Word: haight
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that is why Charles Perry's book is as frustrating as it is exciting, a history of a revolution in thought that can give one a factual knowledge of the Haight-Ashbury movement but through which the reader can only vaguely grasp what IT was all about...
Where IT was is much easier to see. The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco is a neighborhood near Golden Gate Park whose present incarnation is a slightly less grimy version of Newbury Street. Old wood Victorian buildings, many now refurbished in a city more conscious of its architectural heritage, provide occasional lofts for artists and more frequently apartments for trendy would-be artists who are really young lawyers or bankers...
...boutiques and concept cafes along Haight Street are sometimes under the proprietorship of veterans of those heady days, but more likely they are the ventures of mercantile types who sense retail opportunity in buying into the Haight's historic consciousness. It's a decent place for a walk and worth a shopping spree for expensive used clothing, but it's not a way of life...
...however, it was. Then the Haight was not trendy but poor, a neighborhood near the Black ghetto where students and other non-mainstreamers gathered for cheap rents and a sense of community. The strands of the new thought and life were there, too: folk music, hip poetry, Mod fashion, Indian philosophy made popular by Beat writers and Martin Luther King...
...mass availability and use of the drug, further spread through the various acid factories established by master chemist Owsley Stanley, are the key to understanding what the Haight was all about, and where the not quite normative views of reality actually came from...