Short answers, pulled from the story.
Madeline Gleason organized the event known as the First Festival of Modern Poetry. The gathering took place over two evenings at Marcelle Labaudt's Lucien Labaudt Gallery on the 151 Third Street address in San Francisco.
The famous poetry reading happened on the 7th of October 1955. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure performed alongside others during this event which signaled full emergence of the Renaissance into public consciousness.
Donald Allen published an anthology called The New American Poetry 1945, 1960 that grouped certain poets under the label San Francisco Renaissance. Marjorie Perloff observed that the anthology defined both poetics and broader cultural dynamics of that historical moment.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti studied for a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris before moving west. He established City Lights Bookstore in 1953 after meeting Kenneth Rexroth while abroad.
Gary Snyder attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon during the early 1950s. Philip Whalen and Lew Welch also studied there before all three stemmed from Rexroth's curriculum and moved to San Francisco.