Bob Kaufman & the Legendary Co-Existence Bagel Shop

Food and culture site Extra Crispy looks at the "beatnik bagel shop" that “never sold a bagel in its history,” but instead became a home for the Beat movement, hosting spontaneous readings in San Francisco's North Beach by the likes of Bob Kaufman. More from writer Judy Berman:

Kaufman is a fascinating figure too rarely mentioned among the marquee names of the Beat Generation. Born in 1925 to a black mother and a Jewish father, he was one of the few prominent writers of color in a circle that took much of its inspiration from African-American jazz musicians. Among Kaufman’s best-known works is “Bagel Shop Jazz,” which describes the cafe’s patrons—male and female, black and white, clad in turtlenecks and dark tights—as “Nightfall creatures, eating each other / Over a noisy cup of coffee.”

It wasn’t a lack of talent that kept Kaufman from becoming as famous as writers like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In a posthumous profile for The American Poetry Review, his younger contemporary A. D. Winans called him “arguably the most intelligent of all the Beat poets and writers, including Ginsberg” —who happened to be one of Kaufman’s co-editors at the era-defining Beatitude magazine. As a radical in a scene full of largely apolitical individualists, he simply preferred the more democratic life of a street poet.

The beatnik patrol, led by Officer William Bigarani —who Loberg says “saw himself as being on the frontlines of a culture war”—gave Kaufman the opportunity to put his anti-authoritarian ideals into action. It’s not entirely clear why the cops devoted so much attention to Co-Existence Bagel Shop, but Loberg hypothesizes that “it had to do with the fact that it was open during the daytime, and that it was a very visible gathering place.” Fracchia recalls that a single vendetta could be enough to turn the SFPD against an establishment. “The police department, particularly in those days, was a very tight-knit operation,” he says. “If they had some sort of dislike for a place, that place would be targeted.”

Kaufman ended up in jail so often that the Bagel Shop put out a can to collect bail money for him. His most notorious face-off with Bigarani happened when the patrolman spotted a poem Kaufman had posted in the cafe’s window likening him to Adolf Hitler. As Loberg tells it, “He’s infuriated and marches into the Bagel Shop to tear the thing down, out of the window. As he’s doing so, he feels a warm sensation on his leg. He looks over and Bob Kaufman has his pants unzipped and he’s urinating on Bigarani’s leg.”

Read the full profile of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop here.