Golden Gate Time Machine: San Francisco’s Untold Stories

On October sixth, 1967, a group of Haight-Ashbury residents held a funeral, complete with a casket and pallbearers, for someone named “Hippie, Son of Media.” Last week, in our Golden Gate Time Machine, we touched on the city’s many hidden histories; today we’re digging into why the most famous summer in San Francisco history had to be declared dead by the very people who started it. It all began quietly. By the mid-1960s, the Beat Generation had mostly moved on from North Beach, and a new generation found a haven in the Haight-Ashbury.

The rents were cheap, the Victorian houses were spacious, and there was a feeling that something new was taking root. It was a small, local scene… a community of artists, poets, and thinkers experimenting with new ways of living. They were fueled by psychedelic rock from bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, who were literally their neighbors. And they were fueled by LSD, which was legal in California until October of 1966. Then came the spark. January fourteenth, 1967. The Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park. Thirty thousand people gathered to hear Allen Ginsberg chant, Timothy Leary tell them to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and bands play for free.

The national media showed up. And suddenly, the secret was out. You’ve seen this pattern in San Francisco before, haven’t you? It’s the Gold Rush, just with a different kind of payload. Instead of gold, the treasure was enlightenment… or at least, freedom. The media reports, and a hit song written to promote a festival—"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"—acted like a map to the gold fields. And so they came. One hundred thousand young people, from all over America, descended on this one small neighborhood for what was being called the Summer of Love.

They arrived looking for utopia. What they found was a neighborhood buckling under the strain. The original community, maybe a few thousand strong, was simply swallowed. Groups like the Diggers, an anarchist collective, tried to hold it together. They served free stew every day in the Panhandle and ran a Free Store. But they couldn't feed an army. The infrastructure wasn't there. Crash pads became overcrowded and unsanitary. The drugs got harder. The peace and love ethos began to fray, replaced by desperation and exploitation. So what was the real story?

The Summer of Love wasn't a single, blissful event. It was two things happening at once. It was a genuine, beautiful, and radical social experiment by a small group of idealists. And it was a massive, chaotic, media-fueled youth migration that overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed that experiment. The very forces that broadcast the dream to the world ensured its collapse on the ground. The kids who came looking for the Haight-Ashbury they saw on TV were, by their very presence, erasing it. And that brings us back to the funeral. By October, the summer was over, but the problems weren’t.

The original residents, the ones who had started it all, staged that mock funeral to make a point. They carried a casket filled with beads, flowers, and incense through the streets. They were trying to tell the news cameras—and the world—that the "Hippie" you think you know, the commercialized, mass-media version... is dead. Please, stop coming. The party’s over. The Haight would spend years recovering from that summer. But the ideas didn't die in that casket. They scattered, carried back across the country by the same kids who had overwhelmed the source, planting seeds of counterculture that would change America.

The Summer of Love itself was fleeting, a beautiful and impossible dream. But it proves, once again, that in San Francisco, even the booms that go bust change the world on their way down.