(former)
710 Montgomery
San Francisco
This landmark is the first floor of the Canessa building.
An underground is a loose network of creative people who are denied established outlets for what they do, and the history of an underground is ultimately a history of places, of the gathering points and outlets which grew up spontaneously in bars, cafes, coffee-houses and other hangouts.
Thus the North Beach underground began in the 40s with the Iron Pot, the Black Cat, the old Montgomery block....
The places were important because of the people who congregated there, and because the North Beach underground was never a "movement" with philosophy, credo, or sense of evangelistic mission, but simply people who came and went, sharing certain acquaintances, interests, and hang-ups, sometimes influences, usually rejection....
The Iron Pot, the Black Cat, the old Montgomery block belonged to the tail-end of the Bohemian era, a tradition which established itself around Telegraph Hill when it was little more than grass and shacks in the early years of the century. The Pot and the Cat were Bohemian spots in the classical sense, and so was the generation of artists who centered there: Alex Anderson, who did the Cat's murals; Sargent Johnson, Hassel Smith, Jean Varda, Dong Kingman, Luke Gibney, Beniamino Bufano, Avrum Rubenstein; Pat Cucaro even lived in the Montgomery block, and Sam Francis once sold Henri Lenoir, then the Pot's proprietor, one of the little harbor scenes he was painting then....
The Black Cat was the North Beach setting that Jack Kerouac wrote about in On the Road, but by the time the book was published, the action had shifted elsewhere....—Thomas Albright, "The Elevated Underground: the North Beach Period," Rolling Renaissance: San Francisco Art in Celebration 1945-1968, San Francisco, 1968, Intersection, pp. 15, 16