Where music legends lived and "free loved"
A fluke in city planning helped create the counterculture mecca that was Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. Many of the grand old Victorian houses, like the pink wedding-cake affair at 635 Ashbury, where Janis Joplin lived, had been subdivided for workers during WWII. When the workers moved in during the 1950s, the city drafted plans to run a freeway along the Panhandle. Real-estate values in the area plummeted, rents decreased, and then, as now, the artists followed.
The freeway never came, but the musicians did, creating a unique rock style—a blend of the improvisational spirit of jazz with psychedelic imagery and folk melodies—that came to be known as the San Francisco Sound. Many of its legendary artists resided in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood at various times.
Info
Address 635 Ashbury Street (Janice Joplin), 1524 Haight Street (Jimi Hendrix), 2400 Fulton Street (Jefferson Airplane), San Francisco, CA, 94117 | Public Transport Bus: 33 (Ashbury St & Haight St stop); 6, 71 (Haight St & Masonic Ave stop); 5 (Fulton St & Arguello Blvd stop) | Tip Check out Mendel’s Far Out Fabrics and Art Supplies at 1556 Haight Street, where you can pick up materials to make your own rock star outfit.
The side of the building where Jimi Hendrix once lived, 1524 Haight Street, sports a mural of him playing his guitar, and the funky curtains in the window suggest that bohemia still keeps a toehold here. Nothing so wild can be found at 710 Ashbury, where the Grateful Dead hung out in the late sixties. The big house is now decidedly buttoned down; no Jerry in a top hat on the front porch, no girls climbing out the window. The dark brown exterior seems to banish any rainbow-tie-dye dreams that might still linger in the woodwork.
Somehow Jefferson Airplane’s house at 2400 Fulton remains most like the music of the band that lived there. The giant Greek Revival mansion with oversized columns would be the perfect place to live if you were “Alice when you’re ten feet tall.” The band members resided in the mansion’s 17 rooms at the height of their fame in ’68 and ’69. The exterior was painted pure black then and the parties they hosted were legendary. The stature of the “Airplane house” is also a reminder of the profits that the music counterculture brought to San Francisco; as Grace Slick later sang, “We built this city on rock and roll.”
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