It’s been 40 years since the famed Summer of Love, when San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became either the embodiment of brotherhood and sisterhood or, in the words of the Beatles’ George Harrison, full of “hideous, spotty little teenagers.” I tend to believe more in the latter characterization, not because I experienced it (or was even alive) in 1967 but because around the turn of the millennium, when I lived in San Francisco, I saw a lot of “spotty little teenagers” there and that colors my impression. Don’t get me wrong. I like the Haight, and I still go there often when I’m in San Francisco. It’s got an all-time great music store, Amoeba Music; an excellent and cheap pizza place, Fat Slice; and a fine bookstore, The Booksmith, among other things. But I never really felt that Summer of Love spirit.

You know who’s also not feeling it? Some hippies from that era who still live in the Haight. The Los Angeles Times ran a story a few weeks ago titled, “There’s Not a Lot of Love in the Haight.” It chronicled the battle between the old guard and the younger folks now descending on the area. The latter sound suspiciously like the kids Harrison described.

John M. Gilonna writes:

From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.

The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”

But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.

They’re known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. “Please Help Us Get Un-Sober,” one reads. Another: “Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money.”

Still, the romanticization of the Summer of Love and the pursuit for remnants of the era go on. Entertainment Weekly and Via recently looked back, while others, including the AP and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, are prepping travelers on how to celebrate the 40th anniversary in San Francisco and beyond.

In the Independent, Mike Higgins writes about his recent travels to San Francisco in search of remnants of the “hippie dream,” and his story reveals a relatively nuanced portrait of the Haight.

On his trip, Higgins hooks up with Joel Selvin, a music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of Summer of Love, who tells him how much the planet owes to hippies—“gay rights, feminism, environmentalism, organic food—even artisanal cooking.”

Higgins writes:

And he’s right. Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant arguably began the global bourgeoisie’s craze for “eco-gastronomy” three decades ago in Berkeley. The roots of feminism and gay rights are sunk in the sense of open-minded self-determination that the more thoughtful hippies practised. Environmentalism got its hair cut, put on a suit and has grabbed the world’s attention. The Summer of Love even gave rise to the World Wide Web, at least according to John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer.

So maybe the spirit of the Summer of Love lives on after all. We just need to stop looking for it in Haight-Ashbury.

Related on World Hum:
* Amy Tan’s San Francisco: ‘This City is Like an Opera’
* San Francisco: The Mission District
* The Beat Museum Opens in San Francisco

Related on TravelChannel.com
* Destination Guide: San Francisco

Photo by yahnyinlondon via Flickr, (Creative Commons).