What remained of the Summer of Love in 1971? The Observer headed to San Francisco to investigate and found Love was still there. That’s Love, a Persian aristocrat in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt ‘with the wildest red hair’ who sold hamburgers during Haight-Ashbury’s 1966 heyday, back when ‘people really meant it when they said, ‘We love you!’’
Now Love was selling Indian jewellery and incense in a Haight changed beyond recognition: a boarded-up no-go zone beset by violent crime. The journalist herself was threatened by two men ‘who swished an 8ft metal rod around my head until I stamped on their feet’. Firearms, broken glass and human casualties of that singular moment were everywhere: ‘Personal tragedy litters the Haight like the uncollected rubbish in the streets,’ the article commented, highlighting a recent study following 51 beatniks: ‘Three were dead; two were in mental institutions; five were alcoholics or destitute; 14 had returned to ‘square’ life.’
What had changed? The arrival of heroin, for a start. ‘America’s youth getting strung out on smack getting no help from any of the people who run this city,’ as Love put it. Marie, an 18-year-old addict, had been jailed for dealing to find the $200 a week needed to feed her habit. ‘There didn’t seem much harm to it, until I woke up one morning and was hooked.’ Hard drugs might have destroyed that hopeful moment, but they hadn’t seeped into UK cultural consciousness; there are helpful explanations for readers: ‘joint (cigarette)’; snorted (inhaled through the nose); ‘shooting up (injecting into the veins’); and ‘smack (heroin)’.
Attempts to clean up the area by Mayor Alioto (according to whom ‘hippies had done nothing for San Francisco’) were hotly but chaotically opposed by a coalition of local idealists: ‘Resist lovingly… resist beautifully… resist spiritually, stay high,’ read a flyer, but it looked more like an irrevocable, irreversible comedown had already happened.
