What led to the DEMISE of Haight Ashbury’s Hippie Society of Peace and Love? 1965 - 1968 

Part of the brilliance of Freewheeling docs for me is that they’re accessible to anyone regardless of religious or political or philosophical persuasion, however fluid. And deeply engaging and thought provoking- especially those banger endings that make you feel a profound “wow …”

I was in Haight during the 1960s. I'm 78. I found the hippie movement a great illusion.

I was a doctor at the hate Ashbury clinic during the summer of love. It was quite an experience for a boy from Kansas. I watched the pitiful nature of the poor kids in 1968 that were our patients. There were some wonderful people who tried to take care of them And try to love them, but you could watch the whole thing disintegrate from our unique perspective. I enjoyed this documentary and I think I saw myself in one of the clips but I could be wrong. Thanks for documenting this so truthfully and the spelling the myth that the hippie culture was something to be admired. My book is on Kindle. It’s called the entry written and it pretty much reflects the anti-war movement and the pitiful MEDICAL shape that many of the hippies were experiencing. Jack Klausen MD

If nobody is cleaning the bathrooms and taking care of the garbage, it will all go to hell. Truth.

It should be mentioned that proliferation of amphetamines did a lot of damage to that scene. However, this video appears to be censored regarding drugs.

I was involved with Haight Free clinic and subsequently Marin Open House and your chronology is accurate and well done. I have also been apart of other non-publicized experiments that were free-spirited, creative, community expressions of "freedom, peace and love". Even communities that are away from the mainstream and non-publicized go through change and evolution and come to an end. It is important to understand that "everything exists as a moment in time". Events in time are unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes unbelievably wonderful, but they eventually change. Life continuously flows as people change, evolve and their lives change. Nothing is meant to last. What is important is what take away from it, what you give to it and what you use to build the next thing. Things can be going amazingly but then some key people fall in love, marry and have children, move away from the community to build their own family or members want to build a career separate from the community. It is important to remember that all creative outbursts whether it be beatnik, abstract expressionist, the folk scene, hippie, punk, the early 80's East Village art scene all become media fabrications and they all come to an end. None of CBGB original bands embodied the same ethos and applying a term to describe them is useless; the same with the 1940/ early 50''s NYC abstract expressionism. Life is too big and too complex to use a single term to describe it. And, people are too complex and evolving to stay together to maintain something forever. Contradiction is the nature of life. Nothing is meant to last; but many things are meant to celebrated! Let it Be, Forever, Now.

The same thing happened in Portland Oregon. Too many people, high rents, and drug addiction. They came, they saw, and they destroyed.

Excellent. I was a hippie in upstate NY where we had a small scene. So glad I didn’t migrate to the Haight at the time when I was a minor. Ended up moving to SF in 74 when the Haight was dead and the gay movement was in ascendancy. I then worked doing outreach on the street there to help kids who were still running away to the Haight in the 80s. Kids STILL are runaways and homeless there to this day. The Haight has a powerful legacy. Oh, and I remember distinctly reading about The Death Of the Hippie in the newspapers of the time….

I was born and raised in Hawaii and in 1967 I lived with my cousins in Santa Rosa. Curious about all the talk about Haight-Ashbury and the hippy movement we decided to check it out. What a culture shock. There were so many people from all walks of life sharing their music and artistic talents. What was really cool was the number of people gathering to share love for all. I never encountered any negative people. What a moment in time for me.

In 1967 I was 18,had shoulder-length hair with bell-bottom pants.Grass was $10 for a "lid",hash $10 a gram acid was a dollar a hit I remember much of the stuff in this video. By 1968 the speedfreaks and other trash moved in and destroyed the place Thus is the world!

I remember the hippie movement well. In 67, I was living in the east bay and there was a teenage hippie couple that hung out at our local bowling alley. They told me they were moving to the Haight Ashbury district and they wanted me to go with them. I told them I was only 11 years old and I don't think my mom and dad would let me. I thought about it though.😧

The idealism of youth gives way to the realities of getting a job, paying the mortgage, and looking after the kids. Not to mention hard drugs and partying are a dead end.

The demise? Drug addiction, STD's, and bums.

Harder drugs, creepers, criminal elements, and then the unsustainable theories of perpetual cooperation....now I will see what the documentary said.

George Harrison nailed it ! I was a Hippie ( I'm 71 ) , played guitar n bands ( still play solo ) , but I also worked and served my country in the Army for 10 years. I paid my bills and took showers and had a clean home .It was never a " Forever thing " . nothing is ! All movements , good or bad , will fade out and die ! It is the way of things ! Some of my friends tried to go out there and starved , then came back . Getting high only lasts a short time . Food , Rent and Bills are monthly , every month ! You could try farming , but you really have to work for that ! No getting high first thing in the morning , your feeding livestock at 04:00 in the morning and plowing until 12 midnight ! Utopia is for the Rich !

I loved going to Haight Ashbury, it was a beautiful place. Now it's downright scary!

My "First Concert" 12-19-1969 - my 16th Bday - Janis Joplin - NYC -

Every counter-culture scene is short lived. Nothing gets done when nobody wants to be productive. Yes producing art is fun and important, but you gotta pay the rent and eat.

I lived in communal housing across the bay for 7 years. When I first went to San Francisco in summer of 1968, it was just about all over. The SF police had reportedly raided the community and everyone moved on, mostly north to Marin, I believe. By August 1969, the hippie momenent, despite Woodstock that same month, lost its appeal to young people due to the shock of the Murders by the the Manson communal family. The only thing that kept any of the pieces alive, perhaps, was resistance to the Vietnam War.

One of those times i've always been fascinated by, and i love mid/late 60's psychedelic music and culture. I was born in 71, so i was a generation late. I always think that with any of these countercultural moments, its not about the drugs, the clothes, the lingo, its the lessons that you should learn about not fearing difference and realising that behind the social divisions, constructs and labels of class, race, gender, nationality etc we are ALL the same humanity and no matter what happens in the future our shared humanity will remain. Once Haight Ashbury's moment ended, once the Monterey Pop concert or Woodstock were over, THATs when the hard work was needed. It is precisely when the musics over when the lesson should be understood. It is what you take with you in your heart and apply to the rest of your life when these cultural movements have gone. The peace and love, community, love for nature and others etc, was completely forgotten by the vast majority of those people once they grew up/got corporate jobs - save for an occasional joint, and listening to the doors while snorting a few lines. Once they realised that the REAL revolution meant giving up some of the privileges that mom and pops bestowed on them, they ran as fast as possible back to what was safe and comfortable. Some people DID walk the walk, and made sure that those core ideals got passed down to future generations. The late 80's/early 90's acid house/rave culture in the U.K was a seismic cultural shift that carried A LOT of those idealistic lessons from the 60's into a new cultural movement that spread around the world. Some people go along for the ride, but some people get the bigger message and emotion being expressed by everyone, and try and do better for the world. We are not just mindless drones existing on this rock just to slave our lives away for faceless corporations, we are thinking, feeling human beings, capable of creating beautiful things to inspire each other to make the world a better place for everyone like science, art, music and poetry! Pass it on!🫶

What happened to SF was the exact same thing that happened to Greenwich Village in NYC in the 60s : the Corporate Real Estate interests started jacking up the rents to insane prices, oftentimes not just doubling, but quadrupling rates for commercial and residential tenants, forcing tenants to move out and small business owners to close shop. Bookstores and record shops are never high profit businesses and once one 'counter culture' store closed, others had to follow suit. Large Real Estate developers are always the ones who kill communities and force people and small businesses out. I see it happening in 2024 like crazy in my suburban city just outside NYC; developers forcing out small business owners who've been in the community for decades to pave way for "Luxury" Co-ops and Condos. They've done the same from coast to coast in the U.S. They buy off local officials who will then declare "imminent domain" and pay small store owners only a fraction of what their property's worth. This is what led to the decline of NYC and SF and LA in the 1960s and made them some of the most expensive and unlivable and unaffordable cities in the U.S. It wasn't drugs or anything else but Greed pure and simple.

I was right there on Stanyan at this time. It kills me that I missed Jimi in the Panhandle but I was only 7 at the time so it's understandable. I remember going into a Diggers Free Store on Carl and getting military Sargent's Stripes for free. Overall you have really captured the vibe of the time and how I remember it. Some of the photos I have never seen. Jack Cassidy looks so young! I ended up working for Bill Graham about 15 years after the "Summer Of Love". I also worked at the Fillmore for a time but it was a Punk Club called the Elite Club by then. Crazy memories. Thanks for the Trip!

the dealers moved in....got messy. twas still quite groovy in the late 70s & 80s when had a renaissance. today its quite touristy, but still has a fun flavor. tho few of the original shops remain.... the annual street fair was wild... The Grande Piano was a kool cafe where we all gathered for coffee and...... the free clinic was awesome and helped alot of folks.... i lived in a georgous old lady (victorian) bldg for yrs near haight and ashbury....rocker ghosts everywhere... The haight is beloved.

Yeah, I'm a 4th generation native San Franciscan, and I could answer the question of what led to the demise when it was posed 2 minutes in. It was people from San Francisco, till it was massively publicized, then it was people from everywhere, latching on and sucking the life out. In a very similar sense, this has always happened to San Francisco and its natives, and is happening to this day. The phenomenon just changes form over and over. People come and bastardize the pure nature of the city's culture and thieve what they can from the heart and soul of our city. With mass influx of people from elsewhere came predators and opportunists, people looking to manipulate, deceive, exploit, take advantage, rape, batter, pillage, and they did, leaving traumatized innocents in their wake, as those sorts always invariably do. That's not about San Francisco, and it's no reflection on the city, it's the exceedingly typical reality that something magnetically beautiful does attract something dark and ugly that seeks to abuse. And then, of course, drugs. Not weed, not psychedelics, the harder drugs. Speed flooded in via the Hell's Angels and others and turned young people inside out, people became violent, desperate, addicted, developed speed psychosis. Some of this was touched on in this video. It was disappointing to see the entire joyful spirit and idealistic culture of the location and time period end on such a dark deranged note here, which I can only understand as yet another transparent denigration and robbery from the pure heart of my city. Very weak, lazy way to conclude.

Garcia was so perceptive and intelligent and articulate.

As a product of Haight street this is refreshing to see because the aurra is still there. It will never leave! I have been here since 1964.....I became homeless 2005-2008 and lived on and around HIPPIE HILL....The drum circle became integral again at that time and pivotal for a foundation of hope until the H.O.T. Team got me inside where last 4th of July I reached 15 years NO ALCOHOL! I am extremely thankful for San Francisco!!

Jerry Garcia was super intelligent, talented. Always worthwhile hearing what he has to say. 👍🎬

Visited the Haight in summer of '68 to check out the scene. By then the summer of love had become the summer of hell. Lot's of young people sitting outside the shops very stoned and asking for spare change from passersby. Found out later that the Haight's freewheeling culture collasped under the weight of too many young people and the grifters attracted to that scene. Gracia was right: Freedom doesn't mean "free"; you must also have responsibility for the orderly functioning of the culture or it soons descends into anarchy. Sic transit gloria mundi

Now the place is crime ridden, overrun with homeless people, businesses have abandoned it and the entire state, look at what they have done to this beautiful state and city.

Must have been fun for a few months or so in 1966 and 1967, for a few thousand people who were there. I find it all rather depressing to hear about now.

Wonderful!!! I was born in 73 and now I understand how everyone and everything from that time interconnects! Thank you!!

The stars are only in alignment for so long.

My mom and dad raised me on a lot of this type of music when I was a kid in the seventies me and my sisters great music 👍🥁🥁

The term "Free Love" meant to free your love, not screw anybody anytime

This film had impact 25 years ago, The standards and morals sure have gone down hill since then

There were still some hippies hanging around the Haight in '73 when I went there. One house was open to the hippies to use as a crash pad. I was told it belonged to the grateful dead. It had no furniture but it was carpeted if I remember right.

Spent time there and sure not the same. Love your video on RU-vid and may God Richly Bless you and may Jesus Christ show you His GREAT love that He has for each of YOU ❤️ Just ask Him to show you personally His Love as He did to me years ago 😊

The only thing that flourished at Haight/Ashbury was the music and musical creativity. Everything else about the hippie culture was a downside. Drugs debilitated everyone who took them, some more quickly than others. Alcohol had the equivalent effect, and was just another drug to deaden your frontal lobes. "Free love' was nothing more than promiscuity with a cool name, which functioned to undermine the value of lasting man/woman partnerships as well as marriage. The hippies eventually settled on the "us versus the pigs" victim mentality, which was where radical feminism got its start in the US. The music is nostalgic and valuable, but the drug culture of the 60s was an abject failure on every other level. From the culture of "peace and love" emerged addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and societal disintegration.

Still fascinated with this era; always will be, though I'd never pursue the lifestyle. I'm too prim!🙂‍↕️

Far out! I'm 66 now, and my "beatnik" parents dragged me out of North Beach, San Francisco (276 Francisco St., little hovel is still there) in '60 or 61'. I didn't know then what I would be missing until just a few years later! The drug me over to Germany to pick up our custom-made 1961 VW Bus and did Europe in style, apparently. I do remember some of it, but we shipped the bus and us back to NYC, moved not quite far enough upstate to a little factory village on the Hudson River. I'm still here, could never afford to go back. I started getting hip to the news when Kennedy was murdered, got a subscription to MAD magazine, and watched that disgusting "conflict in Vietnam" on TV. And listening to San Francisco and Greenwich village on the brandy new FM band radio. I lived what turned out to be walking distance to Yasgur's Farm, but Pop didn't want me to go, and he didn't want to drive me to Woodstock. The big kids wouldn't take me, and I chickened out on riding my bike the mile or so to Nyack, stash the bike, climb up onto the NYS Thruway and hitch a ride. Still think I could have pulled it off! Sometime around '74, the Grateful Dead (whoever they were) began following me around, I had gone haywire in middle (gulag) school, and Pop caught a miracle and put me in what I now have to call a "Hippie School", very hard to explain, experimental back then. And I grew up loving everyone and spreading as much Peace as I could. Pop married a wonderful woman who survived him, and we talk a lot. Turns out, while I was being a River Rat, and wharves, I guess, my Stepmom was in Haight Ashbury struttin' down the boulevard! Man! She hung around with all the people I wish I'd met! Jerry before the beard, even. Endless stories! Her favorite musician is Bob Dylan, and was then, but it turned out, over and over, they were at the same party, bar, park, and she never saw him! Stoned and she missed it, I guess. Sorry to blather, and I got lots more (met Kesey and Krassner, that's two chapters there.) Okay, back to your regular programming... Peace, Love, Earth!

A lot of the people I knew in the 70's that were into The Grateful Dead were literally incapable of taking care of themselves on their own. Some of them eventually committed suicide.

overcrowding ,homelessness hunger, drug addiction,and crime affected the neighborhood

Sitting up straight and meditating... Breathing in... absorbing love... Breathing out... dissolving stress... Sending love and healing energy to everyone reading the comment section.(~);}

Good doc. I remember the popularisation of the Haight in the mass media in early 1967. I was very attracted by it but was too young to go there myself. But I was certainly influenced by the scene. Still have a romance about that time and place and still am fond of the music.

Hippies grew up and turned i to what they fought against

Fantasy is a deadly playground.

Easy, people on drugs and doing nothing except hanging out. Even the Beatles said it when they visited. They found it depressing. The scene was a delusion.

It was a great time to be young❤🎉

The demise of the hippie movement was hard drugs!

They grew up and learned that sponging off mom and dad and begging while being stoned is a poor life choice.

Hustlers, Addiction, overdosing, predators, cons, bad drugs, thieves, evil vibes man, that's what killed the summer of love ☮️ Even Charles Manson had since it coming down, and had gotten the hell out of there.

My friends who lived in North Beach left California following the Monterey music event in June of 1967. My friend and his wife told me, "The experiment is over for us - it won't be too much longer before it all sours." The mass media at the time didn't help matters either. Too many under-age kids flocking to the Haight didn't either.

DAVID CROSBY: "We were RIGHT about Vietnam. We were WRONG about drugs."

The curiosity seekers didn't help matters. Jerry Garcia once said when tour busses filled with curiosity seekers rolled in that was it they moved to Micky Hart's ranch nearby.

Its hard to live where you just get high everyday and don't have to work and take responsibility for yourself. Alot of poor addicts we know that can't last long.

I was in touch from the beginning and far after the end. I have never heard of beatniks being associated with Hippies. They were two distinctly different cultures and societies.

What happened to peace and love? Peace and love. You need rules, structure, laws, work to function. You can’t sit around doing dope all day and think you’re going to have a house next month.

"horrible, spotty, drop-out kids... on drugs/// It was like the bowery, like alcoholism, like any addiction." George Harrison

Hippie "culture" dies because narcissism is actually exhausting.

this is awesome! A real human created documentary with real person narrating without that familiar fucking Ai mispronouncing shit out of context. 10 thumbs up!!! 😃👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

Got a ride in 1967 to the Monterey Pop Festival from Fullerton with a friend, Jackson Browne and his lost wax gold jewelry partner, Thomas Thomas, as they had a display booth on the grounds. We spent 4 1/2 days on the grounds. Two weeks later, I went to the city (San Francisco) for the Summer Solstice Celebration, went back to playing in LA & Orange County until I got a call in 1969 to come up and play with a group headed by a vocalist living in Larkspur that I'd played with in So-Cal called Rejoice. While playing with them I ran into a singer I'd first run into a couple of years before at Sid's Blue Beet in Newport Beach - Lisa Kindred. After I left the group, Lisa and I started playing together, she on vocals & rhythm acoustic and I accompanied her on my Chet Atkins model Gretsch. Then we got married while living in North Beach, then Stinson Beach and, finally, the Haight where we played with Debbie Olcese's (now Sipes) band Ascension. Lisa best described the change in the Haight when bodies started showing up in dumpsters by making the following observation: "There was a time when anyone with long hair was your friend".

Drugs filth lazyness immaturity and more drugs

The dream became a nightmare thanks to excess.

The time to have been there would have been 1966---before the rest of the world found out about this little Utopia for societal misfits and descended on the place and ruined it in 1967. I've heard more than one "native" of the area say that the REAL summer of love was in 1966--not 1967. Also, LSD was still legal up until October of that year.

What led to its demise? The fact that it was unsustainable from the start. 🤦‍♂️

W hat a fantastic video have a wonderful day ❤❤❤❤❤❤😊😊😊😊😊😊

I was there during 1980 on my first journey around America and just saw very sad burned out hippies who seemed disillusioned, burned out by substances without much to show for their lives. Others had turned to nature, left and had small holdings , self sufficiency A few had rediscovered the Holy Bible clinging onto its truth rather than seeing everything through a haze. .

Peace and love in Haight Ashbury was largely a myth. I lived there 1967-68 and a huge amount of violence and exploitation lurked just below the surface. Rape was common, with underage runaways often victims. The district never came close to a general atmosphere of peace and love.

Why do they censor the audio when pot or acid is mentioned?

The summer of illusion..........Hedonism is not Love nor does it lead to Peace.

Every beautiful scene once discovered and flocked to, soon comes crashing down man.

I grew up in the Bay Area during that mess with the hippies. Yes indeed, I got caught in the middle between generations (baby boomer generation had just phased out in California), however I always wanted to be a hippie in my younger years. I saw those acid freaks spacing out the redwoods and thought wow, that looks like freedom! Little did I know about the dark side of that movement. By the time I left home (age 17 in 1976), the Jesus movement was in full swing. Little did I know about the dark side of THAT movement. What can I say... I was a misfit among misfits.

It was an era where the untold truth centralized into the power of beautiful girls. You weren't cool unless you seemed cool to a Playboy bunny worthy girl. The world revolved around them. The hippy instincts were correct in that you didn't want the 'wage slave employed till you croak' script. But the biggest irony was to later find the only secure jobs were the ones- that nobody wanted.

The Haight Ashbury scene peaked with the "Human Be In"--after that watershed moment mass media descended upon the community and it got commercialized. Additionally, once the district got mass publicity it drew the attention of a lot of shady characters who came in and created major problems--one writer described it as "a pack of hungry coyotes circling innocent lambs." Add to that the mass overcrowding with runaways along with infrastructure shortages and things collapsed pretty quickly. I think the ultimate lessons are: 1) A community like the 60's Haight Ashbury HAS to fly "under the radar" to be sustaining. 2) As Jerry Garcia stated in this clip--there truly is no "free lunch." Along with freedom comes responsibility. If you want a community like this the individuals in that community have to be responsible to do the necessary work to keep it going. (Sadly, many hippies only wanted the pleasure--and none of the sacrifice.)

We stopped there several years back when visiting SF. It’s a damn trippy place.

Jerry Garcia sounded like a politician at times, and other times, a brilliant philosopher.

Like anything in our society, it was ruined once it was discovered and became national news, leading to an influx of people who had nothing to do with the original scene. Just as with punk later, once the entertainment industry figured out how to wring money out of the movement by pumping out cheap, mass-produced shit, "hippie" became just another marketing silo.

Some great music and thought/culture came out of this time. Beautiful intentions that turned dirty and grim... My last memory there was when visiting in 1985. I was walking by the doorway in front of a beautiful Victorian mansion with my girlfriend, and some poor soul was putting a needle in his arm. I never returned. I hear it's worse now. It's a very sad story for a unique, historical American city. The flowers in" Flower Power "wilted and died quickly to line some graves. They still do.

As Jerry said, "There's no such thing as a free ride." My uncle was a teacher in S.F. in the 60''s and I would visit him and go to concerts at the Fillmore, Carousel, and Winterland. I would occasionally go to the Haight just to see what was going on. It was stupid. Crowds of people without money or other resources filled the streets. You could see it degrading every time I went. Too many drugs like heroin, speed, etc. Mentally ill people roaming around and then the crime really started. I blame it on the press, luring kids from all over with b.s. articles about 'hippies'. It was totally dead by '69.

What a great name for a band - Big Brother and the Holding Company!!! I thought 1966 would've been a great time to have been young there!!! I was only five then, a bit too young. My sister went to Haight Asbury in 69 or 70, and became addicted...

8:20 ... When some Madison Avenue suits notices The Psychedelic Shop (and others) the InStore chain (and others) was born and Psychedelia/Hippies/Counter Culture equaled $$$$... 8:29 .. "is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?" 🤣 14:25 ... Quicksilver Messenger Service was my SF band of choice (thd mid '60's lineup, minus Dino Valenti)..❤❤❤ To paraphrase Garcia and quote Robert Heinlein, "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

I'll never understand how George Harrison could have been so naive about the Haight. Did he not know anyone who could have told him what the scene really was like? Did he not read any underground newspapers? It didn't take too much awareness to know what was going on there. The Haight held no appeal for me, it didn't take a genius to know that inviting thousands of kids to come to San Francisco to experience a "Summer of Love" was an ill conceived idea. The organizers had already seen how destructive publicity had been to their little community in '66. At least for a while though, the legend of the Summer Of Love overshadowed the reality. The demise of that early San Francisco scene foretold the eventual demise of the counterculture. The counterculture was a very small part of the Boomer generation. Most Boomers were as straight as their parents, oblivious to the music and lifestyle of the counterculture. But after the Woodstock documentary played throughout the country, kids in the South and middle America realized that what their parents, teachers and other authority figures were telling them about the "hippies" was a lie. What they saw in the documentary ran counter to everything that they were told. Instead, they saw good people, having a good time, enjoying good music and having respect for like minded people. The result was, many thousands of formerly straight kids started growing their hair and smoking pot, along with them came predators, dangerous people who sought to take advantage of the vulnerable. What was missing from these newcomers was an understanding of why the lifestyle started and the reasons for using mind expanding substances. The counterculture died from assimilation, that which had been counter became mainstream, reasons and ritual were lost, white powder drugs became prevalent and it became a drug free-for-all. I was a Freak, a true believer in the ideals of the lifestyle, someone who, from a young age felt distant from the offerings of straight society. I was not anything like the image of the guys who were portrayed in the Playboy magazine advertisements, "What kind of man reads Playboy?". That world was far too pretentious, artificial and success oriented. The fringes of society were far more interesting to me, the world held so much wonder and I wanted to have experiences which would appeal to my heart and mind. There were others who were just like me, we called each other brother and sister, we shared experiences, ritualized getting high, treated psychedelics as if they were sacraments. We spent much of the day doing our best to live within a society that literally hated us. We were denied employment and service, suffered the indignity of insults and threats of violence, we were pilloried by politicians, we were profiled by the police and were were shot at and killed on college campuses. For a short time, white kids knew, first hand, what it was like to be a minority in America. All of the negativity would instantly go away if we would just cut our hair but that was an impossibility for us. People of color couldn't change their skin and we felt obliged to remain steadfast for their sake and for others like us. As David Crosby said, "I feel like I owe it to someone". The adversities made our commitment stronger, as it did for our connection to each other. Spending time with other freaks felt like being with a real family. Walking down a street in anytown America, if you saw another freak, you'd nod hello to each other. We took full advantage of the privilege of youth but eventually things devolved into nothing more than fashion. Music which was made by freaks, for freaks became commercial pablum, a money making business first and foremost. Most musicians no longer occupied the same space as the listeners, they became millionaires, isolated themselves and white powders overtook their lives. In the end, the lifestyle was unsustainable but for a while though, it was beautiful, a rare and special time indeed.

My mom and dad never got into this . I was born in the 60’s .dad was an officer flying helicopters in Viet Nam and mom was a nurse , we grew up in upstate ny . Mom saw a a lot of young people die from the drug scene and it broke her heart . We never had contact with these people . But mom spoke to grandma about the young people dying and getting very sick from the drugs .we kids were all to young to know about any of this .

One thing that made the Hippie scene possible was that a young person could get by on very little money. It was very possible to pursue other interests. Example a used car was under 100.00. Rent for a several bedroom house was 75 a month. All utilities and phone 30 a month. Hotels 30 dollars a week. A full meal in a restaurant with a tip 2 to five dollars. Full breakfast with coffee OJ toast eggs hashbrown bacon was 75 cents, Hotcakes were a quarter. All hippies shared houses so rent was 10-20 $ a month per person. A couple days work a week was enough to live very comfortably in the 60s.

It only proved to the devotees of the noble savage that the world is not a paradise and you cannot live life in it like it was, that this material universe is somehow benevolent and will provide for you.

It is understandable why Haight happened. Many young men did not want to go to Viet Nam. Haight didn't last because the old rules were true. It is better to be clean than dirty. There is no hope with dope Before you have sex, get the ring. There is dignity in work. and it is possible that one day your future will look so bright that you'll have to wear shades.

As with so many underground scenes, the Haight scene was destroyed when the media gave it a name (hippie) and made it trendy, which attracted all the undesirable elements that sucked the life out of it and destroyed any sense of community. Mainstream culture has un uncanny, perhaps even insidious, knack for destroying sub- or counter-cultures by making them popular.

In 1957 my friend parents sold their home, I was 5, we were in our way to San Francisco, then my Mother discovered she was pregnant. Damn I could have been there for the summer of love 💕

I still think that it would have been fun to live during that time. And it's to bad that San Francisco has gone down hill over the last few years.

The time was wonderful but not enough to overcome the basic greed and violence that define humans

Several significant events were omitted. The Manson Family and Altamont were symptomatic of the corruption and downfall of hippiedom; I thought they should have been included. Overall, I enjoyed the documentary. I experienced those times firsthand. I recall when Jerry Rubin was deemed a traitor for wearing a pinstripe suit and turning into a stockbroker-how we believed he had sold out. Country Joe's song, "Cover of the Rolling Stone," penned by Shel Silverstein, a Bay Area native, adeptly captured the contradiction between the free love ethos and the commercialism at the heart of the hippie movement. Let's face it, drugs were a driving force. Without drugs and the birth control pill, which also emerged around that time, we men would likely still have short hair, and women would be in long skirts. Perhaps not, but you get the idea. When I arrived in Hollywood, CA, in the early seventies, the Sunset Strip was winding down, and young people were returning to work. The Vietnam War, another event I referenced, had ended due to Nixon and Kissinger's orchestrated withdrawal, reducing the fervor of the protests. Yet, the mid-seventies saw the rise of a new drug crisis: cocaine. Music also shifted during this period; people moved from 45s to LPs, and there were more solo singer/songwriters than bands.

It was the smell

I grew up in the Sunset district in SF. I was 11 yrs old at this time, my friends and I used to go down to the Haight on Saturday mornings, it was a complete mess.

God Bless Always Thank you very much Philadelphia USA 🇺🇸 ❤❤🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉❤

Between the misfits who arrived w/no intention of contributing to a community, the nonstop tour buses of gaping out-of-towners, the speed, VD, and the filth of flats where nobody ever cleaned the kitchen or bath -- the Haight quickly became a slum. Some of the early residents moved to Upper Grant in North Beach or to Berkeley, while others left for Marin, Sonoma, Humboldt & Mendocino counties. Compare this to Christiana in Copenhagen, where the experiment continues to this very day.

I live here and I love it

Love in the Haight ☮️

No society can work in which nobody wants to accept any commitment or responsibility. It's a shame, maybe, but there it is...

I lived in the Haight in the early '70s. 2024 Oak Street, across from the panhandle. I remember a free store on Haight Street and the Omnibus Cafe, a beer joint. Very fond memories.

They became the new base of the military industrial complex and went from peaceniks to war hawks!