You're standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury — possibly the most famous intersection in counterculture history. In the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, roughly a hundred thousand young people descended on this neighborhood. They came for free love, free food, and free acid. The neighborhood had about seven thousand residents. It was not built for this.
Before the hippies, the Haight was a working-class Victorian neighborhood with cheap rents and big apartments. Families, retirees, students from San Francisco State. A quiet place to live. And then in January of sixty-seven, about twenty thousand people showed up for something called the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. Timothy Leary stood on a stage and told America to turn on, tune in, and drop out. A man named Owsley Stanley — the most prolific L-S-D manufacturer in American history — provided seventy-five twenty-pound turkeys for the crowd, free of charge, along with thousands of doses of his famous White Lightning acid. The t
urkeys were made into sandwiches. The bread was not just bread.
Five months later, a songwriter named John Phillips sat down and wrote San Francisco — Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair. He wrote it in twenty minutes. It was a commercial — literally a promotional jingle for the Monterey Pop Festival. It hit number one in five countries and is credited with triggering one of the largest mass mig
