Monocled Alchemist

Article from Intro magazine: 7th October 1967

Haight-Ashbury hippie myth: As the first mists of fall roll under the Golden Gate, the mayor, the police and the social welfare, are beginning to breathe again. All summer long, they’ve waited for the teenage takeover that would swamp the city knee-deep in love.

All summer long they’ve counted as many as 300 young people a day making their joy-seeking pilgrimage to the Hashbury—world-famous hippie capital in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

But much to everyone’s surprise—including the resident hippies, nearly as many have left each day. The feared tidal wave of 100,000 to 200,000: recruits, aged anywhere between fourteen and thirty, has failed to materialize.

Had that many wanderers settled, even for the summer, disaster would have hit not only Haight-Ashbury but San Francisco itself. The town simply couldn’t absorb such great numbers of new residents without re-sorting to instant slums.

Haight-Ashbury hippie myth

And entertainment and work for this new community could not have been provided. For those who do stick it out for a few weeks, months, the daily routine changes little.

Mornings start in the afternoon and quietly. People start getting busy and living it up from dusk to the early hours of the morning. Nobody intends to work—that’s for the straight people.

At weekends, the Hashbury is flooded with tourists, who arrive by the car and bus load. Inwardly apprehensive and in the dark as to what’s happening around them, tourists gawk, laugh and wonder at the passing parade.

They don’t dig the scene and the hard-core hippies know it. But owners of the clothing stores, coffee houses and souvenir shops welcome them with open arms. It’s an easy way to make a fast buck.

The Happiness Myth

Covering an area of just under a square mile, the Haight-Ashbury district is drab, unlovely. Houses and apartments are dingy and in need of repair, yet to the 10,000 hard-core hippies squashed into this area it means home.

The heart of their country lies in Haight Street (or Love Street as it’s known) and Ashbury Street. On all sides there are way-out shops from the Psychedelic Shop and The Print Mint to the Drogstore Cafe, where hippies flock to buy everything from pornographic posters to minestrone soup.

And hanging over many listless, swaying figures is the sickly-sweet smell of pot. This then is the scene, the new world to which thousands of ‘‘nice” young people flee at weekends.

plastic hippies

No wonder so many of these “plastic” hippies high-tail it for home after a few cold, miserable and lonely hours. For those who have come a long way to see and be ‘‘where it’s at’’, the Hashbury happiness myth can be shattered in a matter of days, hours.

Press and TV reporters from over the world have come, seen and written thousands of words that have over-glorified the district. Letters from hippies to friends paint colourful pictures of free food, free lodging, free love and free drugs. Some of it’s true, some of it’s dreams, most of it means disappointment.

Love Is Where It’s At

The explanation is simple. In no community of 10,000 can every member be friendly or want to be friendly with everyone else. Moods inevitably interfere with relationships.

However, friendships can and are quickly forged. But Hashbury determines to practise what it preaches. Each person simply seeks “‘to do his thing”—to lead the private, personalized way of life he feels is right for him; no one separates and pigeon-holes. As one hippie said: “All is one. All is love. Love is where it’s at.”

What about free love? Sure, you can find it, but there aren’t enough girls to go round. “It’s the problem of supply and demand again,” a lonesome hippie told me.

Free food is available, but not enough to keep hungry teenagers fed. Every afternoon at four, some 200 of them congregate near Golden Gate Park. There, the Diggers (those who undertake to provide free food and clothing for others) dish out the meal of the day. The only other ways to get food are to beg, or borrow money or work.

Organizations That Help

Sleep, too, becomes a problem for those expecting to find free ‘‘crash pads”. There just aren’t enough rooms to go round. Sometimes a friend can be found who’s willing to risk a landlord’s rage by offering space on the floor. All too often wanderers end up in sleeping bags, in the park or in a doorway.

To cope with these hundreds of unhappy joy-seekers, organizations like Huckleberry’s For Runaways have sprouted in Haight-Ashbury.

Huckleberry’s was set up in the early summer by Larry Beggs and Barbara Brachman to bridge what they call the ‘‘intergenerational gap.’’

Overlooking San Francisco Bay, it provides temporary sleeping quarters and a counselling service. When an under-eighteen decides he wants to go home, Huckleberry’s contacts the parents and tries to arrange a reconciliation between all parties.

Another development for hippies’ welfare is the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic which opened last June in five sparsely-furnished rooms over a liquor store.

Haight-Ashbury hippie myth

It treats hippies ill with anything from cut feet to LSD-induced paranoia.

Since then it has treated more than 4,000 patients—at no cost and with no questions—and has doubled the size of its facilities. Money for this clinic, open twenty-four hours a day, comes mainly from private donations and infrequent foundation support.

The clinic was set up by Robert A. Conrich, a thirty-year-old independently wealthy hippie. He put into practice the idea of Dr. David Smith, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, for a local centre.

Although the clinic is for hippies, it is not run or primarily staffed by them. Rather, serving on a volunteer basis are forty doctors, sixty nurses and a hard core of ten “‘non-professional aides”, who are residents of the community, sympathizers who are capable of talking down persons on “‘bad trips.”

flowers in your hair

Dr. Smith says: “What we’ve really done is enlist the community . . . Hippies are treating hippies in a suitable medical environment.”

Dr. Frederick H. Meyers, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California Medical Centre, says: “These kids are not happy. This large number of transients is not at all sure they’ve found what they want. They’re ready to go home. They come in with a lot of manifest anxiety.”

But perhaps nothing better sums up the rising disillusionment than this poem I saw a girl tape to the window of a Haight-Ashbury shop:

“Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
Watch them wilt and fall,
Dead petal on dead petal.
As your spontaneity, your lovingness also wilts.

Dead hope on dead hope.
Perhaps, wearing plastic flowers,
Might control slow death.
If you could accept
The plastic people wearing them.”