NPR: It's Not Another Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury

It's Not Another Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury

Once they were hippies and flower children. Now, they are homeowners and shopkeepers. And they don't like what's happening to Haight-Ashbury.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the tension in the San Francisco counterculture neighborhood over its newest residents: gutter punks -- "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." Boing Boing points out some interesting quotes:

"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," [64-year-old Arthur Evans] said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior."

And this one:

"I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."

This year will definitely not be another Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury. I guess sooner or later everybody forgets how they started.

5:45 PM ET | 06- 4-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

That quote is a bit ironic since "Evans conceded that he had been self-centered and inconsiderate" when he was young.

Sent by Steve Rhodes | 8:02 PM ET | 06-04-2007

I was a hippie in the Haight and Berkeley in the late sixties. I remember some hostility going both ways; from the "straights" towards us as in "Take a bath and cut your hair", and certainly we were guilty of immature and irresponsible behavier at times towards "them". We rejected the right things, like the war etc, but we had an air of entitlment too.

Sent by Peter Ross | 6:58 AM ET | 06-05-2007

The Clash said it best (they say everything the best): "Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl. Has to slap his kids around 'cause they don't understand how death or glory becomes just another story."

Sent by Chris Laude | 11:38 AM ET | 06-05-2007

There's nothing new about this. You'll find gutter snipes/punks in Hollywood (LA) too and in both places it's been going on for decades. I can't recall a time when Haight St. wasn't lined with your runaways and teens asking for handouts. I always just politely smile and say no. I do think there's a kind of poetic justice at work here. The hippies who in the 60s refused to trust anyone over 30 are now reaping precisely what they have sewn. What goes around comes around. The kids out there now might want to keep that in mind. Should they live long enough, someday it will be thier turn to get a snotty attitude from some clueless street urchin.

Sent by John R. Otten | 2:44 PM ET | 06-05-2007

Man maybe some older hippies can teach these kids about peace and social juctice issues instead of them just doing what they are doing.
Haight Ashbury is still Haight Ashbury.
What I do not understand is what happened to all the Hippies from the 1960's did they join the rich and famous or start communes and alternatives to the establishment?
Or maybe all the 1960's Hippies got jobs on Wall Street.
What I do know is that growing up fro Hippie to what?
I guess if a former Hippie grows up that is the same as selling out your ideals

Sent by aleon | 1:45 PM ET | 06-19-2007

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