Memory and event
What happened in the Haight in 1967 and what people remember about it are two different things, and a good deal of the neighbourhood’s later history lies in the gap between them. The events were relatively brief, concentrated into a few months, and involved a modest core of long-term residents and a large, changing crowd of visitors. The memory has been carried by photographs, songs, memoirs, anniversaries and a thriving tourist trade, and it has grown larger and more uniform over time.
The 1970s: hard times
After the autumn of 1967 the district changed. Some of the early residents left for rural communes or other cities, and the volunteer institutions that had held the scene together faded. In the following years, accounts describe a harder drug scene, with more heroin and methamphetamine, more crime and more homelessness. Writers at the time, and many who lived there, associated the later Haight with disillusion rather than idealism, which is part of what historians mean when they discuss the hippie decline.
Meanwhile the physical neighbourhood did what it had done before: it absorbed new residents. Many of the Victorian houses were repaired and repainted in the 1970s by new owners and tenants, and some of the young people who had arrived in the 1960s stayed to raise families. A street fair that began in the late 1970s became a yearly event.
Becoming a destination
Tourism had begun almost as soon as the press attention did. Reports from 1967 mention bus tours that took visitors through the district to look at the hippies, and some of the residents resented being treated as exhibits. Over the following decades shops selling posters, tie-dyed clothes, records and souvenirs built up along Haight Street, and the neighbourhood became a fixed stop for visitors to San Francisco. The commercial appeal of the image was greater than the actual number of 1960s survivors still living there.
The Grateful Dead’s house on Ashbury Street, a private residence, became a stop for fans and walking tours, especially after the band’s long career and the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, when mourners left flowers and tributes in the neighbourhood. Other musicians associated with the scene, including Janis Joplin, also became part of the visitor trail.
Anniversaries and revivals
Round-number anniversaries kept the memory alive. The twentieth anniversary in 1987 and the thirtieth in 1997 brought new books, reunions and television specials. Interest in the 1960s was also fed by the maturing baby boomer generation, many of whom had been young in 1967 and now wrote and edited the histories. Major museum exhibitions around the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries (2007 and 2017) looked at the art, fashion and music of the period, and drew crowds, including many people too young to remember it.
A reasonable caution is that anniversaries tend to reward a bright, simple story. The difficulties of 1967, such as overcrowding, hunger, illness and the problems faced by teenage runaways, receive less attention than the music and fashion, and there is a risk that visitors come away with a picture that the residents of the time would not have recognised.
The neighbourhood today
Today the Haight is a busy district with a mix of long-standing independent businesses, chain stores, restaurants and thrift shops. San Francisco’s rising housing costs have changed who lives in the area, and the cheap rents that drew artists and students in the 1960s are long gone. Visitors still come for the atmosphere of the 1960s, and some find the district more commercial than they expected.
At the same time, the Haight has real community life. Local organisations run services, residents work on neighbourhood issues, and a number of institutions founded in the late 1960s or after, among them the free clinic that started in 1967, have continued in some form. What survives most clearly is the image: the district is a symbol first and a residential area second, and the symbol is now part of its economy.
What to keep in mind
For anyone writing or reading about the Haight, a few points help separate memory from record:
- The scene was small before the spring of 1967 and short-lived at its peak.
- Most surviving images and stories come from a handful of photographers, journalists and well-known musicians.
- Later decades added layers of nostalgia and marketing that were not part of 1967.
- The cultural legacy, in music, dress and attitudes, is real, but it spread through many channels besides one neighbourhood. The overall hippie cultural legacy is a broader topic than any one street.