It’s been almost 60 years since 100,000 young people arrived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for 1967’s Summer of Love and transformed the area into a counter-cultural mecca. Now pushing 80, these hippies are geriatrics today. For them, Grateful Dead likely has a whole new meaning today.
Stan Flouride is the unofficial historian of what is arguably America’s most famous intersection. At 71, he has blue and red dyed hair, wears Superman socks, a T-shirt that reads, “I Survived the ’60s — Twice!” and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the area, having lived there for decades. He’s our guide on a 12-block saunter on the Haight-Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tour.
He points out a couple dozen places of interest: Here is the house where Jefferson Airplane taped egg cartons to the ceiling to create a makeshift studio. Over there is the pink home where Janis Joplin lived when she became the lead singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company. This is the apartment where Patty Hearst was held captive after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
That’s where psychopath Charles Manson lived and recruited runaway hippies into his cult. Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Otis Redding, the Doors, The Byrds — they all lived here for a time. It’s the sort of history that makes San Francisco, famous for its steep hills, cable cars, “painted lady” houses, hard-core Alcatraz island prison, and, of course, the Summer of Love, loom larg.
