Haight-Ashbury Sauntering Back to the ’60s |
The counterculture vibe continues to pulse in psychedelic storefronts like Love on Haight.
BOUNDARIES: Scott St., Waller St., Fulton St., North Willard St.
PARKING: Unrestricted street parking can be found on Oak St., along the Panhandle.
DISTANCE: 2 miles
DIFFICULTY: Easy
PUBLIC TRANSIT: N Judah streetcar (get off at Duboce Park); 24, 71 Muni buses
Along with the gold rush, earthquakes, and gay liberation, the Summer of Love is one of San Francisco’s iconic cultural moments. The intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets is the city’s most famous crossroads thanks to some craziness that occurred around this nexus from the mid-to-late-1960s. When North Beach became too expensive for artists and musicians, they found cheap rent and welcoming arms in the surrounding streets. While many hippies were simply indulging in the neighborhood’s proliferation of drugs and sex, some idealistically saw the so-called Psychedelic Revolution as hope for a better, kinder world. The neighborhood developed its own economy, spawned its own musical sound, threw outrageous parties in its streets and parks, and acquired a distinctive sartorial aesthetic. All in all, it was exciting, mind-blowing, and hilarious.
Today Haight-Ashbury does its best to live up to its rock-and-roll reputation, although some may argue that it’s hypocritically cashing in on a political ideal of anticonsumerism. Whatever your point of view, the neighborhood is a satisfying blend of historical sites, exquisite Victorian architecture, and bustling counterculture commerce of the head-shop, tie-dye, and tattoo-den varieties. Several independent bookstores, loads of great places to eat, and a handful of social organizations still carry on the free-spirited vibe.
We’ll start on a nondescript corner, where Scott and Page Streets meet. The building at 250 Scott, home of 
Jack’s Record Cellar, played a significant role in the neighborhood’s countercultural past. The upstairs flat was the home of poet Kenneth Rexroth, a central player in the San Francisco Renaissance. This home-grown literary movement attracted the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, thus bringing the Beat Generation to the City by the Bay. The cafés of North Beach were the big draw, but the serious salons took place in Rexroth’s pad. Rexroth distanced himself from the Beats and moved back east, but thousands of students and poets subsequently moved into the Haight, looking for cheap rents and a bohemian atmosphere in the decade before the hippies. The record shop is rarely open—your best bet is Saturday afternoon—but if it is, step in. It’s San Francisco’s oldest purveyor of collectible 33-, 45-, and 78-rpm records, and the shop’s walls are covered with concert posters from legendary jazz, R&B, and rock shows.
Head west on Page Street. On the corner of Broderick Street, at No. 1090, once stood the Albin Rooming House. According to rock historian Joel Selvin, this apartment building had a “ballroom” in the basement where Big Brother and the Holding Company and other bands frequently performed. There’s nothing to see here, except in your imagination, so keep a-movin’.
At the corner of Lyon Street turn right. The attractive Victorian at 
No. 122 Lyon was the home of singer Janis Joplin during the Summer of Love. It was an apartment house in those days, and Joplin’s room was on the second floor with the curved balcony off the front.
Head north one block to Oak Street and cross into the Panhandle, a shady, pencil-thin green that’s ideal for dog-walking. Exciting events took place here during the ’60s, including unforgettable free outdoor concerts. Jimi Hendrix once played here, so as you walk a block west in the park imagine his awesome sound reverberating off the apartment buildings along either side.
At the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the time is always 4:20.
Following the Panhandle path west, turn left at Central Avenue, and at Haight Street turn right. On this block you’ll see two relics of the Haight’s radical past. 
The Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore, at No. 1369, has been peddling radical treatises since 1976. 
Pipe Dreams, at No. 1376, is the oldest extant head shop on the strip. Stop by for bongs, hookahs, tobacco products, and groovy patches for your torn Levi’s.
At the end of the block, the 
Magnolia Pub & Brewery is an attractive corner noshery that sells its own home-brewed ales. The facade has changed little since the ’60s, when the site was the Drogstore Cafe. The name was an obvious appeal to the drug culture, with a twist in the spelling when the California State Board of Pharmacy objected. As the Drogstore Cafe, it was featured in the 1968 movie Psych-Out, featuring Jack Nicholson as the requisite stoner. The current owners pay homage to Magnolia Thunderpussy, an erotic bakery that operated in this space post-Drogstore. It was named after its owner, a burlesque performer (real name: Patricia Mallon) beloved for her free-spirited ways and her late-night delivery of desserts such as the Montana Banana. Today, Magnolia Pub produces some lovely cask ales in its basement; they’re pumped up directly to the taps on the bar. The food is good too.
Across Masonic Avenue, 
Love on Haight is a psychedelic grotto of grooviness. The shop deals in everything you’ll need for that ’60s flashback you’ve been meaning to have, from handmade tie-dye shirts and incense to kaleidoscope sunglasses and glitter. If none of that’s your bag, you can always admire the building’s far-out exterior, with its columns shaped like Desi Arnaz congas and cartoony mural work on the window trim. Love on Haight walks the socially conscious walk as well; they have partnered with Taking It to the Streets, a nonprofit dedicated to helping San Francisco’s homeless youth.
A block up, the corner of Ashbury is the epicenter of the neighborhood. Don’t be afraid to snap some shots of the crisscrossing HAIGHT and ASHBURY street signs; everyone does it. In fact, the signs used to be stolen so often that the city stopped replacing them until they came up with the solution of hanging them extra high. On the northwest corner, note the wall clock that is perpetually stuck at 4:20 p.m.—cannabis-culture code for the correct time to smoke weed. (The term 420 derives from the time at which a group of Marin County teens would meet after school in the early 1970s to search for a supposed mother lode of marijuana growing on nearby Point Reyes.)
Hang a left and walk up Ashbury to 
No. 635, another place where Janis Joplin lived. Continue walking up Ashbury past Waller, as Joplin herself would have done to visit her friends at 
710 Ashbury. This Victorian was the home of the Grateful Dead as the band reached its prime (back in the days when bands conveniently lived together, like characters in a sitcom). Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan lived in the psychedelic frat house with managers Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin from 1966 to 1968. Take a moment to imagine the sounds and smells emanating from the house, now home to unfamous millionaires, and beat it on back to Haight.
Make a left on Ashbury and note the residential apartments at 
1524-A Haight; this is where Jimi Hendrix alighted for a while in his heyday. A little farther, at 1568 Haight, is 
Michael Collins, a standard-issue fake Irish pub. In the late ’60s, it was the Pall Mall Lounge, where the so-called Love Burgers were very popular—most likely because if you didn’t have any scratch, you could enjoy your burger free of charge. Turn right on Clayton to see the humble beginnings of one of the most important and ongoing positive social changes to come out of the Summer of Love, the 
Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. In 1967, David Smith, MD, a young faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, was concerned by the alarming number of young people who had been lured to the city for its alternative lifestyle only to find themselves unprepared for some of its negative consequences: drug addiction, malnutrition, and sexually transmitted diseases, among others. Arguing famously that “healthcare is a right, not a privilege”—a sentiment that would later become the clinic’s slogan—Smith began providing free medical care with the help of volunteers from UCSF and Stanford, and on its first day, the clinic treated 250 patients. Today there are more than 1,000 clinics around the country modeled after this one.
Celebrated street artist Mel Waters pays homage to Jerry Garcia, the neighborhood’s onetime house troubadour, with his Cole Street mural.
The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic’s creed: “Health care is a right, not a privilege.”
Returning to Haight Street, make your way to the 
Booksmith. While the original Booksmith opened a few doors down in 1976, and hosted all manner of ’60s icons like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, the current location stays true to its counterculture roots while also offering a celebrated series of author events and a collection that will satisfy any bibliophile. Across the street and just past Belvedere, you’ll find 
The Red Victorian, another standard bearer for the old neighborhood: a gorgeous old inn built in 1904 as the Jefferson Hotel. Peace activist Sami Sunchild took it over in the 1970s and designed the guest rooms to induce drug-free hallucinations. She hung more of her trippy art in a gallery off the lobby and hosted discussions about world peace every Sunday morning that were open to all. Sami lived here until she died in 2013 at the age of 88; because the rooms are still used as short- and long-term communal residential units, you need to make a reservation to poke around. Next door, Sunchild’s Parlour, an eclectic vintage store, is doing its best to keep the vibe alive.
Vibrantly restored Victorians give the Haight much of its charm, and many once housed a veritable who’s who of 1960s rock icons and their entourages.
Above the Red Vic, you’ll see a graffiti rat gracing an exposed side wall. The original was done by renegade street artist Banksy while he was in San Francisco in 2010. Great controversy ensued when the art was cut out, removed, and displayed in various galleries (the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art refused to display it), which seemed contrary to the guerrilla art movement. A replacement popped up a decade later but has proved to be the work of imitators.
The 
Goodwill store at the corner of Haight and Cole Streets was the site of the Straight Theater in 1967 and ’68. Legendary shows took place here, and the Dead often used the hall as a rehearsal space. Across the street, at 1775 Haight, the Diggers (see Backstory) kept a crash pad where anyone needing a free place to sleep could do so.
In the next block, in a converted bowling alley, is the immense 
Amoeba Music, one of the city’s best shopping stops for music. On many an early evening, free live shows are held in the store.
Turn right at Stanyan Street, walk along the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, and turn left at Fulton Street. Look for the 
Jefferson Airplane mansion, at No. 2400. It’s a block up, at the corner of North Willard, the end of your walk. It’s a truly impressive three-story manse with a neoclassical columned entry. Members of the band moved here in 1968, painted the place black, and stayed through the 1970s. Along the way, the Airplane was converted into a Starship. Lead singer Grace Slick left San Francisco for a bigger galaxy (Los Angeles) in the early 1980s, saying she was tired of being a big fish in a small pond.
Backstory: Free Food and Tie-Dye—Can You Dig?
One of the more legendary but less known counterculture groups to take flight during the Summer of Love was the Diggers, a movement based on a society unencumbered by money. Taking its name from the 17th-century British Diggers, who didn’t believe in private property, the group was formed by several members of the guerrilla theater group San Francisco Mime Troupe, including actor Peter Coyote. The Diggers’ ideas manifested themselves in free bakeries (they were famous for their wheat bread baked in coffee cans), free crash pads, and free stores. They famously served free food in the Panhandle every day at 4 p.m., and they asked hungry takers to step through a giant yellow frame to receive their bowl of soup—a way to change their frame of reference, as it were. As more people grew their hair long and traded their button-downs for batiks, the free stores became inundated with cast-off white dress shirts. Digger Luna Moth Robbins (née Jodi Palladini) recommended tie-dyeing them—a then-innovative technique she’d learned in Vermont. The shirts flew off the shelves (for free) and were seen gracing the backs of Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia—thus, a hippie fashion trend was born.
Haight-Ashbury
Points of Interest
Jack’s Record Cellar 254 Scott St.; 415-431-3047
Janis Joplin Home No. 1 (former) 122 Lyon St. (private residence)
Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore 1369 Haight St.; 415-431-8355, boundtogetherbooks.wordpress.com
Pipe Dreams 1376 Haight St.; 415-431-3553, facebook.com/smokeshoponhaightt
Magnolia Pub & Brewery 1398 Haight St.; 415-864-7468, magnoliabrewing.com
Love on Haight 1400 Haight St.; 415-817-1027, loveonhaightsf.com
Janis Joplin Home No. 2 (former) 635 Ashbury St. (private residence)
Grateful Dead House (former) 710 Ashbury St. (private residence)
Jimi Hendrix Apartment (former) 1524-A Haight St. (private residence)
Michael Collins (former Pall Mall Lounge) 1568 Haight St.; 415-861-1586, michaelcollinsirishbar.com
Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 558 Clayton St.; 415-746-1950, healthright360.org/agency/haight-ashbury-free-clinics
Booksmith 1644 Haight St.; 415-863-8688, booksmith.com
The Red Victorian 1665 Haight St.; redvictorian.com (no published phone number)
Goodwill (former Straight Theater) 1700 Haight St.; 415-738-5606, sfgoodwill.org
Amoeba Music 1855 Haight St.; 415-831-1200, amoeba.com
Jefferson Airplane Mansion (former) 2400 Fulton St. (private residence)
