A season with a long run-up
The Summer of Love is usually pictured as a few warm months in San Francisco, but it was assembled over a longer period. Its raw material was a bohemian community that had been forming around the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood since about 1965: musicians, artists, student dropouts, former Beat poets and people experimenting with LSD, which was still legal in California until October 1966. Dance halls such as the Fillmore and the Avalon gave the scene a regular meeting place, and a small press, notably the San Francisco Oracle, gave it a voice.
The moment that made the scene visible beyond the city was the Human Be-In, held at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967. Poets including Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder appeared, Timothy Leary urged the crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, and bands from the local scene played. Crowd estimates generally run from about twenty thousand to thirty thousand. National newspapers and television covered it, and for many young people elsewhere it was the first they had heard of a Haight-Ashbury way of life.
Spring: a name and a forecast
By spring, local groups were openly preparing for an influx. Residents, shopkeepers and the Diggers, a loose group that handed out free food and goods, expected school holidays to bring large numbers of visitors. City officials worried about housing, sanitation and public health. The phrase “Summer of Love” was used in this period as a rallying name for the expected gathering, and in the United States it is closely tied to the 1967 season specifically.
Popular culture then amplified the message. John Phillips wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, which Scott McKenzie recorded and which was released in May; it reached the top of the British chart and did well in the United States. Few records have advertised a place so effectively. The song invited listeners to come to California, and a great many did, though how many is hard to say. Figures around one hundred thousand over the summer are often repeated, but nobody counted, and they should be treated as a rough guide.
Who came
The crowd was less uniform than the later image suggests. It included:
- college students on vacation, many of them middle-class and curious
- teenagers and some younger runaways, who were the group that most worried parents and social workers
- older bohemians and activists who already lived nearby
- tourists, journalists and photographers, drawn by the coverage
- musicians looking for work or audiences
Time magazine’s July 1967 cover story on the hippies and countless newspaper features turned the Haight into a tourist subject. Residents sometimes complained of being stared at, and tour buses reportedly drove through the district. The more the scene was reported, the more it attracted people who wanted to see it, which changed what it was.
What it promised
The ideals attached to the season were fairly consistent: communal sharing instead of acquisitiveness, tolerance, informal friendship, rejection of conventional career paths, and a belief that consciousness-altering experiences could make people kinder. The Diggers’ free meals and free shops were the practical form of this. Music supplied the emotional centre. The Monterey Pop Festival in mid-June, the arrival of the Sgt. Pepper album in early June, and the spread of San Francisco bands onto national radio all made the mood seem like part of a wider cultural shift rather than a local fashion. The broader American counterculture was already larger than any one neighbourhood, and the summer gave it a name and an image.
The strains of the summer
The promise ran into ordinary problems quickly. A small neighbourhood cannot absorb tens of thousands of arrivals without strain. Housing was scarce, free food was limited, and public health workers dealt with malnutrition, infections and bad drug experiences. The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic opened in June to provide care to anyone who came. Hard drugs and petty crime became more visible, and some young arrivals, especially minors, were vulnerable to exploitation.
Elsewhere in the United States, the same summer brought the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising, and the Vietnam War escalation continued to feed protest and anxiety. Young people who had come to the Haight to step out of mainstream society were not insulated from any of it. Some local figures also felt that publicity had already damaged the scene before most visitors arrived, and several of the original residents left in the course of the year.
Autumn: the ending
By October the mood had soured enough for locals to stage a symbolic farewell. On 6 October 1967, an event often called the “Death of Hippie” was held in the Haight, with a mock funeral intended to announce that the media-made “hippie” was finished and to encourage people to move on or to become more self-reliant. The date echoed the anniversary of LSD becoming illegal in California the year before. Many members of the original community drifted to rural areas, other cities or communes, and the neighbourhood’s problems deepened in the following years.
The end was not sudden or complete. Music continued, and cultural institutions of the scene survived: Rolling Stone magazine appeared in San Francisco in November 1967, and the underground press spread across the country. But the Summer of Love as a hopeful experiment in one neighbourhood did not last beyond 1967.
Why it still matters
Historians tend to separate two things. The first is the actual experience of those who lived or visited there, which was messy, short and sometimes harmful. The second is the symbolic afterlife: the summer became shorthand for the idea that a generation could reject mainstream values and try to live differently. That image influenced music, dress, ideas about food and the environment, and attitudes to authority, though the summer did not cause these by itself.
It also helps to keep the dates straight. The key events in this account fall in 1967, but the roots lie in 1965 and 1966, and the wider hippie movement continued well after the Haight faded, reaching its best-known public events at Woodstock in 1969. Treating the Summer of Love as one season in a longer story is more accurate than treating it as the whole of the sixties.