How The Haight Became the Home of the Hippies

Although its heart is Haight Street, particularly the stretch from the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park past Ashbury to a block or two beyond Masonic, the actual physical boundaries of Haight-Ashbury are roughly considered to be Stanyan Street to the west, Baker Street to the east, 17th Street to the south and Fulton Street to the north. Nestled more or less in the center of the city, the Haight is accessible and, steep hills to the south notwithstanding, easy to navigate.

At one time a foraging ground for the local Indians, Haight-Ashbury was first settled in 1870 by a dairy farmer named William Lange. Soon thereafter, most of the district's streets were named after members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who helped spin the wheels that put Golden Gate Park into motion toward the end of the 19th century.

Tolerant Haight Street itself, ironically, was named after California Governor Henry Haight, known in retrospect for his efforts to keep non-whites out of the city.

As the park was completed, Haight Street took on more strategic importance, with a cable car line coming through and recreational facilities being erected in the area. During the 1880s, the Haight became an affluent area, and a construction boom resulted in a proliferation of "Queen Anne" style, or Victorian, homes being built–some of the most beautiful houses in the city. Largely unscathed by the 1906 earthquake, the Haight took on even greater import during the first years of the 20th century as prolific building took place in the city's western half. Most of the classic homes that still stand in the Haight today were built before the Great Depression.

After the Depression, however, the rich began to vacate the Haight for other parts of the city, and much of the area fell into disrepair. Despite hosting schools, hospitals, sports facilities and, of course, the gateway to Golden Gate Park, the Haight became something of a ghost town during the years before and directly after World War II, and many of those homes that still housed people at all had been divided into apartments or duplexes. Into the 1950s, Haight-Ashbury remained home primarily to working-class people, particularly minorities.

By the end of the '50s, though, the Haight was being rediscovered, by several groups of low-income people. Its cheap rents and fabulous architecture were welcome signs to students from San Francisco State University, as well as artists and other creative people. Gays also found the area inviting in the years before Castro and Polk streets became fashionable gay outposts. By 1965-66, the Haight had supplanted North Beach as San Francisco's most happening district.

"Haight Street," Marty Balin said in a 1966 interview with Los Angeles radio station KFWB's Hitline magazine, "is just like Carnaby Street [in London]. Long hair, boutiques, ice cream parlors, band sessions and plays in the park, pie fights–it's just great. It's a low-rent district so all the kids can afford to live there."

A community spirit had developed among the new residents even before the arrival of the hippies, the Haight having become a refuge for the politically disenfranchised. When, in 1959, the state earmarked the Panhandle–the narrow strip of park jutting out from Golden Gate Park, buttressed by Oak and Fell streets–as a freeway construction site, a coalition of Haight residents mobilized into action, and by 1966 the proposal was narrowly defeated by the Board of Supervisors. One supervisor, future mayor George Moscone, who admired the Haight's spirit and its focus on the artistic, was said to be the force that knocked down the idea once and for all–just in time for Haight and Ashbury to become the most famous corner in San Francisco and, for a brief while, maybe even the world.