The Beat Goes On : Neighborhoods: Tucked away in a back alley behind shops in Old Pasadena, an avant-garde coffeehouse features jazz, poetry and hip conversation.

It takes a persistent search to reach the red door with the small, handwritten sign: “Welcome to the Espresso Bar.”

The coffee bar, a cozy watering hole of eccentric charm, sits tucked away in a back alley behind a trendy gift shop in Old Pasadena.

For more than a decade, the Espresso Bar has been dispensing some of the strongest coffee around and providing a haven for a varied assortment of characters to read, swap stories or just hang out.

Its semi-secret location off Raymond Avenue is a sure sign of its cult status. Stepping inside is like entering a time warp.

The “E-Bar,” as the regulars call it, is about the size of a very large garage, and the resemblance doesn’t end there. A beat-up old piano sags against a wall, trying to ward off collapse. Two shabby Chinese lanterns hang from the ceiling, providing subdued light. A broken jukebox stands to one side. Mismatched sets of chairs and tables fill the room in no particular pattern.

The place looks like a throwback to the 1950s and early ‘60s, when coffeehouses reigned as gathering places of a new generation of nonconformists.

“It reminds me of beatnik coffeehouses I used to go to in Chicago,” said Jack Thibeau, a 43-year-old screenwriter-actor from Toluca Lake. He sat with some friends in the E-Bar one recent night after a weekly Zen meditation group meeting.

“I come to do writing here,” he said. “It’s really, genuinely avant-garde.”

The faithful preserver of the E-Bar’s beatnik flavor is manager Gordon Beam. An accountant by day, Beam grew up in the ‘50s and says his own sensibilities are molded by the beat era. His coffeehouse credentials are impeccable, tracing back to travels throughout Europe and Northern Africa (“where the real coffee shops are”) and time spent in Berkeley in the 1960s.

Since taking over the Espresso Bar two years ago, he has kept alive the tradition of his predecessor, Margaret Schermerhorn, who consciously created a refuge frozen in the past.

“It’s not supposed to be anything that reminds you of anywhere else,” said Beam, a ponytailed, bespectacled man of 52. “There (used to be) a clock which didn’t move. I think it was set at 10 minutes to 11 or something. The basic thing was that there was nothing to remind you of present time.”

When it opened about 12 years ago, the E-Bar’s atmosphere attracted an older, cultural crowd that came at night to relive its beatnik days.

Now the clientele is younger. Many patrons are students from nearby city colleges and art schools. Others are teen-agers dropping in after meetings for recovering alcoholics to “get wired on double mochas,” Beam said. All were born years after Kerouac and Ginsberg wandered permanently into the annals of American social history.

“They’re real young now,” agreed Alicia, who offers nightly Tarot-card readings at one of the tables and prefers to be known only by her first name.

On most nights, patrons pack the tables by 10 p.m. Often clad in black or in offbeat outfits, they sit and talk about subjects “from the ridiculous to the sublime,” as one occasional drop-in put it. They sip their Cafe Royales--potent caffeine concoctions consisting of double espresso, hot chocolate and whipped cream. They listen to loud music ranging from jazz albums to live punk bands.

And they smoke many cigarettes.

“Nobody comes here with drugs,” said John Page, an engineering student from Covina wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans. “Here it’s coffee and cigarettes.”

Page, 23, has been going two or three nights a week for the past year. “It’s a place to exchange ideas,” he said. “People don’t have too much attitude here.”

Sohrab Mahdavi, 28, a Pasadena computer technician, said he mostly goes there to ponder great academic truths, not socialize. A copy of “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” rested by his coffee cup, next to a gradually filling ashtray and a notebook with neatly written entries.

“I like reading and writing in a coffee shop, being around people (and) smoking,” he said, adding that the noise actually helps him concentrate.

On Tuesday nights, Mahdavi has to share the E-Bar with the exhibitionists who get 15 minutes of glory apiece during “Espresso Yourself,” an open forum where almost anything goes. The daring, the interesting and the just plain obnoxious use the time to premiere songs they’ve written or to shock the crowd in speech--or dress.

According to one employee, one man recently showed up to sing wearing nothing but plastic wrap and a discreetly placed license plate. “People are asking about him,” she said.

Wednesdays are set aside for open-mike Poetry Night--a beatnik coffeehouse institution. The poetry runs the gamut from not bad to totally nonsensical, spiced with a generous supply of four-letter words.

And for art lovers, the Espresso Bar routinely displays works of local artists. Some have caused controversy, including one show that seemed to blast Alcoholics Anonymous. Beam said he had to escort the artist out, afraid the man would be attacked.

The permanent icon of the place is a painting of Frankenstein’s monster that hangs over the storeroom door. E-Bar lore has it that there has always been a Frankenstein painting there throughout the coffee bar’s history.

“Margaret always felt that the Espresso Bar was a Frankenstein monster which she created,” Beam explained. “When she sold (the bar), she took the painting with her. So the original artist painted this one and gave it to me, which I thought was really sweet.”