Edinburgh Castle Literary Pub

A personal history of San Francisco's legendary literary incubator

Litquake celebrates its 25th anniversary this month (Oct. 10-26), and it seems appropriate to talk about its birthplace. The Edinburgh Castle Pub gained a solid reputation in the 1990s and 2000s as San Francisco’s foremost literary outpost. Similar to KGB Bar in NY’s East Village, you could always walk in, grab a beverage, and count on hearing some cutting-edge writers laying it down. But as I started thinking about it, there was so much more to the Castle. That particular establishment wove in and out of my life for a good two decades. And often it wasn’t about the drinking, there was always so much cool stuff going on. This is by no means a complete history of the pub, just some of the highlights that came up in a conversation with Alan Black last week. After all, it’s a bar, and you’re not supposed to remember every single little thing that happened.

I first stepped inside the Edinburgh Castle in the 1980s, and immediately felt at home. It had everything a young city spelunker craved—dark wooden booths, old bartenders wearing vests, Scottish memorabilia on the walls, model airplanes dangling from the ceiling, dusty pewter mugs hanging behind the bar, a pool table, questionable restrooms, and a shitty neighborhood. Beautiful sleazy urban scuzz. 

The pub originally opened in 1960, and one of the regulars throughout that decade was S.F. State linguist S.I. Hayakawa, who ended up a U.S. Senator. There was even a pet parrot for awhile. But at some point in the early 1990s it became the location for editorial meetings of the satirical investigative Nose magazine.

Our office was south of Market, but it seemed appropriate that we gathered at the Castle once a week. Each Wednesday night a group of sarcastic young people hung out in the tiny front room, with wobbly chairs and a broken-down piano, drank a lot of beer, and brainstormed lunatic magazine ideas, which I would scribble on a legal pad and review the next morning. Except for the last page, which was invariably too stupid to put into print. That continued for at least three years.

Around the mid-90s, a Scottish Association formed around the Castle and produced a festival of Scottish cultural events. There was an annual Robert Burns night, where bagpipers honked, and attendees wore kilts and attempted to eat haggis. Another annual James Bond night paraded a series of men and women dressed up in tuxedos for a lookalike contest. The bar staged the world premiere of the stage version of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, before the film was released.

But it wasn’t always about Scotland. The Castle seemed to host an endless series of pub quizzes, live music, comedy, and theater shows. I remember seeing a fantastic night of short sketches called “Going Down the Pub,” all based upon actual moments that happened at the Castle, written and performed by Castle staff. Producers of the 1993 Mike Meyers film So I Married an Axe Murderer filmed scenes inside the bar. When The Nose magazine folded in 1995, we held a wake at the Castle, with a kilted bagpiper playing “Taps,” and someone reading from a Masonic bible.

Sometime in the 90s, a friend and I stepped inside the bar and walked into the middle of a singles mixer sponsored by the Bay Guardian alt-weekly. Its personals section was legendary, the analog equivalent of Tinder and Match.com. As one would expect, there was not a lot of mixing. Women sat on one side of the room, and the men sat at the bar. An inversion layer of shyness hung in the smoky air, with everyone eyeing each other in anticipation. That night’s entertainment was spoken-word. Bartender Alan Black—responsible for the bar’s events and entertainment in those years—took off his apron, walked up to the mike, and read a hilariously foul story about a man visiting a local clinic and getting venereal warts burned off his penis. It was a beautiful transgressive moment, but pretty much killed any hope of a hookup in the room.

Alan Black began curating a regular literary reading series in the upstairs room. Authors with new books, writers who hadn’t yet published, drunken poets, sex workers, angry ranters—anybody who might have a story to tell. This included journalists like Jane Ganahl and myself. Some shows you’d be asked to read, and furiously come up with something that might work out loud, and the other weeks you dropped in to see what would happen. We were mostly a bunch of white kids, but those readings had soul. Alan never laid down any criteria, but you just knew, if you were on the bill, you’d better bring your best. If you didn’t have something to say, you weren’t asked back. That audience braved the Tenderloin to come listen to you, so don’t waste their time.

Many, many writers appeared on that stage, before their careers took off. Spoken-word stars like Beth Lisick, Justin Chin, Peter Plate, and Michelle Tea. Emerging authors like Anne Marino, Kim Addonizio, Noah Hawley, Emer Martin, Mary Roach, Po Bronson, Keith and Kent Zimmerman. Scottish legends like Irvine Welsh and James Kelman. Lawrence Ferlinghetti even participated. And those are just the ones that I remember. Audience members shouted and heckled and laughed. Pint glasses rattled onto the floor. The Castle was helping define the San Francisco literary scene, one beer at a time.

When California outlawed smoking in bars on January 1, 1998, I remember walking into the Castle on New Year’s night and realizing my sense of smell had now returned. As with the case of most bars, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

Sometime in 1999 the idea floated around our hodgepodge group of writers who hung out at the bar, to start a literary festival in the city. A handful of us were naive enough to push the Litstock festival into existence, with Jane and myself being marginally more organized than the others. We met with Phil Bronstein at the S.F. Examiner, and he agreed to sponsor us for the extravagant sum of $400. We secured the bandshell stage in Golden Gate Park for a date in July. And we had a secret weapon—our afterparty would be at the Edinburgh Castle. After the Litstock readings ended, in a fierce wind, the authors all ran back to the Castle, where our bar tab quickly drained what was left of the $400 budget.

Litstock lasted one more year, this time at Yerba Buena Gardens, but the dotcom crash in 2000 dried up any sponsorship interest for another festival, so we thought that idea was done. Two years, sure, why not.

When my second book San Francisco Bizarro appeared in 2000, it felt only appropriate that the launch party take place at Edinburgh Castle. The bar was very accommodating, and helped us rig up a large projection screen. One of the book’s sections described a local underground taxidermist named Jeanie M., whose expertise was stuffing dead mice and dressing them up as witches, punk rockers, cello players, and vampires. Her bestsellers were Catholic characters like popes and nuns. Our idea was to have Jeanie perform a mouse taxidermy demonstration, with video simultaneously projecting it onto the screen, immediately visible to people entering the pub. Jeanie was not a mouse slayer. She obtained them already deceased, from a pet shop in the East Bay which used them to feed their snakes. She either bought them frozen, or perhaps she froze them herself, I’m not sure. I do remember, just before her demonstration, one frosty mouse falling out of her bag and landing on the chipped tile floor, a white hairy icicle with matchstick-stiff legs, waiting its turn to be reincarnated as a miniature pope.

Later in 2000, Jane and I were again hanging out at the Castle, and a few writers were asking us, “Are you ever going to do that thing again?” It was pretty fun, maybe we should. We rounded up some more people who were interested in helping, and started meeting every week at the bar. In the same front room where, years prior, The Nose staff had discussed outré articles about Bettie Page, Freemasonry, and instructions for eating your own dog, the air was now filled with ideas for literary events, and authors who should be featured. Again, fueled by pitchers of beer.

The resurrected festival, now renamed Litquake, gathered more energy. People were now on board who had marketing and logistical experience. One night at the Castle, visual artist JD Beltran unveiled a new Litquake logo, and we all got even more excited. One of the Castle waitresses, Polina Grinbaum, signed on to design Litquake’s first website. Litquake meetings continued for some years at the Castle.

Concurrent with Litquake, the Castle kept up its own literary schedule. A tribute night to George Orwell. A staged reading of A Clockwork Orange. Writers reading from classic literary hoaxes like Howard Hughes’ diaries, or The Education of Little Tree. An evening titled “Fuck Sports!” An anthology was published, of writers who had performed at the Castle, titled Public House.

After 9/11, a poster appeared in windows all over San Francisco, urging America to go shopping. The “Open for Business” project was allegedly spearheaded by Willie Brown’s City Hall. One of the hijacked planes had been destined for SFO, and this poster just felt tone-deaf and offensive. The entire city was bruised and needed time to mourn. And yet, in two weeks, I was scheduled to do a reading at the Edinburgh Castle.

All of my freelance writing assignments were dead in the water. I sat in my apartment, living off a payment from a Playboy feature, watching the news like everyone else. I wrote a sort-of poem that satirized the moment, and thought, I’m going to bring one of those stupid posters down to the pub. City Hall was handing them out for free, so I made the pilgrimage to the gilded dome of Willie Brown, and asked a woman at a counter if they still had any left. She answered brightly, “Oh yes, but all we have are the really big ones.” Fine, I’ll take three. I brought the poster to the Castle and Alan Black helped me puncture it on a nail above the stage, and did my reading. The Castle’s website said some nice things about my piece, but it was a fucked-up way to remember 9/11.

In 2005 I hosted a wake at the Castle for Hunter S. Thompson, with Ron Turner, Susie Bright, and editor Alan Rinzler, who enthralled everyone with tales of once working on a book with Hunter, while sequestered in a hotel room at the Seal Rock Inn with a case of grapefruit. Another night, Litquake co-presented a program of prison readings, with special guest Morton Sobell, who had been convicted, along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of spying for the Soviet Union. This tiny white-haired man with a ponytail wheeled his merch suitcase into the Castle, and dazzled all of us with descriptions of his capture in Mexico, and spending time in a cell on Alcatraz.

Irvine Welsh returned to the Edinburgh Castle on a book tour for his novel Glue. The queue outside the bar ran to the end of the block. Over 300 fans packed inside, most clutching a pint of beer. Irvine read an excruciating long passage about a woman masturbating and watching a Richard Gere movie—it felt like it was 20 minutes long, and every sentence was gleefully filthy. The entire bar was howling with laughter. I remember thinking, holy crap this is a profound moment. Readings in a bar could be entertaining, and powerful.

Eventually Litquake outgrew the Castle and moved to other venues. After publishing a few books, Alan Black became a painter, and also bartends at Spec’s in North Beach. The Edinburgh Castle went up for sale a few years ago, but nobody’s taken on the commitment. So for now, it pours drinks for the regulars, and hosts DJ nights. I still drive past on occasion, but never feel compelled to step inside. The Castle served as a very important literary incubator, at a moment in time when it was most needed, and that’s how it should be remembered. Well, that and the mouse.

OBLIGATORY PLUGS FOR MY UPCOMING LITQUAKE EVENTS:

Oct 15 - Porchlight storytelling event for the Litquake festival. Swedish American Hall, $20 adv/$25 door, starts at 7:30pm, details here.

Oct 16 - California’s Fiercely Independent Literary Culture, as part of Litquake. City Lights Bookstore, 7pm, free, details here.

Oct 26 - The O.G.’s of Litquake, closing night Lit Crawl, The Chapel, 8pm, free, details here.