This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
Flower children, hippies, acid freaks, drop outs, college students, political activists, middle-class tourists, and even some military personnel, all of them were there in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967. The Haight-Ashbury district commonly known as the Haight was one of the main origins of the hippie subculture movement. Hunter S. Thompson aptly named it “Hashbury” and it became a community based on drugs, sexual freedom, music, and other counterculture ideals. L’Aventure Hippie is a French text that takes a look at the rise and fall of the hippies. The visuals within the volume consist of posters, photographs, comics, and albums just to name a few. In particular psychedelic rock music was just about entering the mainstream during this time and bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin were extremely popular. Their appeal was magnified by the fact that they only lived a few streets away from the Haight.
This Summer of Love that exploded in popularity quickly soured as the area couldn’t accommodate the incredible influx of people. Soon overcrowding, drug problems, homelessness, hunger, and crime were afflicting the area. These issues combined with the natural departure of people (many of them college students) led to the Haight staging a mock funeral known as “The Death of the Hippie” that fall.
As Mary Kaspar put it- We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, don’t come out. Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live. Don’t come here because it’s over and done with.
L’aventure hippie / Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Pierre Delannoy ; préface de Jean-Pierre Galland ; postface de Noël Godin.3e éd. Paris :Éditions du Lézard, [2000] can be found in Widener’s Collection.
Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manger, for contributing this post.