This intersection became the global headquarters of a cultural revolution around you. Haight Street at Ashbury Street — the intersection marked by the double street signs that tourists photograph and locals have learned to ignore — was the address of the Summer of Love in 1967, when an estimated 100,000 young people converged on this neighborhood to live, however briefly, in what they believed would be a new kind of society based on communal sharing, psychedelic experience, and rejection of Cold War conformity. The neighborhood had been a middle-class Victorian enclave whose property values dropped when a freeway was proposed through the park nearby; the low rents attracted students and artists and then the counterculture.
The Grateful Dead lived at 710 Ashbury, two blocks from here. Janis Joplin lived nearby. The Diggers, an anarchist theater group, operated a free store and free kitchen.
Jefferson Airplane played free concerts in the park. The Human Be-In in January 1967 drew 30,000 people to Golden Gate Park and announced the gathering to the world. By that summer, media coverage of the hippie movement had turned Haight-Ashbury into a magnet, and the reality — poverty, bad drugs, crime, runaways — was considerably harder than the images.
But the music was real. The social experiments were real. And the country was never quite the same.