empty.

"It was so disappointing," said City Lights veteran Gent Sturgeon, who wears horn-rimmed glasses, works behind the counter and occasionally catches a junkie shoplifter. "We only found some nasty little bottles and a shockingly high water table."

But readers make their own finds every day, whether they purchase a book or not. Ferlinghetti said people will always be encouraged just to meander through the store.

"We've never had a rule that you had to buy a book in order to stay," Ferlinghetti said. "Years later, I still get letters from people saying, 'I got my real education from reading in your basement. Here's 10 bucks for the books I stole when I was a penniless student in '57.' "

One day, he added, he will publish a notebook titled, "Days and Nights at City Lights," a compilation of oddball characters and events through the decades.

Cassady, the protean working- class hero of Kerouac's "On the Road," will make the book. He is still a vivid personality to Ferlinghetti.

"Neal would arrive outside in whatever jalopy he was driving at the time, leave the engine running at the sidewalk and rush in and grab a copy of (mystic seer) Edgar Cayce," Ferlinghetti said. "We were his constant supplier of Cayce. Typical Neal Cassady routine."


Not everything you need to know about City Lights bookstore, but a few of them:

-- Established in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin.

-- First American bookstore to exclusively sell paperbacks.

-- Number of books in Urdu: 1.

-- Number of books by (diet guru) Dr. Atkins: 0.

-- Section where pop culture books are shelved: "Commodity Aesthetics."

-- Year Adler Alley was renamed Jack Kerouac Street: 1988.

-- Number of books published annually by City Lights: 12.

-- Year glass penthouse structure was removed: 1989.

-- Current bestsellers: "White Teeth" by Zadie Smith, "Ravelstein" by Saul Bellow, "Imperial San Francisco" by Gray Brechin, "Science is Fiction" by Jean Painleve and "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers.

-- Ferlinghetti's favorites: "Reclaiming San Francisco," edited by James Brook, Nancy Peters and Chris Carlsson; "Resisting the Virtual Life," edited by James Brook and Ian Boal.