San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco,
California
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The corner of Haight and Ashbury in 2005
The Haight-Ashbury is a district of San Francisco, California, USA named after the
intersection of Haight Street and Ashbury Street, commonly known as The Haight or, in
recent years, The Upper Haight. The names of the streets themselves are taken from
Henry Huntly Haight, Governor of California in the 1870's, and one of the city
supervisors of the time, a Mr. Ashbury. Both of them had a hand in the planning of the
neighborhood, and, more importantly, Golden Gate Park at its inception.
The district is famous for its role as a center of the 1960s hippie movement, a post-runner
and closely associated offshoot of the Beat generation who swarmed San Francisco's "in"
North Beach neighborhood 2-8 years before the "Summer of Love" in 1967.
History
Before the completion of the Haight Street Cable Railroad in 1883, what is now the
Haight-Ashbury was a collection of isolated farms and acres of sand dunes, most of
which was not graded or developed in any way. The new cable car line, completed in
1883, connected the west end of Golden Gate Park with Market Street and downtown San
Francisco. Shortly afterward, in the 1890s and early part of the 20th century, the Haight-
Ashbury was developed as an upper middle-class residential district. It was one of the
fortunate districts spared in the disastrous fires that followed the catastrophic San
Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
The Haight was hit hard by the Depression, as was much of the rest of the city. Residents
with enough money to spare left the declining and “crowded” neighborhood for greener
pastures such as Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood. During the housing shortage of World
War II, the large single-family Victorians were divided into apartments to house war
workers; others were converted into boarding houses. By the 1950s, the Haight was a
neighborhood in decline. Deferred maintenance took its toll, and the exodus of middleclass
residents to newer suburbs to the south and west continued.