San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury

One of the reasons I had always been attracted to San Francisco is that (together with Paris, London, and dare I say, Mexico city), the city was at the heart of the counterculture movement of the late 1960's. During "the summer of love" in1967, as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, initiating a major cultural and political shift. The so-called 'flower-children' have always fascinated me. Maybe, probably, I am idealizing but it's almost as if the youth of those days really believed in a different World. Not only that, but they were going to make it happen. Nowadays, we protest, but at the same time, we feel very, very lost. We are very good at pin-pointing what is wrong in the system, but when it comes to finding a clear path, to defining how we are going to change things, a fog seems to appear, and there is no consensus. That, and a certain cynical attitude, like the naiveté was lost, like we no longer believe things can really change, like we somehow helplessly accept this wicked world will stay as it is, no matter what we do.

Back to the Haight. This neighborhood takes its name from the junction of the two main streets Haight and Ashbury. "It is bounded by Stanyan Street and Golden Gate Park on the west, Oak Street and the Golden Gate Park Panhandle on the north, Baker Street and Buena Vista Park to the east and Frederick Street and Ashbury Heights and Cole Valley neighborhoods to the south."

The area was built in the 1890s as a middle class suburb, but by the 1960s the Haight become a host to a bohemian community that was a hotbed of anarchy. By 1967 it brought around 75,000 young people in search of love, music and drugs and it became the focus of a worldwide youth culture. Today, it continues to cater alternative lifestyles.

<< The "hippies" were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. >>

As stated by The San Francisco Oracle*: "A new concept of celebrations beneath the human underground must emerge, become conscious, and be shared, so a revolution can be formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love, and the revelation of unity for all mankind."

<<Their culture was based primarily on music and the rejection of established society, a large and colorful thread running through the social fabric at the time featured enlightenment through discovery and personal development, trying to achieve a path for evolution onto a "higher plane" of consciousness.>>

And did you know that the band "The Doors" took their name from a poem by William Blake, "The marriage of heaven and hell", as cited by Aldous Huxley's book "The doors of perception"?

<<If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. >>

I leave you with some images of the neighborhood. I loved to be at the same spot where all of this happened, even if almost 43 years later (wow).

Anarchist collective bookstore.