Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love

Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love

Photo: Mike Norton, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

The Haight began as sand dunes and farms. When the Haight Street cable railroad opened in 1883, linking downtown to the new Golden Gate Park, builders filled the slopes with ornate Victorian houses for middle-class families, and many of them still stand. The district was one of the few spared by the 1906 fire.

By the 1950s many of those big houses had been split into cheap apartments. College students and Beats priced out of North Beach moved in, and by 1966 the Haight was the center of a new counterculture of rock bands, poster artists, communal houses and free food. In 1967, the Summer of Love, as many as 100,000 young people poured in, bringing music and idealism, but also crowding, hunger and hard drugs.

Several Muni bus lines run along Haight Street. The mini tour takes about an hour; use the details arrow.

Getting here: From the Fillmore, take a bus or walk south and west about 2.5 kilometers, roughly 35 minutes, to the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets.

Did you know?: The Psychedelic Shop, often called the first head shop, opened on Haight Street on January 3, 1966.

Photo op: Stand at the corner of Haight and Ashbury to photograph the street signs, among the most photographed in the city, with Victorian bay windows behind them.

More on Wikipedia: Haight-Ashbury · Summer of Love · Human Be-In · Diggers

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom