Can Psychedelic Eclecticism Thrive In An Age of Beige?

A Haight-Ashbury Retrospective

Psychedelia lingers in San Francisco’s spaces in-between. Purple and turquoise-sided clapboard houses stand squatly, defiantly, among sleek, jutting high-rise office buildings. On a bus filled with the sort of commuters who don’t muscle their way through the streets in tinted-windowed Teslas, sits a lone Deadhead from an era past, ragged tie-dye and lightning skull pins drooping tiredly off his bones. The kookiest San Franciscans gather for three days a month at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park, signs around their neck advertising shrooms and free love, while others who foolishly obeyed the nonexistent “no-bag” policy spend $24 on a meal of little substance. Psychedelia lingers, but amongst all its charm, it is hard to deny that San Francisco is no longer the epicenter of a “great happening” worthy of TIME Magazine coverage, unless that coverage is focused on the “great happening” of a soaring cost-of-living crisis or, god forbid, Silicon Valley-wannabes. 

My cynicism is half-manufactured; of course, I choose to live, school and work in the Bay Area, something I have been striving towards since an eighth grade field trip where I fell in love with San Francisco and its hills, its eclecticism, the public transit system! In high school, all I could dream of was graduating so that I could move to Berkeley, live amongst the history of 1960s folk festivals and the psychedelic revolution, walk past murals of my favorite classic rock musicians, and visit the Haight-Ashbury on weekends, leaving my dull suburban life far, far behind me. I don’t regret my decision to leave. There are many things I love about the Bay Area, about San Francisco, but I am not the eighth grader with stars in her eyes, nor the beaten-down senior trying to run from the beige walls of her high school into a psychedelic 1960s daydream any longer. I adore Haight-Ashbury, but what I like about it these days is distinctly mundane; the sticky dive bars, or the German vintage store I can send my longest high school friend a photo of an alligator shirt that says “Ich beiss doch nicht!” from. It is hard to reconcile the psychedelic of the 1960s with what exists in Haight-Ashbury currently, it being only during my most recent trip on March 14, 2024, that I began to understand how to settle on the places I find meaning in, and not the ones the city tries to find meaning for me in.

The first store I stroll into is a boutique known as “Love on Haight.” The building is drenched in color with a walk of fame painted on the sidewalk featuring Haight-Ashbury’s most revered former residents such as Janis Joplin and, of course, Jerry Garcia. The store itself is not something I have a problem with– although the tie-dyed goods they sell aren’t really my style, I admire their commitment to upholding an independent artist’s collective with fluctuating (fair) pricing for handmade goods by artists all around the world, especially as business becomes increasingly corporatized in San Francisco. Love on Haight sells tie-dyed shoelaces and rainbow-bristled, eco-friendly toothbrushes at $4.20 apiece, a tongue-in-cheek reference I find perfectly, hilariously in-character, but their main focus is the tie-dyed t-shirts, velour flares, matching sets, and patchwork robes filling the racks to the bursting, all handmade, all clearly labors of love. The store proclaims “Tie-dye is an art!” and as I examine a funny, long-legged egret plush tie-dyed in vibrant teal and chartreuse, I can’t help but agree. 

Knowing I would be in Haight-Ashbury that day, I had woken up and debated wearing a day-glo, poppy-printed 60s mini dress to “fit in,” but remembering Joan Didion’s subdued attire in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, settled on a pair of worn western jeans, a button up, and a fitted orange sweater. Not that the people in Haight-Ashbury are nearly as suspicious of the press as they were in the 1960s; in fact, they gladly welcome them in, the bouncer at the front of Love on Haight waving rainbow-coloured streamers and shouting “Welcome to Haight-Ashbury!” at every tour bus full of camera-wielding, tech-fleece-attired tourists that drives by. Perhaps this is what I have a problem with in Haight-Ashbury these days, not the welcoming spirit or sense of community, but of the people it attracts, and thus, caters to. As I walk around Love on Haight, closely examining the photos they have posted all around of the everyday people who once lived there (their clothing more akin to my current attire than that of the goods being sold in the store!), I hear shoppers in wide-brimmed hats and designer sunglasses complaining about the prices of the handmade goods in the store. Far from the glory days of co-operative living, these people, these tourists, are not in the store to support independent artists, but rather for a dose of sanitary nostalgia the Haight is happy to give.

But how authentic is the eclecticism of Haight-Ashbury in a post-post-Reaganomic San Francisco? I don’t intend to peddle this idea that “everything was better in the past.” The hippie movement that Haight-Ashbury was the epicenter of had issues upon issues; a stunning lack of racial awareness, for instance. Heavy drug usage and little means for rehabilitation or medical help, for another. Or perhaps the fact that those who could most easily “tune in and drop out” were the white children of wealthy parents who craved rebdellion without truly making a difference. The difference between then and now is that these things still exist in San Francisco, and they still exist in the Haight, but now they are swept under the rug as shiny dispensaries and curated vintage shops with pastel walls move in, instead of being the central issues– and critiques– of a counterculture movement. There is nothing new, or revolutionary, about psychedelia now– you can legally buy it, smoke it, consume it at about a dozen places on the strip, then head to the bar for a drink right afterwards. Haight-Ashbury is psychedelic without the counterculture attached, it is a bright, swirly, tie-dyed spot bravely holding out in a sea of beige corporate nothingness. 

In all fairness, the San Francisco hippie has been declared officially dead since 1967, when an infamous “Death to Hippie” funeral was organized by the activist group the Diggers. The Diggers cited vanity, touristry, and mass media exploitation as the main reasons why the hippie movement needed to be ‘killed,’ which is deeply ironic when one considers those are the three biggest factors fueling Haight–Ashbury’s present day popularity, all swaddled up in a great blanket of nostalgia. I don’t consider myself a hippie– never have, despite the “tree hugger” label a peasant-bloused and peace-sign-necklaced eighteen year-old me acquired at some point– and in many ways, I am skeptical that the hippie movement ever warranted such a great funeral, it being flawed since inception. Perhaps even my shadowy exposeé of the Haight, a place I do truly enjoy spending time in despite my critique, is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. After all, Haight-Ashbury is still colorful, still filled with quirky characters, even if it does put on more of a show for the tourists. Where else would you find a man peddling an entire table of handmade tie-dye under the infamous Haight-Ashbury street signs, watch another man pass by on a bicycle that trails bubbles behind him like a jet stream, and then see him get eclipsed by a guy on a motorcycle, dressed as a leprechaun and blasting “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera? A hesitant optimist, I wonder, is it really so bad for tourists to come through, gawking at the eclecticism, if that eclecticism still holds out at all?

And yet, as I stand exhausted at a bus stop, notebook open, shaggy 1970s hair escaping the braids left over from that morning’s church choir performance and taking on a distinctly greasy texture as the air moistens around me, I can’t help but let cynicism win, surveying the crowds of health nuts and Diesel-jeaned high schoolers milling about. The original Haight-Ashbury street sign now sits, nestled in wooden slots, outside a Ben & Jerry’s. Kids charged up with nostalgia and dressed in fifty-year-old clothes shop for vintage upwards of ten times more than their original price– and look forward to it. Smoking hashish is legal, not revolutionary– and now you can even put kava in your morning coffee or drink synthetic opioids to wind down after your 9-5 office job! You can watch someone spend the equivalent of your entire paycheck on a basket of groceries that wouldn’t even feed you for a week in a market that charges you an extra $1 per sandwich topping. I love Haight-Ashbury, but it does a disservice to the history of the place if one fails to note that it remains full up of the same rich white kids who tuned in, dropped out, and then grew up, clinging to the coattails of hippiedom by purchasing a $30 canister of sea moss, some raw granola, and maybe a Grateful Dead record at Amoeba for good measure. It’s why, as I have grown up, I have traded the colorful polyester mini-dresses I used to wear for outdated suits, or why I prefer stopping into a combination dive bar-restaurant for grubby pool cues and a bathroom that plays Patsy Cline’s greatest hits over browsing through tie-dyed flares. Things change, we change, we become more jaded, or more wise to the ways of the world, depending on how you see it, and the Haight still stands, trying valiantly to resist the corporatization that’s snaked in, one way or another. 

Did I mention there’s a Whole Foods now? ✦

Words: Gianna Caudillo

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