After a weekend walk around San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, I wanted to learn more about its history. All I really knew about it was that it became a bohemian haven in the late 1960s and has morphed into a more commercial version of its hippie past since then. It’s a place that has lots of murals and other interesting street art: stencils on the sidewalks, colorfully painted homes and businesses, eye-catching window displays, and more. Even now during the COVID pandemic, the area has some life and vibrancy as people window shop and hang out on Haight Street. And sadly, like many areas of San Francisco, it has a lot of homeless people and other folks who are down on their luck.

Early History

The earliest people who lived in the region that is now San Francisco were Native Americans, the Ramaytush Ohlone, who were part of a larger group of the Ohlone/Costanoan peoples. The land where Haight-Ashbury now lies was mostly sand dunes and was not a hospitable area for Native Americans to settle. The Spanish who came later to what is now California did not gravitate to this part of the region either, with its sandy expanses and often cool, foggy weather.

Nineteenth Century Development

The 1849 Gold Rush brought American prospectors and settlers to the region, where the original small town of Yerba Buena, later named San Francisco, rapidly grew. Like the Ohlones and Spanish before them, the Forty-Niners didn’t settle in most of the central and western parts of what is now San Francisco, including the future site of Haight-Ashbury. In addition to the sandy soil and fog, the area was not convenient to the waterfront, where most of San Francisco’s early growth occurred. Over time, some farms and “ranches” and a few scattered houses dotted the land that is now the Haight.

The development of Golden Gate Park in the 1870s brought more visitors and residents to central and western parts of San Francisco. By the 1880s, cable cars made travel through what is now Haight-Ashbury easy. Many cable car lines to Golden Gate Park terminated at or near the main pedestrian entrance to the park at Haight and Stanyan streets. With the influx of visitors, pool halls, taverns, restaurants, livery stables, hotels, boarding houses, bicycle shops, and other businesses sprang up near the intersection. Cable car lines and better land grading and building techniques of the 1890s and early 20th century allowed Haight-Ashbury to grow into a suburban residential upper middle class homeowners’ district, with a few pockets of large homes of the rich and elite.

Early attractions in the neighborhood were The Chutes, an amusement park located on Haight Street between Cole and Clayton streets between 1895 and 1902, and the Haight Street Grounds stadium, built for California League baseball, which opened in 1887. In addition to League baseball games, the Grounds also hosted football games for University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University in the early 1890s, before either had their own stadiums. The Grounds hit hard times with the Depression of 1893 and closed in 1895. The land was sold and redeveloped for residences.

1900 to Mid-Twentieth Century

Haight-Ashbury was one of the few neighborhoods of San Francisco spared from the devastating earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906. Many people who lived elsewhere in the city who were displaced from their homes found shelter in the Haight in hotels on Stanyon Street. Less fortunate families stayed in tent villages in Golden Gate Park and The Panhandle. Many of these refugees decided to make the Haight-Ashbury their permanent home. A post-earthquake building boom saw the creation of many new residences, often tract houses and flats built for the lower-middle and middle classes.

By the 1910s, the Haight had many businesses, street car lines, schools, and hospitals and was a vibrant community. In 1924, a San Francisco columnist wrote “There is a comfortable maturity about the compact little city that San Francisco knows as Haight Ashbury. … just weathered enough to be nice, and new enough to be looking ahead to the future.” However, the good times didn’t last, as the Great Depression of 1929 to 1939 brought hardship. Many Haight-Ashbury residents with means moved to the suburbs. The bad economy, along with redlining in San Francisco, contributed to further decline of the Haight. Many of the old homes were divided into flats or converted into boarding houses, and by the ’40s and ’50s, much of the neighborhood was in disrepair, with some buildings vacant.

The Birth of the Haight’s Boho Culture

In the 1950s, a freeway was proposed that would have run through The Panhandle, but public protests in the ’50s and early to mid ’60s prevented the project from happening. Because the nearby Haight area was already economically depressed and became more so due to fears of how a freeway would impact the neighborhood, cheap rents and vacant properties attracted ’50s beatniks and, later, artists and hippies. This burgeoning alternative culture flourished. By the mid-1960s, the Haight’s counterculture brought nationwide media attention.

The first ever head shop, Ron and Jay Thelin’s Psychedelic Shop, opened on Haight Street in 1966. The Thelins felt that psychedelic drugs were they key to peace and equality and that people needed a supportive, positive environment in which to experience them. The Psychedelic Shop would be that place. Because of the Haight’s widespread drug use, “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson labeled the area “Hashbury” in a New York Times Magazine article. The Haight was alive with musicians and other creatives, such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, and actor Peter Coyote, who in the ’60s was a member of “The Diggers,” a local anarchist activist group that did street theater.

Inspired by the Diggers’ activism, a group of University of California, San Francisco medical students opened the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. The clinic, which was the first nonsectarian free medical clinic in the United States, declared health care a right for all and also helped transform how drug addiction is treated. The clinic still serves the uninsured today. Similarly, the nearby Huckleberry House (founded in 1967 and still operating) transformed how support services are provided to homeless young people.

The Summer of Love, in 1967, attracted a wide range of people to Haight-Ashbury, including teenagers and college students drawn by the dream of a countercultural utopia, spiritual groups, runaways, middle-class tourists, and even partying military personnel from nearby bases. College students with no intention of “dropping out” played hippie for the summer. Hundreds of young runaways wandered the streets. The Haight could not accommodate the rapid influx of people, and the neighborhood scene quickly deteriorated. 

By the early 1970s, Haight-Ashbury had said goodbye to many of the early creatives and hippies. Through the ’70s, the Haight saw urban blight, prostitution, hard drugs, and street violence while still retaining an air of bohemian nostalgia. The late ’70s saw many gay San Franciscans and others buying and fixing up cheap properties in the Haight, bringing new life to the area. Sami Sunchild obtained ownership of The Red Victorian, a historic building on Haight Street that Sunchild transformed into The Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast Peace Center, a B&B and spiritual center. Today, the Red Vic is a hostel, cafe, and residence.

The 1980s brought more commercial prosperity to the Haight, with new boutiques, used clothing stores, coffee shops, bookstores, and galleries that peddled sixties nostalgia to college students and tourists. The area also became an epicenter for the San Francisco comedy scene when The Other Café became a full-time comedy club and helped launch the careers of Robin Williams, Whoopie Goldberg, and Dana Carvey, among others.

Sadly, the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s resulted in many of the Haight’s gay residents dying or leaving, leaving Haight businesses to cater to a younger and straighter clientele. The ’80s also saw skinheads as a presence in the Haight. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the rave and alternative music scenes took off and influenced the culture of Haight-Ashbury. A long-time neighborhood attraction has been Amoeba Records on Haight Street near Stanyon. The business, which became one of the most famed independent music retailers in the world, was founded with a store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in 1990; the Haight store, a former bowling alley, opened in 1997.

The Haight Today

In the recent past, Haight-Ashbury has been a busy area with both vibrant businesses and a gritty, grungy feel, popular with both tourists and residents, especially teens and young adults. The area pays homage to its alternative history with thrift stores, world goods boutiques, and vintage shopping, but it also has chain stores, restaurants, and bars. It still attracts runaways and the homeless. Like most parts of San Francisco during the COVID pandemic, the Haight has been quieter than usual, with nonessential businesses closed for months, some forever. What the Haight of the post-COVID era will be remains to be seen.