Haight-Ashbury: Stones, Song, and Victorians

Haight and Ashbury

The intersection that gave a neighborhood its name and a generation its compass point.

You are standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The street signs above you are two of the most stolen in America, so the city eventually started selling replicas at the police station. That should tell you something about what this intersection means to people. In 1967 the Haight drew somewhere around 100,000 young people.

The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane all lived within a few blocks of where you are standing. The neighborhood still wears its history on its storefronts, but the Summer of Love was also brief and complicated. A lot of the kids who flooded in that summer were gone by fall, and the Dead themselves had left 710 Ashbury by early 1968. The corner you are on now was never just a tourist stop.

It was a real place where things happened fast and fell apart faster. Look up at the intersection. Take it in. Then turn and walk north up Ashbury Street, climbing the hill toward number 710.

710 Ashbury Street

The Grateful Dead house, where a boarding house became the band's headquarters, photo backdrop, and the site of a front-page pot bust in 1967.

This tall Victorian at 710 Ashbury was a boarding house before it was a legend. The band's managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, set up the office here first, then rooms opened up one by one until the whole building was theirs. The Grateful Dead posed on this front stoop for a Rolling Stone photograph by Baron Wolman. A thin, beardless Jerry Garcia grins from the doorway; Pigpen holds a rifle.

That image became one of the band's most enduring pictures, and it is why people still pause at this gate today. On October 2, 1967, police raided the house and arrested Bob Weir and Pigpen on marijuana charges, along with several others. The bust made the front page of the Chronicle. The band held a press conference right here, a rare political act from a group that otherwise steered clear.

Ken Kesey once lost his brakes coming down this hill and had to choose between crashing into the Dead's house or the Hells Angels' house across the street. He chose the Angels. Walk back down Ashbury toward Haight. Your next stop is two doors south of the corner, at 635.

Buena Vista Park

San Francisco's oldest park, established in 1867, where WPA workers built footpaths out of broken Victorian headstones. Some inscriptions still face the sky.

Buena Vista Park is 36 acres of steep hill, dense oaks, and eucalyptus, and it is the oldest official park in San Francisco. It was called Hill Park when the city set it aside in 1867, paying squatters $88,250 to leave. In 1906, people gathered on this summit for five days to watch the fires from the earthquake burn across the city. The paths you are walking on were rebuilt by WPA workers in the late 1930s.

They lined the gutters with broken marble headstones taken from the Victorian cemeteries at Lone Mountain, which the city was clearing to move the dead to Colma. Most stones were placed inscription-side down, out of respect. But a few were laid face up. Walk the western paths near the Haight Street entrance and look at the stone borders along the trail edges.

You will find fragments: a number 52, the word 'died,' a partial name. The marble is smooth and white, cut into irregular triangles. These gutters run all the way up the hillside. The park fell into rough shape during the Summer of Love, when people camped in the dense brush and police made regular arrests.

A renovation in 1978 stabilized the path system. Today it is quiet, steep, and full of hidden things. When you are ready, exit the park at its northeast corner and walk north two blocks to Fell Street. Cross Fell and enter the Panhandle.