City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

City Lights Booksellers and Publishers occupies a distinctive, triangular building at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway. Founded in nineteen fifty-three by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, it opened as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, a radical choice at a time when the literary establishment favored hardcovers. Ferlinghetti named the shop after the nineteen thirty-one Charlie Chaplin film, envisioning a gathering place for writers, artists, and activists to exchange ideas.