Enclaves

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Today, I explored more of San Francisco’s outer neighborhoods.

The city is well known for cultural enclaves, which preserve a particular culture within the overall city.

I first went to one of the most famous, Chinatown.

Many big cities have a neighborhood with a large concentration of Chinese.

I ate in one in Seattle (see Do you Like Green Eggs and Ham, SAM I Am?).

Most Chinatowns look like American cities with Chinese culture grafted on.

The architecture is American, and the signs are a combination of Chinese and English.

San Francisco’s Chinatown, the second largest in the United States, is completely different.

Chinatown

This neighborhood looks and feels like a city in China.

Passing through the Chinatown Gate marks a transition to another world (granted, one partially aimed at tourists).

All the signs are in Chinese.

Paper lanterns and banners with Chinese characters hang over the road.

Merchants sell all sorts of exotic delicacies, none of which I had knowledge of.

Chinese style street lamps line the roads, and several buildings had Chinese pagodas on top.

Two of these were built soon after the 1912 earthquake to symbolize the resiliency of the neighborhood.

For the first time since the Pine Ridge Reservation (see This Hard Land) I felt immersed in a culture not my own (even more than in Vancouver, in another country!)





After Chinatown, I drove to another neighborhood from the Far East, Japantown.

Thanks to the relocation camps of World War II, San Francisco is one of only three cities that has one.

Unlike Chinatown, this neighborhood looked like an American city, with Victorian architecture.

Japanese culture shows up through Japanese signs on the buildings and a traditional temple complex, the Peace Pagoda.





I drove here because I need car keys.

San Francisco has one of the oldest Toyota dealers in the United States, and they are located in Japantown.

The Burning Man organization recommends that all attendees bring an extra set of keys (WARING: May be offensive), because people lose them often during the festival.

A spare key makes the difference between getting out and a tow so expensive it can’t be contemplated.

AAA doesn’t go that far, either.

All modern Toyota keys contain a computer chip to stop auto theft.

Only dealers can duplicate this chip.

The restriction officially exists to ensure security of the keys, but it also gives dealers an oligopoly on key duplication that they milk for all its worth.

The new keys cost over a hundred dollars!





While here, I had the technicians go over the car.

I’ve put on a lot of mileage during this trip, on some pretty poor roads.

Heading into a desert, a breakdown is the last thing I’ll need.

They discovered that the car itself is in pretty good shape, but the tires are worn down enough to soon be dangerous.

I replaced them; another reason for a contingency budget on a long trip.

Haight Ashbury Hippie Tour

Car problems handled, I went to one of the most mythic neighborhoods in San Francisco, if not the world: Haight Ashbury.

In the late 1960s, this small block of streets became famous as the home of the hippies.

Four decades later, separating fact and fiction is at best difficult; particularly since, as Paul Kantner famously put it, “Anyone who remembers the 1960s probably wasn’t there" (WARNING: May be offensive).

To get the inside story, I decided to take a walking tour.

I chose the Flower Power tour, which many guidebooks rank as the most informative.

Our tour guide really was there in 1967, but left after four months.

They are now heavily involved in preserving the history of the neighborhood.





The first thing they talked about was history.

The neighborhood started in the late 1890s as a resort area.

Wealthy businessmen built large Victorian homes.

They abandoned them during the Depression, and by the 1950s the area was pretty derelict.

Those building were just what young bohemians needed, lots of space for little or even no cost.





Next, our guide discussed the movement.

Hippiedom, officially at least, was about creating a new type of society, one whose values opposed the conformity and overwhelming commercialism of American culture at the time.

Hippie culture was a heady cocktail of Eastern philosophy, socialist principles, hedonistic pleasure, and artistic self-expression motivated by writers like Timothy Leary and Jack Kerouac.

Large groups of people took over the abandoned buildings to form communes.

They expressed themselves through outlandish clothing and psychedelic music.

Loosened sexual mores were a way of promoting physical pleasure.

Adherents took drugs as a way of reaching a higher plane of consciousness, as Timothy Leary wrote about after dropping LSD, and to pursue hedonistic pleasure.





The hippie movement was very much a youth movement.

The average age of participants was nineteen, and very few were over twenty five.

Hippies often said “Never trust anyone over thirty”, and they meant it.





The most famous (but not the most important) legacy of the hippies is music.

Promoters ran a series of rallies and free concerts in Golden Gate Park, which they called “Be-ins”.

They all featured then new rock bands, most playing a style now known as psychedelic rock.





Contrary to the “tune in, turn on, drop out” stereotype, the hippies most important legacy is how they changed American politics.

Many were heavily involved with the Vietnam War protests.

Others helped form the modern environmental movement.

Still others got involved minority rights or the increasingly visible gay community.





Our guide had some great stories about a number of music groups.

The Grateful Dead are the most well known.

In the 1960s, they were based in a house at 710 Ashbury St., which they used on an album cover.

Even though they sold it in the 1970s, star struck fans still take pictures of themselves in front of the house.

So many people climbed the stairs to replicate the album photo that the current owner had to put up a fence.

After Jerry Garcia’s death, the house became a pilgrimage site.





The neighborhood has thoroughly memorized its most famous ambassador.

Their skull and lightning bolt logo appears everywhere.

The local fire station even incorporated it into their logo, probably the only government tribute to a band.





A group of Hells Angels occupied the house across the street.

The bikers and the Dead did not always get along.

Both were notorious for their all night parties.

One morning, people heard loud screaming from the house.

When a band member investigated, they found a fully drunk and half crazed Janice Joplin, who had partied with the Angles all night.





A house down the street was the site of one of the neighborhood’s most notorious police busts.

The cops showed up due to excessive noise.

They found at least thirty people, all stoned and many naked.

They announced that everyone would be brought downtown to be booked.

At that point two more naked people came down from the roof, and one of them announced that if everyone else was arrested, the cops would need to take him too.

They did.

The man in question was famous ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, who was in town for a performance.





The next thing we saw is the actual intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets.

The street signs are much higher than normal.

The signs were featured on the cover of another Grateful Dead album, and people keep stealing them.

A clock on one of the buildings has its hands permanently set to twenty after four.

This is a sarcastic comment on California drug laws.

Very few people know this, but pot was illegal throughout the sixties.

‘420’ is the San Francisco police call for a drug bust.





Golden Gate Park starts one block north of Haight Street, a section called the Panhandle.

This was the location of one of the neighborhood’s more important groups, the Diggers.

They were an anarchist collective which did social services in the area.

Most importantly, they gave away free food.

Many hippies did not earn income, since that would mean being corrupted by the outside system.

The Diggers bought their food with donations.

One of the neighborhood’s deepest secrets is where their donations came from.

The group realized the wealthiest people in the area were the drug dealers, and solicited them accordingly!

Some required more persuasion than others.





The last item on the tour is the most important, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.

Many hippies had health problems, and very few could pay for treatment.

David Smith founded the clinic in 1967 to provide it.

They were the group that took care of people who passed out at the free concerts, and the group that handled endless overdoses.

The clinic still exists and provides all services for free.

It has survived on a shoestring budget and whatever donations it can get.





The neighborhood has gone through a transformation since the end of the era that made it famous.

In many ways, it has become a parody of itself.

Much of Haight Street, for example, has become a countercultural shopping mall.

It is lined with psychedelic T-shirt shops, some “functional glass art” stores, a few good book shops, and one of San Francisco’s best music stores, Amoeba Records.

Many of the buildings are covered in psychedelic graffiti.

Unfortunately, the area still attracts young vagabonds by the busload, who find a scene that has long since departed.

I saw a number of them camping in Golden Gate Park.





One store on the street, Piedmont Boutique, (WARNING: May be offensive) specializes in what they call ‘extreme fashion’.

In practice, this means outfits lined with neon satin, sequins, and fake fur, along with creative undergarments.

I figured it was just what I needed to complete my Burning Man look.

Once inside, I knew I was home.

Half the people there were heading to the desert this weekend.

What they had for sale was special, but would also break my budget!

I finally found an affordable glittery hat that should fit right in next week

North Beach

For my final item tonight, I went to the other historic base of San Francisco counterculture, North Beach.

The area was the home of the beat writers in the late 1950s after they moved from New York.

The scene centered on a bookstore called ‘City Lights’, which was the first in the country to only carry paperbacks.

It became really famous after poet Allen Ginsberg was tried for obscenity for writing ‘Howl’ in 1957.

He was acquitted, an important victory for artistic first amendment rights.





I got there on the cable car, which ranks with the streetcars of New Orleans (see After the Flood When All the Colors Came Out) as the most famous public transport network in the country.

They were built in 1873 to deal with the city’s steep streets.

The cars are old and made of lacquered wood.

Famously, they have exposed benches around the outside; I wonder how people manage to not drop things.

The cars run by gripping a cable running under the street; to stop the operator releases the cable and pulls the brakes.





North Beach is the most disappointing neighborhood of the city after the fog bound Golden Gate.

I expected a neighborhood of the historic haunts of important writers.

Instead, I found a neighborhood filled with porn shops and strip clubs.

North Beach, in fact, has become San Francisco’s red light district for straights.

I did see something that could only exist in this city, a sign for “the world’s only employee owned strip club” (I didn’t stop to ask what that meant).

(LATE UPDATE) I found a story on it, thanks to the wonders of newpaper archives.

The only current literary landmark is City Lights itself, and even it has changed.

The store started selling hardbacks in the 1970s.

About the only thing beatnik remaining is the huge poetry selection upstairs.





North Beach borders San Francisco’s Little Italy, so I went there for dinner at Caffe DeLucchi.

The food was very good.

The restaurant décor was straight out of a Martin Scorsese movie, too.

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Photos

Chinatown Gate
Welcome to another world

Chinatown
Chinatown, San Francisco. Note the pagoda on the building on the left

Chinatown
The closest place to Hong Kong that doesn't need a passport

Victorians
The type of Victorian houses that once attracted hippies to Haight Ashbury

Greatful Dead house
The former home of the Greatful Dead at 710 Ashbury Street

The most famous intersection in San Francisco
The intersection of Haight and Ashbury. Notice the height of the street signs; people keep stealing them

Haight Ashbury Free Clinic
The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, still serving the neighborhood after forty years

Mural
One of many murals in Haight Ashbury. Note the tribute to the Greatful Dead on the right

Current street life
People try to keep the vibe alive in Haight Ashbury

Cable Car
Inside the famous San Francisco cable cars

City Lights Bookstore
City Lights, the home of the beats.