Haight Ashbury : Nostalgic S.F. Tour Into the Hippie Era

On your right, the Janis Joplin house. On your left, an old head shop complete with tie-dyed shirts and Grateful Dead decals. Straight ahead and far out, man, Hippie Hill--THE place to make music, friends, love and connections in the 1960s.

It has been 19 years since Scott MacKenzie sang “For those who come to San Francisco, summertime will be a love-in there,” but today, the curious or nostalgic can recapture the high with a historical tour of Haight Ashbury.

“We think the tour is a natural for people who heard about the hippie days, but couldn’t be in San Francisco to live them,” said Anna Boothe, a self-described “48-year-old hippie” who is one of three guides to lead the $50 walks offered by a local travel agency.

Fiesta Tours, combining some 1980s entrepreneurism with the whiff of “flower power,” is offering its “San Francisco and the Hippie Haight” walks in the hope that the “summer of love” proves marketable in what is expected to be a record summer for tourists.

Boothe calls hippies “the most important subculture ever to come out of San Francisco,” and a generation of ex-hippies surely would agree.

It was 20 years ago that the area was transformed from a quiet neighborhood full of run-down Victorian houses to a psychedelic mecca fueled by the hallucinogenic drug LSD, acid rock and the idealism of flower power.

The movement burst into full bloom in 1967 when more than 20,000 people gathered at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park for a “Human Be-In,” featuring free turkey sandwiches laced with LSD. MacKenzie captured the spirit with his hit song “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers),” and thousands of young people migrated to the city during the summer of love wearing long hair, rainbow-colored clothing, beads and peace medallions.

Revolution in Decline

But by the end of the decade, the counterculture “revolution” was in full decline, and gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s has seen Haight Ashbury’s hippies replaced by yuppies and homosexuals.

Boutiques, espresso bars and cookie shops dominate the area around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. Two popular coffee houses where poets and poetic souls gathered in the 1960s are now home to Round Table Pizza and Happy Donuts. The Straight Theater, where Jimi Hendrix, Joplin and the Dead performed in “The People’s Ballroom,” was torn down in 1979, its site now vacant.

Nonetheless, the Haight remains one of San Francisco’s most Bohemian neighborhoods, even if the longhairs often turn out to be punk-rockers, bikers or transients.

“You still see a lot of the spirit of the 1960s around here,” Boothe, sporting beads and a Gary Hart button, said during a recent tour.

Remaining hippie vestiges include the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. The 19-year-old clinic, the first of its kind in the country, receives $200,000 yearly from the city and remains free to all San Francisco residents. A flower mural greets visitors along with a sign reading: “No holding--no dealing--no using dope . . . We Love You.”

Tourists also can stroll through markets selling organically grown produce and natural foods, stores selling second-hand clothing and books, and the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard, a volunteer service with free information on emergency food and housing.

The price of the tour alone indicates how times have changed--$50 for the walk, or $204 with your own crash pad for two nights at tour headquarters, the Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast Inn.