In the mid-1960s, artists, activists, writers, and musicians converged on Haight-Ashbury with hopes of creating a new social paradigm. In the summer of 1967, this small portion of the city would attract as many as 100,000 young people from all over the nation. The neighborhood became ground zero for their activities, and nearby Golden Gate Park their playground. This exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of that legendary summer.

One of the most significant precursors to San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture was the artistic and literary movement known as the Beat Generation, which blossomed from the mid-1950s. The Beats critiqued the pervasive censorship and conformity of post–World War II America. While the Beats were largely apolitical, by the 1960s, contemporary events prompted many associated with the movement to speak up in defense of civil freedoms. This combination of Beat influences and a burgeoning political consciousness led to the emergence by the mid-1960s of the “hippie.”

In the mid-1960s, the powerful psychedelic drug LSD was still legal. Author Ken Kesey, who had received his first doses of LSD through a government testing program, decided with his friends, who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, to conduct their own informal “acid tests” a series of participatory experiments designed to spread insider knowledge of the drug. The largest of these was a massive three-day event called the Trips Festival, in 1966.

The Trips Festival was a multimedia extravaganza complete with light shows and rock bands. Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead performed; upwards of 10,000 people attended, many of them dancing and imbibing punch spiked with LSD. The Trips Festival launched a brand new type of multisensory dance concert experience and set the stage for the unique presentation of some of the greatest rock bands of the sixties. Experimental filmmaker Ben Van Meter attended the Trips Festival and documented it with his Bolex camera. He then rewound the film and exposed it each successive night. After having the triple-exposed film developed, he spliced the rolls together. He has called the resulting film “A documentary of the event from the POV of a goldfish in the Kool-Aid bowl.”

Golden Gate Park provided the countercultural movement with an expansive space to gather and commune. Youths mingled at Hippie Hill, and throughout the park rock bands and theater troupes provided free performances aimed at disrupting behavioral norms.

On January 14, 1967, the park served as the backdrop for an event designed to unify the political activists of Berkeley with the bohemians of the Haight-Ashbury. The event promoted as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” marked the collective consciousness of this youthful underground.

The Human Be-In served as an awakening of sorts for the participants. Looking around, attendees saw others dressed in bohemian fashions and realized that their views and attitudes were shared by thousands.

The eruption of the San Francisco music scene was due in large part to two major local figures: Bill Graham and Chet Helms. These two music promoters competed for acts and audiences for their legendary concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. These events were more participatory than those held elsewhere, partly because there was no seating at either venue, only large vacant spaces waiting to be filled with music enthusiasts. Both Graham and Helms commissioned extraordinary posters to advertise these events, distributing thousands each week.

At the rock concerts, not only was the music and its presentation revolutionary, so too was the dancing. San Francisco concertgoers found countless ways to express their individuality, and nowhere was this originality and creativity more on view than in their dress. Some costumes were designed to throb and glow under psychedelic light and others to flow, emphasizing movement and participation.

The fact that concert promoters settled on an advertising strategy based on posters and handbills rather than billboards, television spots, or newspaper magazines says something about their intended audience. Posters attracted the attention of pedestrians and neighborhood residents. Tacked on telephone poles and pasted in shop windows, posters were an ideal medium for the message, assuming of course, that they remained posted. These graphic artworks were eagerly sought by aficionados and often disappeared within hours of their posting.

Posters could also be found in local head, music, and poster shops or obtained straight from the source at the venue.

Over the course of the 1960s the counterculture youth movement developed a robust community in the neighborhood surrounding Haight Street. This community of mostly well educated, artistic youth from middle-class backgrounds did not just protest against political and social issues, but on a more personal level they challenged the status quo of the mainstream society from which they hailed. Their ambitions were reflected in the economic and intellectual reshaping of the neighborhood. Throughout the 1960s, members of the counterculture movement opened bookstores, providing access to a wide range of texts including eastern spirituality, psychology, and contemporary literature as well as boutiques celebrating fashions that reflected the era.

The Haight attracted as many as 100,000 young people from all over the nation, many more than the neighborhood could safely absorb. This photograph of the runaway board at the Golden Gate Park Police Station during the summer of 1968 demonstrates the number of young people flocking to the area, often without their parents’ permission. The community was overwhelmed. With no support from city hall, neighborhood organizers created their own social services such as:

• Switchboard, an organization developed to help new arrivals find housing
• Huckleberry House, which offered run away youth shelter and aid without the threat of a call home
• The Haight Ashbury Legal Organization, where volunteer lawyers took on the many legal battles encountered by the community

For the counterculture of the 1960s, Levi’s jeans were durable, cheap, and a canvas on which to express their personal ideologies. San Francisco–based Levi Strauss & Co. originally clothed miners, cowboys, and agricultural workers. By the 1960s their jeans were the uniform of the working class, and for their young devotees, represented the direct rejection of middle-class values, specifically consumerist excess. Attentive to the trends taking place within San Francisco, the company’s president, Walter Haas Jr., created an ethos that was at once socially responsible and highly attuned to marketing their products to the young generation.

The social developments in San Francisco and the Bay Area in the 1960s as epitomized by the Summer of Love catalyzed a set of ideas that would eventually lead to new norms: the birth of the natural food industry, concern for the environment, sexual liberation, and challenges to the nuclear family. The era’s political and social activism had a significant impact on the course of American history. The counterculture touched every facet of American culture, offering alternatives to the mainstream that still flourish today.