Jerry and Estelle Cimino founded the museum in Monterey in 2003, but that was never the right place for it. The Beats belonged to San Francisco, to North Beach specifically, where City Lights Bookstore still stands across the street and where Lawrence Ferlinghetti once defended Howl against obscenity charges. After a two-year roadshow called The Beat Museum on Wheels, the Ciminos moved their collection to its spiritual home in 2006. The building they chose, the former Swiss American Hotel, carried its own history. Carolyn Cassady, widow of Neal and muse to both Cassady and Jack Kerouac, was guest of honor at the opening weekend. The Associated Press and Reuters ran stories that appeared in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.

The collection spans thousands of pieces donated by family members, friends, and fans. Allen Ginsberg's typewriter sits among memorabilia from Kerouac's funeral. The referee shirt Neal Cassady wore in Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test hangs on permanent display alongside an original Acid Test card from those legendary gatherings. A first edition of Kerouac's debut novel, The Town and the City, sits near an advance copy from his hometown library. The 1957 Howl obscenity trial gets its own exhibit, with original art by Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, and Gregory Corso lining the walls. An exhibit called Passing the Torch traces how the Beats became the hippies, one generation of outcasts handing their iconoclasm to the next.

Van Morrison has visited. So has Patti Smith. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin made the pilgrimage, as did filmmaker John Waters, magician Penn Jillette, and singer Tom Waits. Jillette wrote about the museum in his book, calling it the only museum that matters and wondering aloud who needs dinosaur bones. The Beats attract their own kind. Actors from the On the Road film stopped by, including Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund. Jesse Ventura came. The museum holds regular readings and book signings, participating in San Francisco's annual Litquake literary festival, keeping the spoken word tradition alive in the city where Ginsberg first howled.

The museum's stated mission centers on three principles the Beats embodied: Compassion, Tolerance, and Living One's Own Individual Truth. These were post-war artists who looked at 1950s conformity and refused it. They wrote about drugs and sex and jazz and Buddhism when such subjects guaranteed scandal. They read poetry aloud to strangers. They drove across America looking for something they could never quite name. The building on Broadway preserves not just their books and photographs but that essential restlessness, that conviction that the conventional life was a kind of death. Women of the Beat Generation, an oft-forgotten contingent, get their own dedicated exhibit, reclaiming voices the era sometimes overlooked.