Haight Ashbury Walking Tour

Tour description

My Haight-Ashbury tour is offered through SF City Guides, a non-profit that offers 60 tours throughout San Francisco.  All tours are free although we do make a pitch at the end for voluntary donations to our organization.  On any given day, City Guides generally offers between 5 and 15 tours.  We offer this tour one Sunday a month as well as weekday afternoons that fit my schedule.

City Guides currently requires that all participants register in advance for the tour and suggests a donation of $15. Click here for the Haight tour page that lists dates. Note that I am one of several guides who lead this tour — if you want my tour, please make sure you see my name listed next to the date.

The tour meets at the Park Branch Public Library (1833 Page St.) and we walk about 2 hrs., covering just under 1.5 miles.  We go through the Panhandle, which was the site of many free concerts and other hippie community events during the Summer of Love.  We go to the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury and take note that the street signs are placed very high off the ground, either to prevent theft or to make them easier for those under the influence to notice.  See map below for the precise route.

I discuss the early history of the neighborhood but focus on the hippie community of the 1960s and the psychedelic rock music that the neighborhood produced including bands such as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company.  Between stops on the tour, I play more than 20 songs by musicians who either lived in the Haight or had important ties to the SF hippie scene.  To me, this music is the great legacy of that period, and I tell the story of how SF became a great city for rock music and launched a new era in which musicians gained much greater control of their music.

We talk about the circumstances and youthful energy that led to the formation of the hippie community.  Important neighborhood organization such as the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic and Huckleberry House were founded to address critical social needs.  But the influx of an estimated 100,000 people by the end of 1967 led to chaos and violence that would leave the neighborhood in shambles for many years afterwards.  In recent years, residents have invested time and money into renovating the neighborhood's unparalleled collection of victorian buildings.  Today, the neighborhood looks great but also features rents that put its housing out of reach for younger residents of SF.

Click here to see the song list I play on this tour.