Haight-Ashbury - Alive and Well

It’s easy to see why Haight-Ashbury launched the youth revolution that swept the world.  Before the advent of flower-power the area had been home to the beat poets from nearby North Beach where Ferlingetti, Ginsburg and Kerouac had hung out.  It had provided cheap student lodgings then, but in the early sixties ‘alternative’ life style shops opened selling outlandish clothes and crazy hats, macrobiotic foods and dope.

Life started to take on an anarchaic quality that was soon being echoed in poetry by the  writers who lived there. Lawrence Ferlingetti’s City Lights bookstore still stands on Columbus Avenue, a monument to an era and a generation that spawned a revolution in poetry and student politics.   Pictures of Che Guevara still adorn the walls, Ginsburg’s books fill the windows and you can still savour a whiff of revolution in the air.

Still standing also, is 710 Ashbury Street, home for a period to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead, now a landmark for those who visit the area for more than a Cherry Garcia ice-cream from the Ben & Jerrys that stands on the corner.  There’s little else to remind anyone of that time when, for a few precious years, it seemed that the dawning of Aquarius was a real possibility.

Genuine alternative communities flourished in tolerant San Franscisco and in the sixties I wanted to live there forever.  My uniform of mocassins and beads, long hair and plaited flowers was my entry into a community of hedonistic, feckless young people.

But something went wrong.  The pushers came for the tourists who had come to look on this human zoo, and by the time the Rolling Stones staged their free concert at the Altamont in 1969, Haight-Ashbury had become a haunt of heroin addicts.  When Janis Joplin died a year later it heralded the end of dreamtime.

 I went back there a few months ago to a sense of instant deja vu. The new generation of hippies now set up their stalls to sell incense, candles and leather belts, with the odd piece of Indian silver studded with fake turquoise stones thrown in as a homage to Native Americans.  The rock bands and the flower children have disappeared.

The smell of pot still hangs in the air but the sense of sweet charm and toleration has gone. The drop-outs who genuinely want to live a nomadic life are being swamped by aggressive veterans of the two Gulf and the Vietnam wars, by homeless, rootless kids of the kind you’ll find in every city and the crazies’ - their term not mine - who look at you wildly and shout obscenities as you pass.

 But attempts are being made to change the culture, and shops selling sixties artefacts now alternate with vegetarian restaurants and cast-off clothing stores.  Good coffee is available, and there's even the fashionable over-the-top selection of Double-no-funs (de-caf. and fat-free milk) and Maya Lattes (cholesterol heaven, chocolate, coffee, full cream and extra cream on top).

The tourists are coming back - slowly.  Some searching for a past; some who merely want to add Haight-Ashbury to the list of counter-culture places they’ve visited.  Radical chic is still alive and well in today's U.S.A.

 It was nostalgia that took me back there but as I stopped at Ben & Jerry's and bought my Cherry Garcia I thought again of those days of great bands, of Janis and The Holding Company, of Jimi Hendirx, Jefferson Airplane and the rest.  Our dreams didn’t survive the seventies but somehow, the continuance of Haight Ashbury - even in a debased and ugly state - makes me think it wasn’t all in vain.

Haight-Ashbury stands as a monument to a dream that failed, but it failed honourably.   Go see it now, before they colonise it into a theme park.