Before we head out of the city and into some nature, we’re going to take one last photo-walk through a very specific slice of San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury. Today it would be easy to pass through this area and think it’s just a pretty neighborhood, but there is actually some really cool history here from the not-so-distant past. There was a time when Haight-Ashbury was the epicenter and headquarters of a national zeitgeist whose iconic status endures to this day.

I’m talking about the Summer of Love.

About Haight-Ashbury

Haight-Ashbury is one of San Francisco’s most famous and historic enclaves, most notable for its association with the hippie movement of the 1960s. Back then this place was home to musicians, cult leaders, revolutionaries, and a whole lot of other radical stoner dudes. Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and many more all famously lived here together. And others from the Bay Area like Creedance Clearwater Revival and Steve Miller Band also came up in the orbital of this bright-shining star. What a time to have been alive!

Before we go too deep into the cultural chronicles of Haight-Ashbury, let me tell you a bit about it as a neighborhood. It sits in a truly idyllic San Francisco nook. It is bounded by Golden Gate Park to the west and to the north its boundary is drawn at the Panhandle, which is a skinny, leafy extension of the Park that runs about 8 blocks in length. And if that wasn’t enough green space for you, it is also bordered by Buena Visa Park to the south, which runs up at a steep incline. The remainder of its southern border is a beautiful little area known as Cole Valley which I have only just now discovered. All of this area is GORGEOUS. Aside from the SF/California magic that you’ll find throughout this whole city, the aesthetics of Haigh-Ashbury are defined by elaborately detailed, multi-story, wooden houses which date back to the 1800s. This particular architectural sensibility is unique to San Francisco, and while there are a great many examples of it throughout this city, the specimens found in Haight-Ashbury are particularly splendid and concentrated. Here’s a map so you can see this place within the bigger picture of San Francisco.

Before the hippies took over in the 1960s, this area had been in a prolonged period of post-war decline, and many of the beautiful Edwardian and Victorian homes were vacant and in disrepair. That’s always how it goes right? Things start to change when the artists start moving in.

It started small. In the beginning, there were just a few hundred like-minded, forward-thinking people looking to create a world of their own. Sure there were parties and drugs, but the real essence of this movement was rooted in social change. They experimented with communal living, the rejection of material values, spiritual transcendence, social reform, and all kinds of other things that—when you stop and think about them—are actually pretty cool. And as the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and the Vietnam war all raged on, here in San Francisco, Haight Ashbury served as a respite to many.

By the mid-1960s, Haight-Ashbury was something of a Mecca for hippies across the nation. Hunter S. Thompson labeled the district "Hashbury" and reporting on its comings and goings was regularly published in national newspapers. Young people came here from around the country to take in the social experiment that was playing out here. This was actually where the first-ever smoke shop was opened. Decades before Marijuana was first re-legalized in the U.S., there were brick-and-mortar storefronts here that were openly selling all kinds of drugs, guided by a philosophy that drugs were a unifying force within the community. At the time, I’m sure it would have been hard to believe that this movement would have become so massive. Cue the Summer of Love.

ABOUT The Summer Of Love ❤️

As best as I can tell, the Summer of Love really started the winter before—in January of 1967. During this time, there was a massive festival in Golden Gate Park called the “Human Be-In.” About 30,000 hippies showed up for what turned out to be a widely publicized event. The San Francisco Oracle (Haight-Ashbury’s hippie newspaper) wrote as follows: “A new concept of celebrations beneath the human underground must emerge, become conscious, and be shared, so a revolution can be formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love, and the revelation of unity for all mankind.”

This is when the great hippie migration really began. Young people with flowers in their hair and bell-bottom jeans started showing up soon after this, and then they just didn’t stop showing up. In fact, more and more of them were showing up every day. People knew it was about to be a crazy summer, so community leaders within Haight-Ashbury got organized… ish. There was actually a community council devoted to managing the inflow of youths that coined the term “Summer of Love.” They coordinated with local organizations to provide housing, food, and sanitation, in addition to music, and arts-related activities. When spring break of 1967 came around, suddenly a wave of high school and college-aged kids started appearing in such great numbers that city officials really started to panic. They published articles in national newspapers publicizing the situation and advising people to stay away from Haight-Ashbury. And that totally did the trick! All the rest of the hippies in America read that article and did as they were told.

Just kidding.

THEY ALL HOPPED IN THEIR VANS AND DROVE AS FAR AS THEY NEEDED TO IN ORDER TO JOIN THE PARTY!

That summer, there were about 100,000 people that converged on this little slice of San Francisco. And it really is a small area. The pictures I have seen make this place look PACKED. There were a couple of notable music festivals that happened in the area, but even between these larger events, the party really never stopped. That summer saw packed performances from The Who, Grateful Dead, the Animals, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Otis Redding, The Byrds, Big Brother & the Holding Company, and last but not least, the late, great Janis Joplin. But the crowds never really subsided. People were hanging out 24/7, talking about life and doing drugs. Indeed, drug use was (and still is) heavily tied to this movement, but according to Bob Weir (guitarist of The Grateful Dead), it was never really about that. “It was about exploration, finding new ways of expression, being aware of one's existence.”

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty cool moment in time. But by the end of the summer, the magic was beginning to fade. The sustained influx of people had put the city’s infrastructure under real strain and by this point, the crowd was 50% peace-loving hippies and 50% drifters who came to stir up trouble. Eventually, the party had to end, and people had to go get jobs. Haight-Ashbury locals actually put on a funeral procession for the Summer of Love that fall, and the hippie powers-that-be (er, I guess I should say “powers-that-were”) told their flocks to bring the movement back to their homes. And they did! For a while, hippies were everywhere after that. And the Summer of Love would live forever in the history books of San Francisco and of the nation. What a place and time this must have been!

Visiting Haight-Ashbury Today

This is the part where you’re expecting me to tell you how different it is today, right? Well, a lot has changed. San Francisco is a largely different city today than it was in the 1960s. And the real estate has definitely skyrocketed in value; this is one of the prettiest districts in San Francisco, with an unbeatable location, and plenty of normal working people going about their business. I have friends who live here. BUT, in spite of the shifting dunes of the San Francisco cultural landscape, the ghosts of hippies past still haunt these streets, and the dark, carcinogenic crust of this by-gone era can still be found sitting on street corners, pushing shopping carts around, or yelling jibberish at passersby like yours truly.

Yes, I’m talking about homeless people. That’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the West Coast, but Haight-Ashbury has a special brand of them. These people look like they were tripping at a grubby Phish concert somewhere when they got teleported to the middle of San Francisco. What I mean by that is that they mostly seem like they all have some emotional connection to the hippie movement. And that is sort of cool, but I’d be lying if I told you they didn’t make me feel uncomfortable a time or two. There was one guy who just kept yelling “VAGINA!” over and over again at the top of his lungs. Even the other hobos around him were yelling at him to knock it off, but still, he persisted. And city life went on around him the same as it has for all of these decades.

Haight-Ashbury is technically a very specific stretch of Haight Street, covering a couple of city blocks on either side of its intersection with Ashbury Street. However, the neighborhood surrounding it bears the same name. The district itself is a mish-mash of high-end shopping, fast-casual restaurants, and edgey hippie things like smoke shops and guitar stores. I’m honestly not a huge fan of this stretch. It can be a bit stressful. But I LOVE the surrounding neighborhood though. It is some of the prettiest walking you can find in this city, and that is really saying something in a city as gorgeous as this. Here are some pictures. When you look at them, imagine there is somebody in the distance yelling “VAGINA!” 😂

The Grateful Dead House

Oh yeah, and did I mention that you can go see the exact houses where some of your favorite hippie icons lived? Janis Joplin’s old house is somewhere in this neighborhood. I didn’t realize this the last time I was in San Francisco, but I did track down the house where the Grateful Dead used to live. I don’t know if anybody lives in it now, but it’s still there, quietly sitting in a row of beautiful San Francisco houses. Every so often a passerby stops to pay their respects… and that’s about it! Also, this famous band photo was snapped in the living room of this house.

If you’re interested in visiting for yourself, here’s the address:

710 Ashbury St, San Francisco, CA 94117

Seeing the Grateful Dead House with my own eyes really clinched my fascination with this little chapter of history. Just like I never was really into the blues until I experienced it being performed in its place of origin—the Mississippi Delta—I never loved this particular era of rock & roll until I put a face to the name. Thinking about all those old psychedelic songs being written on beat-up acoustic guitars in living rooms of houses like this, on temperate, quiet San Francisco nights, before America had been introduced to the hippie movement, before tech companies owned this city, before the housing prices had made this place prohibitively expensive and before the entire state of California was on fire for half the year… it’s cool. That must have been an incredible place and time. I picture it being very peaceful. I’ll end with a song that transports me into this place in my mind.

I think that if I could go back to any place and time in history, I would pick 1960s California. That would have been a great place and time to exist, I think.