0:00 On October sixth, 1967, a group of Haight-Ashbury residents held a funeral, complete with a casket and pallbearers, for someone named “Hippie, Son of Media.” Last week, in our Golden Gate Time Machine, we touched on the city’s many hidden histories; today we’re digging into why the most famous summer in San Francisco history had to be declared dead by the very people who started it.0:32 It all began quietly.0:34 By the mid-1960s, the Beat Generation had mostly moved on from North Beach, and a new generation found a haven in the Haight-Ashbury.0:45 The rents were cheap, the Victorian houses were spacious, and there was a feeling that something new was taking root.0:55 It was a small, local scene… a community of artists, poets, and thinkers experimenting with new ways of living.1:05 They were fueled by psychedelic rock from bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, who were literally their neighbors.1:16 And they were fueled by LSD, which was legal in California until October of 1966.1:22 Then came the spark.1:24 January fourteenth, 1967.1:26 The Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park.1:29 Thirty thousand people gathered to hear Allen Ginsberg chant, Timothy Leary tell them to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and bands play for free.1:41 The national media showed up.1:44 And suddenly, the secret was out.1:47 You’ve seen this pattern in San Francisco before, haven’t you?1:52 It’s the Gold Rush, just with a different kind of payload.1:57 Instead of gold, the treasure was enlightenment… or at least, freedom.2:03 The media reports, and a hit song written to promote a festival—"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"—acted like a map to the gold fields.2:16 And so they came.2:17 One hundred thousand young people, from all over America, descended on this one small neighborhood for what was being called the Summer of Love.2:30 They arrived looking for utopia.2:32 What they found was a neighborhood buckling under the strain.2:37 The original community, maybe a few thousand strong, was simply swallowed.2:44 Groups like the Diggers, an anarchist collective, tried to hold it together.2:50 They served free stew every day in the Panhandle and ran a Free Store.2:56 But they couldn't feed an army.2:59 The infrastructure wasn't there.3:01 Crash pads became overcrowded and unsanitary.3:05 The drugs got harder.3:07 The peace and love ethos began to fray, replaced by desperation and exploitation.3:14 So what was the real story?3:16 The Summer of Love wasn't a single, blissful event.3:21 It was two things happening at once.3:24 It was a genuine, beautiful, and radical social experiment by a small group of idealists.3:31 And it was a massive, chaotic, media-fueled youth migration that overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed that experiment.3:41 The very forces that broadcast the dream to the world ensured its collapse on the ground.3:49 The kids who came looking for the Haight-Ashbury they saw on TV were, by their very presence, erasing it.3:58 And that brings us back to the funeral.4:01 By October, the summer was over, but the problems weren’t.4:06 The original residents, the ones who had started it all, staged that mock funeral to make a point.4:14 They carried a casket filled with beads, flowers, and incense through the streets.4:21 They were trying to tell the news cameras—and the world—that the "Hippie" you think you know, the commercialized, mass-media version...4:32 is dead.4:33 Please, stop coming.4:35 The party’s over.4:36 The Haight would spend years recovering from that summer.4:41 But the ideas didn't die in that casket.4:45 They scattered, carried back across the country by the same kids who had overwhelmed the source, planting seeds of counterculture that would change America.4:58 The Summer of Love itself was fleeting, a beautiful and impossible dream.5:04 But it proves, once again, that in San Francisco, even the booms that go bust change the world on their way down.
