Towering eucalyptus and cypress trees line the narrow strip of parkland around you, the counterculture's outdoor gathering room. The Panhandle is the finger of park that extends east from Golden Gate Park proper — eight blocks long, a block wide, lined with towering eucalyptus and cypress trees — and it was here, and in the meadows just west of here in the park, that the concert culture of the 1960s was born. The Grateful Dead played free outdoor concerts here beginning in 1966, before the Summer of Love had a name.
Bill Graham used the experience he gained promoting these park concerts to open the Fillmore Auditorium, which became the laboratory of psychedelic rock. The Diggers organized community meals in the Panhandle, ladling soup from a stock pot for whoever showed up, an anarchist food bank that made no distinctions between the runaway and the curious and the desperate. The Human Be-In on January 14, 1967, which drew the gathering that announced the Summer of Love to the national media, took place in the polo field in Golden Gate Park at the west end of the Panhandle.
Timothy Leary told the crowd to turn on, tune in, drop out. Allen Ginsberg chanted. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane played.
The following summer, 100,000 people came to the neighborhood looking for what the Be-In had promised.