|
Haight-Ashbury is a district of San Francisco, California, USA named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. It is commonly called The Haight. The Haight-Ashbury generally encompasses the neighborhood surrounding Haight street, 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 is futher broken into The Upper Haight and the Haight-Fillmore or Lower Haight district; the latter being lower in elevation and part of what was previously the principal African American and Japanese neighborhoods in San Francisco's early years. The names of the streets themselves are taken from pioneer and exchange banker Henry Haight, or, (though it is arguable) the tenth governor of California, Henrey Huntley Haight, the former's nephew, and one of the city's first politicians, Sup. Ashbury (of which information is sparse). Both Haight and his nephew as well as Ashbury had a hand in the planning of the neighborhood, and, more importantly, nearby Golden Gate Park at its inception. The district is famous for its role as a center of the 1960s hippie movement, a post-runner and closely associated offshoot of the Beat generation or beat movement, whose initiated and "beatific" youth swarmed San Francisco's "in" North Beach neighborhood two to eight years before the "Summer of Love" in 1967. Many of those who could not find space to live in San Francisco's northside found it in the quaint, relatively cheap and underpopulated Haight Ashbury. The '60s era and modern American counterculture has been synonymous with San Francisco and the upper Haight neighborhood ever since. Before the completion of the Haight Street Cable Railroad in 1883, what is now the Haight-Ashbury was a collection of isolated farms and acres of sand dunes. The new Haight cable car line, completed in 1883, connected the west end of Golden Gate Park with the geographically central Market Street line and the rest of downtown San Francisco. The cable car and land grading and building techniques of the 1890s and early 20th century reinvented the Haight-Ashbury as a residential upper middle-class home owners' district. It was one of the few neighborhoods spared from the fires that followed the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The Haight was hit hard by the Depression, as was much of the city. Residents with enough money to spare left the declining and crowded neighborhood for greener pastures within the growing city limits, or newer, smaller suburban homes in the bay area. During the housing shortage of World War II, large single-family Victorians were divided into apartments to house war workers coming home from the piers; others were converted into boarding homes for profit. By the 1950s, the Haight was a neighborhood in decline. Many buildings were left vacant after the war. Deferred maintenance also took its toll, and the exodus of middle-class residents to newer suburbs continued to leave many units for rent. The Haight Ashbury's elaborately detailed 19th-century multi-story wooden houses became a haven for hippies during the 1960s, due to the availability of cheap rooms and vacant properties for rent or sale in the district. The bohemian subculture that subsequently flourished there took root, and to some extent, has remained to this day. San Francisco and the Haight gained a reputation as the center of illegal drug culture and rock and roll lifestyles soon after, especially with the use of marijuana and LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. By 1967, the neighborhood's fame chiefly rested on the fact that it became the haven for a number of important psychedelic rock performers and groups of the mid-1960s. Acts like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin all lived a short distance from the famous intersection. They not only immortalized the scene in song, but also knew many within the community as friends and family. Another well-known neighborhood presence was The Diggers, a local "community anarchist" group famous for its street theatre who also provided free food to residents every day. The fabric of the neighborhood was forever altered in 1967 during the Summer of Love. Psychedelic rock music was entering the mainstream, and received more and more commercial radio airplay. The song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" became a hit single. The Monterey Pop Festival in June further cemented the status of psychedelic music as a part of mainstream culture and elevated local Haight bands such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane to national stardom. A July 7 Time magazine cover story on "The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture," an August CBS News television report on "The Hippie Temptation" and other major media interest in the hippie subculture exposed the Haight-Ashbury district to enormous national attention and popularized the movement across the country and around the world. Thousands of youth migrated to the Haight-Ashbury district, including many runaway teenagers, irrevocably altering the social structure of the neighborhood. In response to this new population migrating to the Haight-Ashbury and a growing medical crisis caused by increased drug use and lack of health insurance, Dr.David E Smith opened the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic on June 7, 1967, the first free clinic in the U.S. without a religious affiliation. His goal was to provide free medical care without prejudice under the motto that "Health care is a right, not a privilege." The clinic operated in the Haight-Ashbury District through 2007, then moved most of its operations to the Mission District of San Francisco. Nevertheless, the organization continues to provide medical care in San Francisco to those who would otherwise lack access to it. Source: Wikipedia |