Summer of Love

By the mid-1960s, as North Beach became commercialized, baby boomers drawn to a Bohemian lifestyle began moving into a low-rent neighborhood across town, the Haight-Ashbury district. Many began experimenting with communal living in the large Victorian houses of the Haight, and visions of a utopian society began taking shape, enhanced by a mind-altering new drug called LSD, or acid.

With schools out in the summer of 1967, thrill-seekers flooded into San Francisco. When they arrived in the Haight and Ashbury neighborhood, they found a world where free love and free clothing was the norm. Joel Selvin reflects in the film: “The Free Store, what fun that was. I mean, just the idea was liberating, a place where they gave you things where money was no longer the relevant issue.”

In January 1967, the thousands of youth already in San Francisco descended on Golden Gate Park for a Human Be-In. The media flocked to the event, putting hippies in the national spotlight for the first time. And once the press offered a window into the world of Haight Ashbury, even more young people flooded in.

Teenie bopper, speed, stoned, turn on. These were just a few of the words that were defined for tourists as they took a bus ride down Haight Street in San Francisco during 1967 — the Summer of Love.