San Francisco’s beat scene was commercialized by 1959 while New York’s was not yet

Evidence

Coffeehouse poetry readings, often with jazz accompaniment, had been popular in San Francisco’s North Beach for the past five years. By 1959, the scene had become a tourist attraction, suffering from the commercialization that had not yet arrived in New York. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1840

Categorization

• XREF: A live, dated data point for the claim about why culture stagnates now: commercialization dynamics within a scene across cities.