Haight and Ashbury Street

Will Foster

Haight and Ashbury Street : The Counterculture

            When we began to talk about the counterculture in class, I assumed that I had learned it all in my high school history class. I was highly mistaken. My high school teacher basically said “everyone was on drugs, the end.” There is so much more to it than that. As I was defining the important terms I was confronted with something I had never heard of. Thus was the “Haight and Ashbury Street” term. I was immediately interested and had to do some more research.

             In essence, if the counterculture had a specific location, it just might have been Haight and Ashbury Street. This location, found in San Francisco, California[1], was in fact a whole district. The areas surrounding these two streets became a highly publicized place. From the research that I have gathered, it seems that the youth of this time and area, were looking for a place where they could carry out their “Hippie” lifestyle. This obviously included the use of drugs and alcohol, as well as the practice of casual sex.[2]

               I think that, even though we can describe the changes in society as a swinging pendulum between liberal and conservative[3], society always became more liberal eventually. We saw in the movie “Kinsey,” that even in the 1930’s people were very sexually ignorant, and people did not know what the female anatomy really looked like.[4] We went from that situation, to people hanging out in places like Haight and Ashbury street, and Woodstock fully naked. The counterculture and the Haight and Ashbury street district was maybe a more bold swing towards a liberal society, but I think it was inevitable that this kind of culture would eventually arise. Everything was leading up to it.

            It seems that this counterculture might have been the big step that lead to our society today. We all know that we live in a highly sexualized culture. However, in the 1800’s I doubt people expected that this kind of culture would even exist, let alone be extremely popular. They were very conservative, and   As we got into the 20’s with flappers and pimps and things of that nature, maybe then it became more evident that we were headed to this kind of sexualized society.

            Haight and Ashbury street eventually became “too mainstream” (In today’s terms) and the real hippies vacated the area. Many people that were not so much concerned with the hippie lifestyle as much as being in a huge social setting began populating the district and soon it lost its reputation of being where the hippies were.[5]

            Now there are obviously not hippies living in the district like there were in that time, but no one will ever be able to wipe the height of the Haigh and Ashbury street district away from our countries

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[1] Danaparamita , Aria. "Haight-Ashbury's Hippie House: Preserving San Francisco's 1960s Counterculture." PreservationNation Blog. http://blog.preservationnation.org (accessed April 27, 2014)

[2] "The History of Hippies - San Francisco, California - The Haight-Ashbury Homepage." The History of Hippies - San Francisco, California - The Haight-Ashbury Homepage. http://www.lovehaight.org/history/counterculture.html (accessed April 27, 2014).

[3] Moore, Crystal. "The Sexualized Society." Lecture,, Charlotte, North Carolina, April 17, 2014.

[4] Kinsey. DVD. Directed by Bill Condon. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox :, 2004.

[5] Danaparamita , Aria. "Haight-Ashbury's Hippie House: Preserving San Francisco's 1960s Counterculture." PreservationNation Blog. http://blog.preservationnation.org (accessed April 27, 2014)