More than one neighbourhood
The Haight-Ashbury district gets most of the attention, but the San Francisco hippie scene was spread across the Bay Area and had been developing for several years before the Haight became famous. A fuller picture includes North Beach, the dance halls, Berkeley and Oakland across the bay, the houses of Marin County, and the Golden Gate Park.
North Beach and the Beat inheritance
North Beach, home of City Lights bookstore and a number of cafes, was the Beat quarter of the 1950s. As rents rose and tourists arrived, some of its artists and young bohemians moved towards the Haight, where large Victorian houses were cheap and near the park. The Haight itself was a mixed, partly run-down neighbourhood in the early 1960s, home to working-class families and students from nearby San Francisco State and the University of California medical campus. A change in the area’s housing market, and the threat of a freeway through the area that was never built, had reportedly left many rooms empty.
The ballrooms and the bands
Music gave the scene its focal points. In October 1965 the Family Dog collective, which included Chet Helms, put on dances at Longshoremen’s Hall, and Helms later ran the Avalon Ballroom. Bill Graham, who had worked as business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, started promoting concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium in the Western Addition district in 1966. Both venues combined bands with psychedelic light shows and hand-drawn posters, and drew audiences from the whole region.
The bands came from different corners. The Grateful Dead lived in a house on Ashbury Street, Jefferson Airplane had a house nearby, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, grew from jam sessions in the city. Country Joe and the Fish came out of Berkeley. Together they made up what became called the San Francisco Sound, although the groups differed quite a lot in style.
Berkeley and the political side
Across the bay, Berkeley was a centre of protest. The Free Speech Movement of 1964 had made the university famous, and in the following years the Vietnam Day Committee organised large marches and teach-ins. The East Bay therefore supplied a more openly political strand, and the weekly newspaper the Berkeley Barb was an early voice of the underground press in the area. San Francisco’s own underground paper, the San Francisco Oracle, began in 1966 and was known for its colourful, psychedelic design.
Street theatre and the Diggers
The Diggers grew out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a political theatre company. From 1966 they used street performances and “happenings” to criticise money and property, giving away free food in the park and running a free store. Their ideas were closely associated with the Haight but came from older theatre and anarchist traditions, and they are an example of how the politics and the lifestyle of the scene mixed.
Marin, the Panhandle and the park
Many musicians and artists lived across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, in Sausalito and in the rural towns north of the city. Back in the city, the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park served as a free meeting place for events. The Human Be-In of 14 January 1967 in the park’s Polo Fields, which brought together poets, bands and a large crowd, is the best-known example, and was widely reported in the press.
The Summer of Love and its strains
In the summer of 1967, national publicity drew many young people to the city. The Haight, a small neighbourhood, found itself with far more visitors than it could house or feed. Longer-term residents reported problems with crowding, theft, runaways, bad drug experiences and the arrival of dealers of harder drugs. The social strains of the Haight, together with the commercialisation of the scene, left many of the original participants feeling that the community had been overwhelmed.
The Death of Hippie, 6 October 1967
The mock funeral known as “Death of Hippie” took place in the Haight on 6 October 1967, a date chosen because it was the first anniversary of California’s ban on LSD. Participants, including members of the Diggers and local merchants, carried a coffin through the streets and burned or buried objects associated with the “hippie” label, such as beads and hair, according to accounts of the day. The message was that the “hippie” of the media, a commercial image of a long-haired consumer, was dead, and that a freer and more local community would continue.
The ceremony did not stop the migration or the decline of the scene. It is better understood as a statement by people inside the community that they did not want their way of life defined by publicity. Within a year or two many of the early figures had left for the countryside, other cities or different careers, although the bands, the venues and some of the community institutions stayed active for years.