Last Gathering at 60: A survivor speaks

Artist Bornstein alive and active

IN TERMS OF the Beat Generation, the US counterculture and the vibrant 60s scene in San Francisco, there were many famous faces in the photo lineup of writers and artists captured outside City Lights on December 5th, 1965: there was shop owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, probably the best known poet in America, novelist Richard Brautigan and so on.

But standing among this conspicuous crew in an image that would be dubbed ‘the Last Gathering of the Beats’ is a much younger and largely anonymous teenager who would be merely identified as ‘Steve’ or ‘Ginsberg’s friend’. Who was this junior individual rubbing shoulders with a gang of literature stars generally heading for early middle age?

With the help of Peter Hale, tireless worker on behalf of the Allen Ginsberg Project in New York City, Rock and the Beat Generation has been able to reach Steve – actually Stephen Bornstein – now based in Puerto Rico, with his wife, to discuss his part in this seminal moment and his life since that memorable brush with literary celebrity and subcultural cachet.

Picture above: Steve Bornstein, featured in the 1965 City Lights shoot, aged 17

When we contacted Hale, he told us this about the famous camera session: ‘Ferlinghetti had the idea to make a portrait of the scene before it all disappeared, in the vein of the famous 1920s photos of the surrealists.’ He also helped us to identify some of the individuals in the image.

He added that Andrew Hoyem, the man on the stretcher, was not really injured. ‘I’m perfectly well,’ he told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. ‘I just felt like renting an ambulance. First time I’ve ever tried it and I’m very satisfied. I find it a relaxing way to travel.’ His statement seemed to match the freewheeling anarchy of the occasion.

When we also asked Hale to speculate on who was perhaps still alive in the picture, he came up with two names: ‘Stephen Bornstein and Jason Goodrow are the only ones in the photo still living.’

There were further twists though arising from that summer 2025 email. Sadly, musician Jason Goodrow, born in 1959 and the boy being held by his father actor Garry Goodrow in the famous shots, had actually died in May this year in New York City.

But it was a pleasure to establish that Andrew Hoyem, the fake invalid of 1965, had celebrated his 90th birthday this autumn, a landmark appropriately commemorated in a City Lights event and reviewed last month in Rock and the Beat Generation.

But there was more to be revealed when we were in touch with Stephen – informally Steve – Bornstein himself in the last few weeks. In this lively and engaging conversation he shares reflections on his own career arc and the impact of those times then and on the decades that have followed…

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Simon Warner: Thank you so much, Steve, for getting back to us. What an exciting period to have been a part of, San Francisco in the mid-1960s. I envy your experience…

Steve Bornstein: Thank you. And yes I’m happy to help with your questions.

SW: Could I ask what age you are today and, by inference, how old would you have been when those 1965 pictures were shot.

SB: I am 77 years old. I was 17 when photo was taken.

SW: Peter Hale at the Allen Ginsberg Project suggested you might now live in Puerto Rico. Is that correct? When did you make your home there?

SB: Yes, I currently live in Puerto Rico. I lived for 30 years in Miami between 1976 and 2006, another 19 years in Austin, Texas.

SW: You you were described as ‘Steve’ in the captions linked to the City Lights images. But your name has a longer history, hasn’t it…

SB: My name is Stephen. I’m named after my father’s sister Stefi who died in the Holocaust. My parents wanted to name me Stephan, but it was too Germanic.

In the 1950s, Steven was a very popular name, and everyone started calling me Steve. My wife calls me Estivito from Esteban, Spanish for Stephen.

Pictured above: Steve Bornstein and wife Gabriella in 2024

SW: Would you describe yourself as an artist and, if so, what has been your principal field of activity?

I have always been an artist. I initially impressed Allen in 1964 with my work.

I painted a well known 120’ scroll, illustrating The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in 1965 while I was living with Allen in California.

Christian Goodwille decided to write the book after curating my library and art work that I donated to Hamilton College. Christian is the Director of Special Collections at the college which is located in Clinton, New York.

He managed to totally cure my ‘dumpstermania’, that fear that, when you die, all your life’s work ends up in a dumpster.

Just having someone of his experience express his feelings about me is most gratifying.

SW: Let us go back a little way and talk about that connection with Allen Ginsberg…

SB: I was a member of Allen Ginsberg’ small entourage from Nov 1964 thru 1972 and we remained close for the rest of his life.

Arguably, from November 1965 to January 1966, I believe was a huge cultural inflection point taking in place in San Francisco, which was soon affecting the rest of the country and quickly the entire world!

Pictured above: Blue Buddha by Stephen Bornstein. A book on his work is in preparation.

SW: How would you describe what was going on?

SB: What happened? A small, relatively unknown obscure literary movement, the Beats – a term basically created by Herbert Huncke and adopted by Kerouac – soon became the phenomenon of the hippie movement.

SW: What sort of mark did the hippie movement make?

SB: The first mass psychedelic music event, the Acid Test, took place at Ken Kesey’s friend’s ranch on Saturday, October 30th, 1965.

This party was the debut of the Grateful Dead, who, for a year, lived outside on Kesey’s La Honda California hillside, and were known formally as the Warlocks.

In December of 1965, with LSD illegal in California for three months, the real, public Acid Test, a 5,000 person rock concert took place. Every attendee was given a dose of LSD.

SW: Was there are legacy, do you think, from these kind of events?

SB: They became the format of both the successful Woodstock and the disastrous Altamont rock concerts. These concerts, which we now call ‘raves’, continue to this day around the world.

SW: And, of course, artists like Bob Dylan were part of this mix. He was in San Francisco at the end of 1965 and would be around during the City Lights shoot.

SB: Yes, just as importantly, Bob Dylan, beloved as a protest singer and expressing the innermost emotions of a generation, held his first official electric guitar concert in the city at this time.

There were other changes, too. What had been a university FM radio station musician became an AM radio station, a national and global phenomenon.

From meaningful protest songs representing important issues to, self focused, drug indulgent inner journeys…

SW: And this all connected in various ways to the City Lights session 60 years ago?

Basically this is the backdrop for Ferlinghetti’s photo project. This was before email, of course. He had a formal invitation mailed. He arrived in an old Cadillac ambulance, wearing a Moroccan Jalaba. It was meant to be a Dali-like Dadaist event.

SW: Six decades on and what do you perceive that amazing photographic moment meant?

SB: Well, the rest is history. Basically a straight global trajectory of liberal, social ideas, till today’s rebirth of right wing basically fascist thinking. A dramatic swing in the pendulum of human affairs.

SW: Thank you, Steve, for that fascinating history lesson and some fantastic personal insights…

Editor’s note: To see more of Stephen Bornstein’s eclectic twenty-first-century work visit his website here

See also: ‘Last Gathering at 60: Making meaning’, December 4th, 2025; ‘The Last Gathering of the Beats’, December 2nd, 2025