A modest scene
Chicago did not have a Summer of Love in 1967, in the sense that the phrase belongs to San Francisco. The city had a counterculture, but it was smaller, more dispersed and more closely watched than the one on the West Coast. Chicago was a large industrial city with a powerful political machine, a strong police department and a conservative civic establishment. Those facts help explain why its hippie community stayed modest in 1967, and why the city is better known for the confrontations of 1968 than for any flowering of 1967.
Old Town
Old Town, on the city’s Near North Side, was the nearest thing to a Chicago equivalent of the Haight. It had been a bohemian district for years, with cheap rents, small theatres, coffee houses and folk music venues. Wells Street was its main commercial strip. The Old Town School of Folk Music, founded in 1957, and clubs such as the Gate of Horn and the Earl of Old Town made it a centre of the folk revival, and the Second City comedy troupe, which began in 1959, performed there. By 1967 the strip also had head shops, poster stores and boutiques selling beads and psychedelic clothing, along with the tourist businesses that followed.
Old Town was not a mass youth gathering place on the scale of the Haight. It was a place where young people could buy a poster, hear music and find like-minded companions, and it competed for attention with the more established Rush Street nightlife nearby. Observers often described Old Town’s counterculture as partly a commercial strip and partly a refuge for people who wanted to leave the suburbs.
Music and clubs
Chicago had a rich music scene, but much of it was blues and rooted on the South and West sides, and it overlapped with the white counterculture in specific ways. Young white musicians had been learning from Black blues players for years, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, formed in Chicago, was one of the best-known results. The city also had folk clubs and a growing number of rock bands. A fuller rock ballroom scene came more clearly in 1968 with venues like the Kinetic Playground. In 1967 the options for psychedelic performance were more limited than in San Francisco, and big touring acts mostly played elsewhere.
The Chicago Seed
The best-documented institution of the Chicago counterculture is the Chicago Seed, an underground newspaper that began in 1967 and continued into the mid-1970s. Like other papers in the national underground press, it mixed music coverage, politics, drug news, comics, personal ads and local listings. It provided a way for dispersed readers to feel part of a community, and it helped coordinate events. Its circulation and exact founding date are less well recorded than for some better-known papers, so only the broad outline is certain.
Politics and the police
The political setting in Chicago was different from San Francisco’s. Mayor Richard J. Daley led a Democratic organisation that dominated city life, and his administration was publicly intolerant of disorder. Police were reported to harass young people and their venues through arrests, ticketing and inspections, and radical activists complained of surveillance. The city had also seen unrest in other forms: a disturbance in a Puerto Rican neighbourhood in 1966, known as the Division Street riot, had already tested relations between police and young people.
Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left organisation, had a national office in Chicago in this period, and the city’s antiwar groups were active. Chicago was thus both a place where countercultural ideas circulated and a city where the authorities were ready to resist them. That tension grew through 1968, when the Democratic National Convention drew protesters, including the group later known as the Yippies. Those events are background to this story, not part of 1967. The conflict had already been building, and it explains why the city’s hippies were more likely to be involved in politics than their West Coast counterparts.
Putting Chicago in perspective
A few points help when comparing Chicago with the better-known scenes:
- Scale: the number of people in the Chicago counterculture in 1967 was small compared with the Haight at its peak, though exact figures are not available.
- Setting: the city’s cold climate, industrial economy and political machine limited public gatherings.
- Substance: music, newspapers and shop culture were present, but they existed alongside much older traditions of folk and blues.
Chicago in 1967 shows that the national counterculture was a collection of local scenes with different conditions. It is a useful reminder that the Summer of Love, as a name and an experience, belonged mostly to one place.