Bay Area Trip Day 7 (Haight-Ashbury)

Well, unfortunately, Ursa ate something that didn't agree with her and had to take the afternoon off from exploring San Francisco. I felt terrible for her, but what would do her the most good was just some bed rest which wasn't going to happen with me bumbling about the house, so I got out my umbrella and set out in the rain to do some exploring on my own.

Janice Joplin's old house on Ashbury St.

In 1967's legendary "Summer of Love" the neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury became the epicenter of a social and cultural movement whose reverberations are still felt today. I had looked up a list of famous homes from that era and combed the neighborhood looking for them. When you see the close proximity that so many giants of the counter culture movement lived to each other it's no wonder that those became such heady times. On the corner of Haight and Ashbury at 612 Ashbury Street, lived Country Joe McDonald. Across the street from him at 635 Ashbury lived Janice Joplin.

The Grateful Dead's old house on Ashbury St

On the next block up at 710 Ashbury is where the Grateful Dead were living, and literally across the street from them, at 719 Ashbury was a house rented out by the Hell's Angels. Just up the hill on Buena Vista West was Graham Nash, and down on Page Street was famed concert poster artist Ron Donovan, down the street from him was a house rented out by Big Brother and the Holding Company. The punk band, Flipper, had an apartment just around the corner from them on Haight Street. It wasn't all love of course, Charles Manson lived on Cole Street, and on Masonic Avenue is where Patty Hearst was in hiding at a Symbionese Liberation Army safe house.

The last stop I made while in the Haight was to do some shopping at Amoeba Music. I love old record shops like this; sifting through rack after rack of old, new, kitch, and local music to find a diamond in the rough to listen to. It's a hipster paradise. Today I didn't buy any albums though, instead I picked up a photo book of Bay Area street art and graffiti.
Tonight, assuming that Ursa starts feeling better, we are going to do something decidedly un-hippy; going to the ballet. We were going to go for a nice dinner as well but I think that with Ursa's stomach issues we might just limit our activity for the evening to just going to the show and coming back. We will have plenty of other nights to sample San Francisco's culinary delights.