Grateful Dead House
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This
was the center of hippy culture in the 1960's. The most
famous landmarks in this area are the former homes of
several counterculture icons. The home at 710 Ashbury
was the home of the Grateful Dead back when the group
was known as the Warlocks. Across the street was the Hell's
Angels House. Janis Joplin used to live at 122 Lyon Street.
The Jefferson Airplane lived at 2400 Fulton.
San Francisco Tours
If
there's any area of San Francisco that evokes images
of the long-gone '60s hippie culture, the Haight is
it. Fragments of that flower-power, incense-burning,
acid-dropping, tie-dye-wearing, peace-and-love-vibing
era can be purchased at smoke shops and Eastern-influenced
outlets bearing names like Dreams of Katmandu, Pipedreams,
Psychedelic Sun, and Happy Trails. But save for a few
hippie relics, the Haight today is a whole new scene.
Exclusive boutiques, high-end vintage-clothing shops,
second-hand stores, Internet cafés and hip restaurants
have all settled in, making the Haight one of San Francisco's
commercial centers.
Neo-punks,
club kids, fashionites, tourists and neighborhood folks
are equally at home here, whether they have come to
get a new piercing, grab a burrito, find the latest
drum 'n' bass 12-inch or just people-watch from a café.
But there are two distinctly different areas of the
Haight: The Upper Haight, which stretches from Stanyan
to Masonic, is the more moneyed shopping zone, though
it deteriorates a bit where it stretches toward Golden
Gate Park. Meanwhile, the Lower Haight, roughly Divisidero
to Webster, is a more diverse neighborhood with a grittier
feel. While it has been an alternate nightlife hub for
years, with bars like Noc Noc and Mad Dog and popular
clubs the Top and Nickie's, the Lower Haight has recently
become a main draw among DJs and ravers with the proliferation
of dance-music record shops.
In
the 1950s, students from then-nearby San Francisco State
College took over most of the neighborhood, forging
a youth culture that led to flower power, hippies and
the Summer of Love. The first hippies to move to the
Haight were actually Beats from North Beach, who also
came to take advantage of lower rents for the large,
run-down Victorian homes. The bohemian culture that
later developed was characterized by its embrace of
Eastern religion and philosophy, its antiestablishment
political stance and its experimentation with numerous
drugs, especially psychedelics.
Haight
life became a cultural phenomenon, pushing Pop Art and
light shows to new levels of mass appeal. Locals the
Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane made names
for themselves, while Bill Graham took the psychedelic-music
scene nationwide. Inevitably, the middle-class kids
started turning up for free food, free drugs and free
love. Not long after the 1966 Be-In and the Summer of
Love the following year, an inrush of unsavory characters
(e.g., Charles Manson) and organized crime instigated
the Haight's gradual decline.
By
the end of the '60s and on into the '70s, most stores
on the street were boarded up. But toward the latter
part of the '70s, second-hand shops and antique stores
began to emerge, deteriorated old Victorians were restored
and the Haight slowly gained prominence as a tourist
and local destination.
Northeast of The Haight is Alamo Square and a row of
beautiful Victorian homes known as the Painted Ladies.
San Francisco Tours
If
you would like more information, please email tours@alcatraz.us
or call us toll free at 866-268-8729. For local information,
please call 415-461-4608.
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