SF Is Alive With Grateful Deadheads Is City Still a Hippie Mecca?

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• San Francisco is alive with Grateful Deadheads for final shows. Is the city still a hippie mecca?
• Step inside of the San Francisco Decorator Showcase 2024
• How to Visit The Grateful Dead House in San Francisco (1966 –
• San Francisco artists maintain a creative haven for 40 years—at a radioactive site
• The top things to do on an I-10 road trip
• O box truck, where art thou? Two Oakland A’s fans’ hunt for a missing team relic

The Grateful Dead, also known as ‘The Dead” was a jam band founded in Palo Alto, California in 1965. Known for their eclectic style and long bouts of noodling, the band fused together elements of rock, blues, jazz, folk, and country to form their own psychedelic sound. Though they had no radio hits, the band is on the charts as one of the most successful touring shows in music history. Glossy surfaces weren’t solely relegated to ceilings, but extended to walls, custom cabinetry, and furnishings.

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“I thought this would be the perfect place for it,” she says of the water-jet-cut and baked-glass fixture made of interlocking C-shapes they’ve been prototyping for the last year. For his stylish study, Jay Jeffers worked with Willem Racké Studio to develop a decorative ceiling treatment that looked as though it was actual marquetry inlay. And in a vestibule connecting her primary bedroom and bathroom, Sindu Peruri of Peruri Design Company offered a nod to the Palace of Fine Arts—which can be seen from windows in both spaces—by copper-leafing its rotunda-style ceiling.

Haight-Ashbury: Five decades later - Valdosta Daily Times

Haight-Ashbury: Five decades later.

Posted: Sun, 05 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]

San Francisco is alive with Grateful Deadheads for final shows. Is the city still a hippie mecca?

Nearly the perfect center of the city, the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets was once one of the cheapest parts of town. As San Francisco gained a reputation for acceptance amid the stifling confines of 1950s America, free souls flocked to the Haight neighborhood, which had been popularized by the media as a haven for disaffected youth. In May of 1967 — just before the Summer of Love — Hunter S. Thompson coined the neighborhood's nickname "Hashbury" in "The New York Times" Magazine, but the portmanteau didn't stick around as long as the residents. The Grateful Dead actually only lived here between 1966 and 1968 but that was enough time to make this home a semi-religious spot people trekked to from pretty much every corner of the earth. Well, to be completely honest with you, the house is a private residence – a gated private residence. However, that doesn’t mean that the house isn’t worth a visit on your way to or from Haight Ashbury, as it’s just around the corner from this famous intersection.

Step inside of the San Francisco Decorator Showcase 2024

Featuring original Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart alongside pop music icon John Mayer, Dead & Company sold out all three Bay Area shows. The band’s free-spirited community, radical love and family ties will never fade away from San Francisco, some superfans say, even if the city looks and feels less hippified today. Diehard Deadheads consider the Grateful Dead’s 1995 concert at Chicago’s Soldier Field to be the influential jam band’s last true performance before frontman Jerry Garcia died.

👉 If you’d like to see footage of the inside of the house, I recommend watching the documentary The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir. Weir visited the house along with his daughters and detailed different rooms in the house. Due to the commercialization of Haight-Ashbury and the increased use of hard drugs in the area, the Grateful Dead left 710 Ashbury in March 1968.

San Francisco artists maintain a creative haven for 40 years—at a radioactive site

Among San Francisco’s most famous houses is the Grateful Dead house, located in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Here’s our definitive list of the best steakhouses in San Francisco, from timeless classics to newer gems. Learn about San Francisco's Jazz and Blues history and check out all the best places to see it performed live today.

Grateful Dead House – The Dead live on

But fans say Dead & Company’s finale in San Francisco, the same city where the Dead spent their pivotal early years living in the Haight, is a pilgrimage they cannot miss out on. Don’t attempt to get through the gate without their explicit permission, and don’t snoop through the windows. Though the house is a private residence and you cannot go inside (without knowing the owners, that is), 710 Ashbury is an absolute must-see for any Grateful Deadhead in San Francisco. I was able to visit the house on my trip to San Francisco, and although it is privately owned, I still loved seeing it and envisioning all that happened there. Deadheads say the band’s Americana lyrics cater to the wanderers of the world, and all of those roads lead back to the Grateful Dead’s birthplace in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The 400 Club's proximity to the docks meant it was in a rough-and-tumble joint, frequented by sailors. Jerry grew up hanging out with drunken sailors while his parents tended the bar—not your average upbringing, but then again, no one ever called the Grateful Dead's bandleader average. As a tourist, you cannot go inside the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco as it is privately owned. The charges were eventually dropped (all they got was a $200 fine), but not before a news conference was held in at 710 Ashbury to protest the drug bust.

O box truck, where art thou? Two Oakland A’s fans’ hunt for a missing team relic

McLaren Park is about 20 minutes south of Haight-Ashbury, but the drive is worth it because of the close connection to Jerry Garcia. In the middle of this park is the Jerry Garcia Amphitheatre, which is a Greek-style outdoor concert venue. Jerry Day features performances by tribute bands whose music would make Jerry proud. Located at 710 Ashbury Street, San Francisco, the Grateful Dead house is one of the most iconic symbols of the counterculture heyday in California.

On Oct. 2, 1967, eleven residents of the house were arrested by the San Francisco police for drug use (although Garcia wasn’t one of them, as he was hiding out across the street at the Hell’s Angels house). During their heyday the Dead lived in a nondescript Victorian at 710 Ashbury where they penned many of their hits. The house today is a normal residence, but some dedicated fans have left tributes in the form of flowers or artwork. The Haight-Ashbury area became known as a mecca for artists and their go-with-the-flow followers. It was not uncommon to run into musicians like the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin as well as members of psychedelic rock outfits such as Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, many of whom lived within a few blocks of one another. "Wandering around Haight, you’d end up bumping into everyone you wanted to find and — as the song goes — strangers would stop strangers, just to shake their hand," says Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann.

David Wiseman crafted a mind-boggling powder room suite with a traceried bronze screen, mirror, ceiling light, and toilet paper holder, some embellished with enameled mushrooms and snakes, and all set against an envelope of toothsome pink onyx. The seductive home theater—cloaked in de Gournay velvet panels bedazzled with metallic threads and millions of beads and gold sequins arranged in patterns of wafting smoke—features a custom Haas Brothers hookah. Igniting the clients’ curiosity about contemporary design was part of the fun,” the designer recalls. The Grateful Dead have been a San Francisco icon since the 1960s, and though their leader Jerry Garcia has since passed, they remain a symbol of the city. During the 60s they were the embodiment of the Hippie movement and a rallying symbol of peace and love.

History repeats itself with the return of the San Francisco Decorator Showcase, which debuts its 45th edition this month. “The clients really pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and into their world,” says designer Nicole Hollis. The Haight staged an impressive comeback in 2022, especially compared to the city’s beleaguered Downtown. Despite all the changes and challenges hitting San Francisco, visitors still flock to the Haight for its cultural roots and freewheeling reputation.

The incident made local headlines and was reported in the very first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. On October 2, 1967, narcotics officers, reporters, and TV crews stormed the Grateful Dead house looking for drugs and they found a pound of pot. Bob Weir (the Grateful Dead’s rhythm guitarist and sometimes vocalist) and Ron “Pigpen” KcKernan (vocals, organ, harmonica) were arrested along with 8 others for possession of marijuana. “I knew I could run away because of those Grateful Dead people,” said a man who asked to be referred to as Out Side, who was sitting on Haight Street’s sidewalk Thursday. After the bust, the band held a press conference here, arguing for decriminalization. If all the people who smoked weed were arrested, they claimed, San Francisco would be empty.

City Lights' connection to the Grateful Dead dates back to before the band was even together. I hope this gave you a ton of information on the house, as well as tips on what counterculture-related things to do in San Francisco. With the guidance of a local expert, this tour will take you to various filming locations from movies such as Mrs. Doubtfire, Dirty Harry, Vertigo, and Bullitt. Not only is the house a great photo op, but it’s also a great place to go when you’re reading say, The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.

For the primary bedroom, Peruri selected a curvaceous Selene pendant lamp by Elsa Foulon to drop from the center of the space. And in the “Vaulted Jewel” bathroom off the main kitchen, Stephanie Marsh Fillbrandt of Marsh & Clark Design selected an antique patinated brass leaf chandelier to hang in contrast to the bright white subway tiles. Janis Joplin lived down the street from the Grateful Dead at 635 Ashbury Street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. At a different time, Charles Manson also lived in this house before he left to start his family. San Francisco may have gained a slight touch of gray since the Grateful Dead band members lived together in a looming Victorian at 710 Ashbury St. to ride out the storied 1967 Summer of Love. The hippie era’s characteristic tie-dye aesthetic and psychedelic-fueled hedonism endure on a small stretch of shops on San Francisco’s Haight Street between Central Avenue and Golden Gate Park.

“The clients really pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and into their world,” admits Hollis, a designer heretofore known for discreet, monochromatic palettes and assiduously tailored interior compositions. “I told them, ‘I can’t do rainbow, but I can do color block.’ It was an adventure for all of us.” Even the more outré decorative flourishes seem to have won Hollis over in the end. “It’s like a high­falutin Spencer’s shop,” Hollis jokes, referencing the ubiquitous mall destination for bawdy novelties and stoner paraphernalia. All hippie tour itineraries should include a visit to the epicenter of the Summer of Love.