The Summer of Love was 1967 with its epicenter in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was a summer of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. San Francisco attracted almost 100,000 young people who converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
America had seen a couple of post-WWII counter-culture movements that later became mainstreamed: Jazz focused on music and Bohemians focused on literature. The Summer of Love saw this and more personified in “hippies.” The hippie movement was different in that it encompassed not just music and literature but also art, fashion, liberal politics, sexual liberation, weed, psychedelics, Eastern philosophy & spirituality, naturalism, ecology, organics, communes, long hair, and
Haight-Ashbury was home to revolutionary movements, spiritual groups and famous musicians, (Jimmy Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Steve Miller Band, Janis Joplin) making it a hotbed of creativity. Artists flocked from all over the world to the Haight-Ashbury District to experience the life that was being lived there. They helped push the boundaries of the hippie movement that came out of and made history there.
Though there were several counterculture movements that came out of Haight-Ashbury, the one that resonates with me is the hippie movement. So many of my friends say that I would have fit in perfectly with the hippies, and I have to agree. I believe I encompass some of the traits of the modern hippie with the love of mother earth, spirituality, peace, and freedom of mind and body!
The hippies wanted no part of what they called the "establishment" culture, believing that permanent legal and civil organizations were too concerned with material goods, too competitive, and too dominated by anxiety and corruption. Hippies wanted a new society based on peace, love, and pleasure. Members of the hippie counter-culture expressed their dissent through personal expression. They dressed differently, wore their hair differently, listened to different music, talked differently, and used different drugs than the mainstream culture. Some hippies formed small groups and lived together in various kinds of small, self-supporting communities called communes.
By the end of 1967, many of the hippies and San Franciscan musicians from the Summer of Love had moved on. In its wake were street people, drug addiction, and panhandling.
In the following year, both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated.
Haight-Ashbury now draws a lively, diverse crowd looking to soak up the historic hippie vibe. Upper Haight Street is a hodgepodge of vintage clothing boutiques, record shops, bookstores, dive bars and casual, eclectic restaurants. Bordering Golden Gate Park, the neighborhood features many colorful, well-preserved Victorian homes, including the storied Grateful Dead House.
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