The intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco, California, is both a physical place and a symbol for the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. San Francisco had long drawn people who did not fit with the mainstream of American culture. In the mid-1960s, the neighborhood around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury had begun to attract counter-culture types, or hippies (see entry under 1960s—The Way We Lived in volume 4). Hippies were people known for their relaxed dress, long hair, and casual social attitudes. They came in part because this working-class neighborhood had cheaper rents than other parts of San Francisco did. By the mid-1960s, more than ten thousand hippies were living in the neighborhood. Shops and services sprang up to serve this group.

Left alone, Haight-Ashbury might have simply continued as a quiet hippie neighborhood. But in 1967, the neighborhood became a symbol for...