The Diggers were a radical anarchist street-theater group, named after the seventeenth-century English Diggers who had occupied common land. In San Francisco the Diggers organized free food in the Panhandle every afternoon (cooked in a 50-gallon pot in someone’s garage and trucked in) and ran a 24-hour Free Store, where everything was free and the staff was unpaid. The store opened on November 4, 1966 in a renovated garage on Page Street and operated under the name “Free Frame of Reference.”
The exact garage is not preserved or marked, so this stop is approximate. The Diggers’ principles (free food, free housing, free medical care, the idea of money as an obstacle rather than a tool) shaped almost every social innovation of the Summer of Love, including the Free Clinic on Clayton and the free concerts on Hippie Hill.
The Diggers’ ethos is the through-line that connects the music history of the Haight to the radical political history of the Haight to the architectural preservation history of the Haight. Most of what survived from 1967 survived because someone decided, at some point, to make it free or to give it away.