Psychedelia Haight Asbury
History,  Independent travel,  Music,  North America,  Photography,  Travel Blog,  USA

San Francisco #2

July 6, 2022 /

For those of us of a certain age, the very words “San Francisco” evoke memories of 1960s music, flower power, the hippy generation and the 1967 summer of love. That entire movement, if movement is the right word, may have been synonymous with the wider city, but it was actually centred around the district of Haight Ashbury, just over a mile west of downtown. 

loveonhaightsf.com
Haight-Ashbury

A district which was hit hard by the Depression and fell into decline during the 1950s slowly became a haven for the hippy counterculture during the 60s due in the main to the availability of cheap rental accommodation in a downbeat and under populated neighbourhood. Within a short space of time the genre had grown to not just a sizeable community but the worldwide epicentre of the hippy generation.

Jimmy Hendrix Red House. Haight-Ashbury
Haight-Ashbury

Today, 55 years after the summer of love, Haight Ashbury still happily and proudly carries the hippy vibe. Psychedelia, messages of peace and love and the smell of cannabis is everywhere – one commentator once suggested renaming it Hashbury – and so is music, both of the era and more contemporary. 

Beetles mural Height-Ashbury

Every shop is quirky, sometimes borderline weird, and it’s a great place to be. Just as we think we’ve seen everything, a naked cycle club calls in for coffee, simply wandering in with everything dangling and asking for a cappuccino. If San Francisco has everything, then Haight Ashbury takes it one step further.

Naked Bike Ride
Look ……
….away….
….now

An integral part of San Francisco’s character is the hills which are such familiar images to all of us, but which really are steeper and more dramatic when seen in the flesh, as it were, than you picture before you arrive here. In fact we found them an endless source of amusement.

The daftest of these hills is surely one section of Lombard Street, such a steep downhill road that it is in reality a tarmac slalom veering around the flower beds. By necessity there is a 5mph speed limit here, and the whole thing is made even more surreal by the queue of drivers waiting to totter down, all marshalled by a pair of laughing policemen at the top.

Lombard Street…….

It’s not very easy to be bored in San Francisco. Cold yes, windswept yes, fogbound yes, but bored, never. Apart from the obvious major attractions this city has to offer, there are many, many other fascinating aspects.

San Francisco apSkyline
View from Coit Tower

Coit Tower, a memorial to the city’s firemen who perished in the great fires and earthquakes, sits on the top of Telegraph Hill, reached by something approaching mountaineering up some more of the most ridiculous steep streets you can imagine. It’s well worth the climb though, not just for the wonderful city views, but also for the brilliant murals around the inside, depicting San Francisco life, its workers and their occupations, in classic American fresco style…….

Out on bus number 5 from Market St, we find our way to Alamo Square with its signs warning that coyotes might attack your dog. Strung up an adjacent hill are a group of houses known as the Painted Ladies, a group of Victorian/Edwardian properties preened and finished in attractive colours, as the name would suggest. In their own right, these houses are really nothing special (beautifully presented though no more than that) but the attraction is the photo opportunity, with the backdrop of the modern skyscraper city spread out behind these quaint properties, creating an especially pleasing clash of old and new styles.

Painted Ladies San Francisco
Painted Ladies

Chinatown, much vaunted and much anticipated – we were intending to sample the fare – is these days pretty dead at night, with, we would estimate, over three quarters of restaurants shut down with roller shutters tightly closed. Most, apparently, have never reopened after the pandemic, and in fact one guy told us of the reluctance of San Franciscans to visit Chinatown due to China’s connections with COVID. Whatever the background, the shops in Stockton St trade during the day, but at night this “heart of Chinatown” street is deserted.

Ghirardelli chocolate shop San Francisco

Our last day in this brilliant vibrant city bucks the trend, the fog lifts early and we are treated to many more hours of warm sunshine than has been the norm here. We are leaving this full-of-life city with a sackful of great memories.

As it happens, we’re also leaving on the fourth of July, driving away just as the city and the seafront prepare for tonight’s celebrations. We may well be missing out, but we have a strong feeling that our next destination will give us Independence Day party time anyway.

Perhaps fittingly, our last glimpse of San Francisco is as we drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific now blue instead of grey, the golden fields of the Golden State soon opening out before us.

It’s the wine country of Napa Valley next, but we think maybe, just maybe, we left our hearts in………you know the rest.

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