Why it happened here
The answer is the housing. The streets around Haight and Ashbury were built up in the 1890s and 1900s with large Queen Anne Victorians and, later, Edwardian terraces — bay windows, turrets, elaborate woodwork, and a great many rooms. The district declined in the middle of the twentieth century, a freeway was proposed through it and fought off, and by the early 1960s these enormous houses were cheap and easy to subdivide.
That is the whole mechanism. Students from San Francisco State, musicians and people with no money could rent a floor of a mansion between them, which is not something any other part of the city offered. The scene assembled itself around that fact from about 1964, with Golden Gate Park at the end of the street for free concerts.
The architecture, incidentally, is genuinely Victorian for the most part rather than Edwardian — a correction worth making because it is sometimes asserted the other way round.
1967, and how it ended
The Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967 drew tens of thousands and put the neighbourhood on front pages everywhere. What followed over that summer was an arrival on a scale nobody had planned for, commonly estimated at around a hundred thousand young people, into a district of a few thousand residents.
It did not hold. There was not enough housing, food or sanitation; hard drugs displaced soft ones; and the press coverage that had drawn people in kept drawing them after the thing they had come for was gone. In October 1967 the Diggers, the neighbourhood's own anarchist street-theatre group, staged a mock funeral through the Haight under the title Death of Hippie, Son of Media — a deliberate attempt to kill off the label and send the newcomers home. The Summer of Love lasted one summer, and the people who were there ended it themselves.
One episode stands for the collision between the Haight and the wider world. After a Royal Ballet performance on 10 July 1967, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn went on to a party at a house on the 100 block of Belvedere Street. Police arrived in the early hours, reported the smell of marijuana, and arrested eighteen people including both dancers. Nureyev and Fonteyn were bailed by the company's manager, and in the end every charge was dropped — but the photographs went round the world.
The addresses that are still there
These are private homes. They can be looked at from the pavement and nothing more.
- 710 Ashbury Street — the Grateful Dead's house from 1966 until 1968, and the single most visited address in the neighbourhood. It was raided on 2 October 1967, after which the band held a press conference on its own front steps and became public opponents of the drug laws.
- 635 Ashbury Street — Janis Joplin's, a second-floor flat, in 1967.
- 2400 Fulton Street — the mansion Jefferson Airplane bought on the edge of Golden Gate Park, a walk north of the Haight.
- 558 Clayton Street — the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which matters more than the rest of this list put together. Dr David E. Smith opened it on 7 June 1967 on the principle that health care is a right rather than a privilege, and it was the first of more than six hundred free clinics founded across the United States in the following decade. It ran for fifty-two years. It closed in July 2019, losing over a million dollars a year — unable to match commercial wages, and serving a neighbourhood that had gentrified out from under it. The building remains in community use, housing a needle exchange run by an independent charity. Accounts describing the clinic as open and still free are out of date by some years.
What is actually open
- Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight Street — a vast record shop in a former bowling alley, trading since 1997, and the real answer for anyone hunting original Jefferson Airplane or Grateful Dead pressings. It is also simply one of the best record shops anywhere.
- 1727 Haight Street — the Red Vic Movie House, an institution that closed in 2011; since 2021 the space has housed The Booksmith, the neighbourhood's long-standing bookshop.
- The Red Victorian, 1665 Haight Street — still red, and worth a glance, but no longer anything. Sami Sunchild bought it in 1977, painted the front and ran it as a bed and breakfast with Sunday peace conversations until her death in July 2013 at eighty-seven. It operated as a co-living house from 2014 until 2021, was sold in September 2022, and nothing has reopened in it. Descriptions of a proprietor serving breakfast there belong to a different decade.
- Hippie Hill, in Golden Gate Park just past Stanyan Street, where a drum circle has met at weekends for more than fifty years and still does.
- The Panhandle, the narrow strip of park running east from the main park, where Jimi Hendrix played from the back of a flatbed truck in 1967 and where free concerts were a constant.
The shops along Haight Street itself divide fairly cleanly between genuine vintage clothing, which is good and plentiful, and tie-dye and peace-sign merchandise aimed squarely at visitors. Both have been there for decades.
What the street is like now
Two things are true at once and most accounts give only one of them.
Haight-Ashbury is now among the more expensive neighbourhoods in an expensive city — those subdividable Victorians sell for sums that would have appalled everyone named above — and the quieter residential streets are leafy, handsome and entirely unremarkable in character.
Haight Street itself, particularly towards the Golden Gate Park end, has a visible street population and open drug use. This is not a hangover from 1967; it is the city's wider homelessness and drug crisis, which the Haight carries a disproportionate share of partly because of its reputation. Visitors who have read nothing but the mythology are frequently taken aback. It is a busy commercial street in daylight and most people walk it without incident, but it is better to know in advance than to be surprised.
The walk that works best runs down Haight Street from Divisadero, turns up Ashbury for the houses, and finishes in Golden Gate Park — which is where the neighbourhood's story began and where the park's own attractions take over. General practicalities for the city are on the San Francisco page.