Revisiting Haight Street 50 Years After the Summer of Love
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It seems like the latter third of each decade I’ve lived in the United States is particularly prone to Boomer self-congratulation. Each year ending with a seven, you see, is a decennial year for Sgt. Pepper, the most overrated Beatles album tacked inside the most overrated vinyl sleeve in rock-n-roll history. Later that same year the anniversary of the Summer of Love rolls in. The years ending in a nine are jubilees of Woodstock music festival, and the time in between sevens and nines is when the media outlets work overtime advancing psychedelic fashions and everything else hippie, like patchouli, Jimi Hendrix, free food and sex and easy access to drugs.
I like Jimi Hendrix, and I like The Beatles, just not a big fan of everything else associated with the 60’s counterculture.
Allegedly, 100,000 hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in summer 1967. They responded to the media hype surrounding a January open air “Be-In” that featured the likes of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.
Romanticization of the “flower children” living a bohemian dream of art, orgies, intoxication and no responsibility continues to this day. It is unlikely, however, that there was ever anything beautiful about the “Upper Haight” dwellers. Consider the account of Jenny Boyd, George Harrison’s sister-in-law, who accompanied the high-as-a-kite Beatle on his visit of the neighborhood:
We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible — full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned — even mothers and babies — and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled. Then somebody said, ‘Let’s go to Hippie Hill,’ and we crossed the grass, our retinue facing us, as if we were on stage. They looked as us expectantly — as if George was some kind of Messiah.
[…]
Anyway, we got up and walked back towards our limo, at which point I heard a little voice say, ‘Hey, George, do you want some STP?’
George turned around and said, ‘No, thanks, I’m cool, man.’
Then the bloke turned round and said to the others, ‘George Harrison turned me down.’
And they went, ‘No!’
And then the crowd became faintly hostile. We sensed it because when you’re that high you’re very aware of vibes, and we were walking faster and faster, and they were following.
When we saw the limo, we ran across the road and jumped in, and they ran after us and started to rock the car, and the windows were full of these faces, flattened against the glass, looking at us.
Imagine all the people living life in peace. Now imagine Charles Manson in the crowd of hippies chasing George Harrison and entourage. Of course we don’t know if Manson was among this particular group of creeps, but we do know that America’s most notorious murderer lived in the Haight area from April to November 1967. He started his “family” in Berkeley a few months earlier, moving it across the Bay just in time for Summer of Love.
Manson later relocated his cult to LA, in pursuit of music career, which was one smart move. Although some of the iconic 60’s musicians like The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin were from San Francisco, the real epicenter of hippie creativity was Los Angeles:
Blasphemy? Consider that by the time the Summer of Love rolled around, L.A.’s music scene, which developed largely independently of San Francisco’s, had already delivered an avalanche of generation-defining rock music: The Byrds (which would seed both Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers), the Buffalo Springfield (whose members included Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay), the Mamas & the Papas, the still-relevant Beach Boys; psychedelic garage bands like Love, the Seeds, and the Leaves, the folk-tinged pop of the Turtles and the Association, and not least the wildly avant-garde Frank Zappa. L.A. was also home to some of the finest recording studios, engineers and producers — not to mention Capitol Records, the Beatles’ U.S. label (Blue Jay Way, immortalized in George Harrison’s song released later in 1967, is in the Hollywood Hills).
Why? Manson’s biographer Jeff Guinn explains:
[T]he recording industry was based in Los Angeles, and the L.A. reps who came to check out San Francisco talent left unimpressed. In their opinions, “Northern” musicians might wow spacey Fillmore or Avalon Ballroom audiences, but on the whole they simply didn’t have the professional chops to produce marketable studio product.
Driven SF-bases bands like The Grateful Dead had to go to LA to get signed. Although San Francisco missed the mark in creativity, it excelled at consumption of hippie artifacts, and, as a visit to the Upper Haight today confirms, it continues to excel at counter-cultural consumption.
A tourist hoping to spot a San Francisco hippie on Upper Haight is going to leave disappointed. The popular wisdom that the original hippies turned into yuppies is probably correct, because where did the 100,000 go? Many stayed in San Francisco, to be sure, they just figured that “turn on, tune in and drop out” is not the motto that will take them through life.
For as long as I remember, which is to say since the early 1990’s, hippies were replaced by gutter punks who, while not very different from hippies in substance, do differ in appearance. They look more Syd Vicious than George Harrison.
Upper Haight residents never really liked “the kids” and continuously complained of drug use and related issues. Businesses (by then the neighborhood was turned into an outdoor mall) complained of theft. The area continued to be a Mecca for maybe a few hundred runaways whose scorched skin betrayed hard drug use. Perhaps there were street savvy cult leaders like Manson among them. Perhaps they were the vulnerable mentally ill.
Back in the 90’s homeless advocates advanced the argument that without the street kids the Haight Ashbury would be just another shopping enclave. Street kids add an aura of authenticity to the otherwise gentrified community. That was a cynical argument, but the priciest boutiques around the world don’t shy away from exploitation.
A few weeks ago I visited the Upper Haight with a friend of mine. We parked a block away from Rasputin Music. The side street smelled of urine, but only a little bit. The mall itself was generally clean with only a few street kids walking around. I spotted several people with obvious serious mental health issues, like a woman with small black and blue lines tattooed all over her face. She sat on a first story window frame eating a large burrito.
Business was doing pretty well, though. I saw very few empty storefronts, and those I did see I assumed were due to natural turnover. Tourists and hipsters were walking up and down the street.
My friend took me to a few exemplary vintage boutiques. I looked at the price tags: an average dress was between one hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars. “I’m on Etsy!” read the tags.
I nearly bought an “as is” 1940’s dress at Decades of Fashion. It was fabulous: feminine and well-constructed. But there were small holes in the sleeves, the sizing was off and it was obviously missing a belt. Most importantly, I can’t properly care for a dress like this. It’s either the dress, or Sunday pizza nights. I need something I can throw in the washing machine.
There are multiple places to buy a Haight Ashbury refrigerator magnet, record stores and various other establishments that add counter-cultural authenticity. Then there is a Whole Foods… but the street kids?
In 2010 San Francisco voters approved the measure that prohibited sitting and lying on the sidewalks. It wasn’t until 2015 that Haight Street really cleaned up, and that was following a murder of two people, one in San Francisco, one in Marine, by three homeless “kids” that the area saw improvement. It is now significantly cleaner than many other high-traffic, touristy areas.
Some San Franciscans were worried that more street dwellers will hit the city on the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, but that obviously didn’t happen. Is the hippy mystique dead, or does serious policing do wonders?
Berkeley, on the other hand, went downhill. My Berkeley friends are telling me that the Haight homeless migrated there en mass, and I can’t help wondering if it has something to do with the riots that rocked the university in recent months.
