Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties

While the Haight-Ashbury eventually became known as the center for hippies, acid, and acid rock music, it was also the center of many artistic efforts, including painting, poetry, performance art, comics, posters, and literature of all kinds.

Video: Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties! Excerpts of the CD-ROM released in 1996, featuring interviews, clips, light shows, poster art, original music, and narration by Allen Cohen and Raechel Donahue.

Haight-Ashbury Videos
Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In
Allen Cohen and the S.F. Oracle
Alton Kelley: Haight-Ashbury Collages
Grateful Dead: Unlimited Devotion
Haight-Ashbury Links: Hippies on the Web
From 1964 to 1968, there swelled a gigantic wave of cultural and political change that swept first San Francisco, then the whole United States, and then the world. What was fermenting in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was a powerful brew that would ultimately stop a war.

As any history book will tell you, the Haight’s popularity grew as the Beat Generation in San Francisco was dying out. Many of the Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg, crossed over, but a younger generation gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district, where the rents were cheap. Many were students at nearby University of San Francisco, UCSF, and S.F. State University. Others were musicians (such as the Grateful Dead), philosophers, artists (such as Alton Kelley), poets (such as Allen Cohen), apartment-dwellers, panhandlers, and even future CEOs of companies such as Pepsi, the Gap, Smith-Hawken, Lotus, and Rolling Stone magazine.