[5] Between 1957 and 1959, Hack lived primarily in San Miguel de Allende, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, a haven adopted by American artists and bohemians after World War II.

In 1959, after a referral by Beat poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hack rented studio space with other artists on the third floor of the Audiffred Building located at 9 Mission Street in San Francisco.

[1] The artists included Frank Lobdell, Hassel Smith, Sonia Gechtoff, Madeline Dimond, Philip Roeber, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown.

In 2013, Hack donated the door from his Audiffred studio (salvaged in 1978), signed by artists who had worked on the premises, to the Beat Museum in San Francisco’s North Beach.

(T)hey display for him the humble machinery of everyday living - shoemaker’s equipment, the chairs and cabinets of a barber shop, a tailor’s padded pressing iron – always silent, always at rest, intensified to the highest degree by isolation and close scrutiny.

But his collection of Sunday morning glimpses into little offbeat shops is neither a social document, in the manner of Edward Hopper, nor a celebration of the mechanized, in the style of Charles Sheeler.

His art studio at 54 Cook Street in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco was left abandoned for more than 15 years, but sold in 2016 for 1.5 million dollars despite decrepit conditions.

[11] In Hack's obituary, its remembered how 54 Cook Street became an afterschool play area for students from Laurel Hill Nursery School while Howard (Hondo) was still involved with the property.