In one of my online wanderings recently I found this photograph of Allen Ginsberg. Birmingham News photographer Ed Jones took this shot of the poet in the Colonial Room of the original Tutwiler Hotel on January 6, 1970. Constructed in 1914, the hotel sat on the corner of 5th Avenue North and 20th Street until it closed in 1972. The hotel was demolished two years later.
Ginsberg was one of many well-known people who passed through the old Tutwiler. President Warren G. Harding, Charles Lindbergh, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Babe Ruth and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey were among them. In 1937 Tallulah Bankhead and her new husband actor John Emery held their after-wedding party in the Continental Room on August 31, 1937.
By the time of his visit to Birmingham and until his death in 1997, Ginsberg was one of the best known literary figures in the United States, if not the world. Along with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, he was a core member of the Beat Generation of writers. Kerouac's On the Road and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Ginsberg's long poem "Howl" are basic texts of that literary movement. The poem made him famous--and for a while notorious in the wake of a 1957 trial over the work's supposed obscenity. Ginsberg was a prolific poet and activist in the 1960s and 1970s as he participated in protests over the Vietnam War and environmental issues. His association with major cultural figures, ranging from Bob Dylan to Timothy Leary, continued.
So what was Allen Ginsberg doing in Birmingham in early January 1970? Good question. He might have been invited for a poetry reading. Since he's sitting next to a microphone, maybe he was interviewed by a radio or TV station.
You can read more about Ginsberg here and here.
UPDATE 3 April 2025
My friend Bill Plott has sent me this bit of info about his visit to the Magic City:
"Allen Ginsberg was in Birmingham as a participant in the Encounter Symposium at Birmingham-Southern College. There was an unbylined interview with him in the Jan. 6, 1970 Birmingham News. Wonder why the writer did not receive credit for an interesting story?"
UPDATE 31 July 2025
Recently, as one does late at night, I was perusing my copy of Julie Caldwell's 1995 master's thesis completed at UAB, "Birmingham Freaks: The Heritage of the Beat Generation". There, on page 37, I found a discussion of Ginsberg's visit.
He arrived early and spent much of the day at Gene Crutcher Books, a legendary space in the city's Five Points South neighborhood opened by Crutcher and his wife Bettie in 1962. The store closed in 1974. Ginsberg mingled with patrons and even contributed to the bathroom graffiti.
Caldwell's thesis includes a poem by Joe Simpson, "Thoughts on Allen Ginsberg's Visit to Birmingham" [pp 93-95]. The poem was also published in the Evergreen Review, October 1970, p. 37. Simpson was a Yale Law School graduate and World War II veteran who later abandoned his law practice and became an author and newspaper publisher in 1960s Birmingham. By 1968 he was teaching freshman English at UAB. Simpson died in 1977.
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