Walk west on Haight to Ashbury and stand at the corner. This is the corner. This is the famous sign. The building on the northwest corner, with the white-painted bay windows and the storefronts at sidewalk level, is the Doolan-Larson Building. It is the most architecturally and historically significant single structure in the neighborhood.
Built in 1903 as a Colonial Revival residence for Richard P. Doolan, the building survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. After the quake, Doolan elevated it and added six commercial storefronts at street level along Haight. Those storefronts ended up housing the Psychedelic Shop, Mnasidika, and a rotating cast of head shops, record stores, and counterculture businesses through the 1960s and 1970s. The upper floors stayed residential, then became the Evelyn Apartments in 1918, and stayed apartments after that.
Doolan held the property until his death in 1947. His family kept it until 1973. In 1980 a fourth-generation San Franciscan named Norman Tyler Larson bought the building and spent the next thirty-eight years restoring it. He listed it as San Francisco Landmark #253 in 2006 and as a National Register Historic Place in 2011. Before he died in 2018 he donated the entire property to San Francisco Heritage.
In November 2018 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the building its 100th National Treasure, citing both its architectural integrity and its position as “the crossroads of the counterculture.” It is the only Summer of Love site in the country with that designation. The Haight-Ashbury street sign on the lamppost across the intersection is the most-photographed street sign in San Francisco, and possibly the most-stolen. The city now bolts it on.