Haight-Ashbury

About Haight-Ashbury

The corner of Haight and Ashbury still draws pilgrims chasing the ghost of 1967, and while the Summer of Love has faded into legend, this neighborhood keeps its counterculture edge even as yoga studios move in next to head shops. It’s messier than most San Francisco neighborhoods, and that’s why it still works.

About Haight-Ashbury

The Haight sits at the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, a compact grid of Victorian flats, record stores, vintage shops, and smoke shops that run for about eight blocks along Haight Street. The neighborhood splits into Upper Haight (around the famous Haight and Ashbury intersection) and Lower Haight (east of Divisadero, quieter, more residential, with a tighter bar scene). Most visitors come for the Upper Haight, where Amoeba Music, the psychedelic storefronts, and the relentless pilgrimage photos at Haight and Ashbury have kept the counterculture tourism engine running for sixty years.

The Victorians here survived the 1906 earthquake because the fire stopped at Van Ness, and what you walk past today is some of the best preserved nineteenth century housing stock in the city. Painted in colors that range from tasteful to full psychedelic, they earned the neighborhood its reputation long before the hippies arrived.

The Character

The Haight maintains a scruffy independence that most gentrified neighborhoods lost years ago. Head shops next to yoga studios. Vintage stores next to juice bars. Street kids panhandling outside Whole Foods. Tech workers who moved in for the Victorians. It’s a neighborhood that refuses to fully clean itself up, and locals are protective of that refusal. The Summer of Love happened here in 1967 and the neighborhood has been negotiating with its own myth ever since.

Amoeba Music commands the corner of Haight and Stanyan in a converted bowling alley that holds more vinyl than you can browse in a lifetime. It is the destination record store that survived when every other record store closed. Piedmont Boutique has been dressing drag queens and club kids since 1972. Wasteland and Buffalo Exchange anchor the vintage scene, but the smaller shops reward anyone willing to dig.

How to Move Through Haight-Ashbury

Start at Haight and Ashbury for the photo, then walk west toward Golden Gate Park. Duck into Amoeba Music for as long as you need. Work your way back east along Haight Street, cutting into the vintage shops as you go. The residential blocks one street off Haight, on Page and Waller, are where the best Victorians live — walk slow and look up. Finish at the Panhandle, the grassy strip that extends Golden Gate Park east into the neighborhood, where drum circles still break out on sunny Sundays. If you have extra time, keep walking east into Lower Haight for a quieter bar or a pint at Toronado.

Getting There

The 7 Haight bus runs the length of Haight Street from downtown. The N Judah stops a few blocks south at Cole and Carl. Street parking is miserable on weekends. Golden Gate Park sits at the western end of the neighborhood whenever you need to trade the sidewalk chaos for trees and quiet.