Haight - Ashbury

Haight Street would be an important thoroughfare in San Francisco even if it its intersection with Ashbury Street didn't evoke images of the 1960s counter-culture.  It provides one of the only paths from downtown to northern parts of the Sunset (The path is from Market to Haight to Stanyan to Parnassus which becomes Judah). 

I have a friend who owns a business on Haight Street whom I consulted several times while constructing these pages.  "See the Four Seasons houses on Waller Street," she recommended.  This is a row of four painted Victorians (or Edwardians?) between Masonic Avenue and Ashbury Street with thematic medallions on their fronts suggesting winter, spring, summer and fall.  They have garages.  A garage adds $100,000 to the value of a house in San Francisco where parking is a major expense in one's budget.  She led me to a map of celebrities who had lived in the Haight.  I asked her about a yellow and orange place on Central Avenue.  "Oh, Jimi Hendrix lived there."  It must have been several psychedelic coats of paint back.  Walls painted Day-Glo pink or green were standard in the Haight-Ashbury I remember more than 30 years ago.  This place was downright lemony.
 

While outwardly similar to houses in other San Francisco neighborhoods, the Haight's houses actually have larger interiors with typically four flats per house (two up, two down), with rooms separated by hallways assuring privacy.  Rents were cheap in the 1960s.  They were ideal for communes.  This formerly elegant neighborhood with its commanding views just south of Haight Street and proximity to Golden Gate Park became a hangout for those who had dropped out, the hip clothes-wearing hippies, as they became known in this neighborhood. The houses also have large backyards not visible from the street, that became notorious for parties many of which allegedly involved unlicensed pharmaceuticals.   Although an air of counterculture still suffuses the neighborhood, today's tourist sees a gentrified neighborhood of boutiques, trendy restaurants, coffee houses and bookstores, and an atypically large number -- for San Francisco -- of panhandlers.

He was too lucid to be a street person despite his appearance.  I wondered if he was trying material for a standup gig at a club. 

"Why won't a cannibal eat a clown?" 
"Because he doesn't like food that tastes funny."

"What's another word for Bill Clinton?"
"Sex between the Bushes."

"Aw c'mon," I said."You're up here from Silicon Valley.  I know things are slow down there."

"No, I have a captain's license and I drive ships all over the world."  I took a second picture of him.

I had no intention of not giving him a dollar and would have gone to an ATM if I didn't have the cash with me.  It was a late afternoon in July, when a cold onshore wind usually picks up along with a thick low cloud layer, which at a couple of hundred feet above the terrain, isn't low enough to be called fog but terminates any hint of sunshine for the day.  Northern hemisphere tourists hate this poor excuse for a summer.  Natives love it.  It is why San Francisco houses don't have screen windows -- it's too cold for flies -- and it drives away the sorts who settle in the Sun Belt.  "The Sun Belt?" I asked.   "Yeah, over in the Mish (the Mission District).  Palo Alto.  Los Angeles."  Chuckle.  Samuel Clemens had experienced his "coldest winter, the summer in San Francisco."  I had just heard on the radio that temperatures up and down California currently ranged from 56 in San Francisco to 123 at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, the latter predictably the hot spot for the U.S. every day in summer.  I too preferred this city to the Sun Belt.  With the view three blocks away, it was easy to see why.  But you had to work for it.  I climbed to the top of Buena Vista Park four or five times that day.  The last time I walked up, I asked a woman who was walking her dog if she made the same climb every day.  She said yes, but she avoided the hill on her return trip home and she pointed at her house near the top.  "Avoiding the hill" was some kind of sardonic neighborhood joke.  I was too short of breath to pursue the matter.

At the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, one finds the attractive rounded bay window,  a San Francisco trademark, bulging from buildings on three of the corners.  One of these corners is occupied by of all things a Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor.  It makes a nice picture, reproduced here in two versions.  The first is unmodified.  The second (click on picture) has been altered subtly to provide a more Middle America setting,  the possible result of frozen yogurt overdose. 

A JC Decaux "street furniture" piece, a self-cleaning computer- monitored toilet, just like the ones you see around Paris, or for that matter around San Francisco, is located around the corner from the end of Haight Street on Stanyan Boulevard.  Yes, computer-monitored.  You have twenty minutes to get the job done and then bells and whistles announce to the world that you've overstayed.  (You expected the Marriott for 25 cents?)  In keeping with the worldwide custom of naming public toilets for someone else's nationality, the apparatus is called a French toilet in San Francisco.  JC Decaux, a European advertising company, also maintains Parisian style kiosks on Market Street. 

One afternoon in June, as I walked east along Haight Street (I was on my way to Alamo Square), I noticed a Thai restaurant with an unusual name, and a funny gargoyle mounted on the corner of an ornamental iron fence.  The two typify the Haight perfectly.

Graffito chic at Haight and Central

One of four bookstores in Haight-Ashbury
Most San Francisco business districts 
seem to have two bookstores.