A neighbourhood before a movement
Haight-Ashbury is named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Long before 1967 it was an ordinary, somewhat run-down residential district. Understanding why a youth culture settled there, rather than somewhere else, comes down to buildings, prices, location and a few years of preparation by people who arrived well before the press did.
Houses and rents
The district was largely built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many of its Victorian and Edwardian houses survived the earthquake and fire of 1906. By the middle of the twentieth century a lot of them had been divided into flats and rooms, and some were in poor repair. This stock of large, aging wooden houses is what people mean by Haight Victorian housing, and it suited group living: there were many bedrooms, and the rents were low.
A proposal to run a freeway along the Panhandle, the strip of park leading into the larger one, was fought by residents and eventually dropped. The uncertainty is often said to have kept property values and rents down for years. Whatever the exact effect, the neighbourhood was cheap, centrally located and within walking distance of the park, which gave young people with little money a practical reason to move there. Students from nearby colleges and hospital staff also lived in the area, and the district was already racially and socially mixed.
The Beat and art crowd arrives
San Francisco had been a centre of Beat literature in the 1950s, and some of the people who came to the Haight had links to that earlier scene, as discussed in accounts of Beat Generation roots. Artists, poets, actors from the San Francisco Mime Troupe and musicians moved into the Victorian houses in the mid-1960s. Many were connected to the bands that would become famous. The Grateful Dead lived on Ashbury Street, and the Jefferson Airplane took over a large house elsewhere in the city.
Small shops followed the residents. A bookstore and gift shop called the Psychedelic Shop opened on Haight Street in January 1966, and other cafes and boutiques appeared around it. These businesses gave the street a recognisable character and gave newcomers places to meet.
Dances and the Trips Festival
Large dances were the other ingredient. A group calling itself the Family Dog staged its first dance at Longshoremen’s Hall in October 1965, and the Family Dog went on to run the Avalon Ballroom the following year. Promoter Bill Graham began presenting shows at the Fillmore Auditorium in early 1966. Neither venue was in the Haight itself, but both drew crowds from it.
The Trips Festival, held at Longshoremen’s Hall from 21 to 23 January 1966, brought together the group around author Ken Kesey, the dance-hall organisers and bands such as the Grateful Dead. It combined light projections, film, dancing and music, and it set the style for later events. The shows made the idea of psychedelic experimentation visible to a general audience, and they led directly to the development of psychedelic light shows and the poster art that advertised the dances. Many of the best-known psychedelic rock posters were made for the Avalon and the Fillmore in this period.
Why the Haight became the centre
By the autumn of 1966 several conditions were in place:
- Cheap, spacious housing within reach of the park.
- A cluster of musicians, artists and writers who knew one another.
- Venues for live music nearby and businesses on Haight Street that catered to the new community.
- A legal environment that changed when LSD became illegal in California in October 1966, which pushed some activity further underground without stopping it.
These combined to make the Haight the natural meeting point, and word of mouth spread. Local newspapers had begun reporting on the district by 1965 and 1966, and the Oracle, the neighbourhood’s own paper, started in the autumn of 1966.
What happened next
The same qualities that made the Haight attractive also made it vulnerable. It was a small district, and when thousands of newcomers arrived in 1967 its housing and services were overwhelmed. That story, and the events of the Human Be-In that opened the year, belong to the 1967 articles; here the point is that the Haight of 1967 was the result of several years of gradual settlement. It was not created in a single season, and the people who lived there before the summer often saw themselves as residents of a neighbourhood, not as extras in a media event.