Summer of Love and Haight: 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love

Time seemed to stand still in the Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of a revolutionary, avant-garde community in the mid-sixties, where young people were exploring communal living and new ways of being alive. The Haight-Ashbury spelled hope for a generation that rejected war and America’s affluent wasteland, and that believed LSD was going to save humanity by bringing peace and love into the hearts of millions. The psychedelic counterculture was swept away by the euphoria of the zeitgeist, with its new way of looking at oneself and the world. Yet no sooner had a generation begun expressing its newfound freedom and spreading its utopian vision, than the community in the Haight-Ashbury began to disintegrate and fall apart. By the time the Summer of Love arrived, the dream was all but over and soon a parade would celebrate the Death of Hippie. In Summer of Love and Haight, William Schnabel draws on his first-hand knowledge of San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury in the sixties to discuss the events leading up to the Summer of Love, outline its social and historical context, and review its cultural and political significance. His informative narrative helps to understand the psychedelic movement in the Haight-Ashbury and its place in American history.