2023 Fox Media LLC and Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC. Jump to navigation Jump to search For the concurrent period of valentine’s day gifts long distance 1967 race riots, see Long hot summer of 1967. KFRC Fantasy Fair Dryden Balin Kantner. The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco’s neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.

Hippies, sometimes called flower children, were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. The prelude to the Summer of Love was a celebration known as the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, which was produced and organized by artist Michael Bowen. It was at this event that Timothy Leary voiced his phrase, “turn on, tune in, drop out”. This phrase helped shape the entire hippie counterculture, as it voiced the key ideas of 1960s rebellion. A new concept of celebrations beneath the human underground must emerge, become conscious, and be shared, so a revolution can be formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love, and the revelation of unity for all mankind.

The gathering of approximately 30,000 at the Human Be-In helped publicize hippie fashions. The term “Summer of Love” originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love during the spring of 1967 as a response to the convergence of young people on the Haight-Ashbury district. College students, high school students, and runaways began streaming into the Haight during the spring break of 1967, John F. The media’s coverage of hippie life in the Haight-Ashbury drew the attention of youth from all over America. Thompson termed the district “Hashbury” in The New York Times Magazine.

On February 6, 1967, Newsweek printed a four-page four-color “Dropouts on a Mission”. The event was also reported by the counterculture’s own media, particularly the San Francisco Oracle, the pass-around readership of which is thought to have exceeded a half-million people that summer, and the Berkeley Barb. The media’s reportage of the “counterculture” included other events in California, such as the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival in Marin County and the Monterey Pop Festival, both during June 1967. In Manhattan, near the Greenwich Village neighborhood, during a concert in Tompkins Square Park on Memorial Day of 1967, some police officers asked for the music’s volume to be reduced. In response, some people in the crowd threw various objects, and 38 arrests ensued. Double in size of the Tompkins Square Park concert, as many as 100,000 young people from around the world, flocked to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, as well as to nearby Berkeley and to other San Francisco Bay Area cities, to join in a popularized version of the hippie culture. The Haight-Ashbury could not accommodate this influx of people, and the neighborhood scene quickly deteriorated, with overcrowding, homelessness, hunger, drug problems, and crime afflicting the neighborhood.

Haight Ashbury was a ghetto of bohemians who wanted to do anything—and we did but I don’t think it has happened since. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new ways of expression, being aware of one’s existence. After losing his untenured position as an instructor on the Psychology faculty at Harvard University, Timothy Leary became a major advocate for the recreational use of psychedelic drugs. On the West Coast, author Ken Kesey, a prior volunteer for a CIA-sponsored LSD experiment, also advocated the use of the drug. Along with LSD, cannabis was also much used during this period.

However, as a result, crime increased among users because new laws were subsequently enacted to control the use of both drugs. By the end of summer, many participants had left the scene to join the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s, to resume school studies, or simply to “get a job”. Those remaining in the Haight wanted to commemorate the conclusion of the event. We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don’t come here because it’s over and done with. In New York, the rock musical drama Hair, which told the story of the hippie counterculture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, began Off-Broadway on October 17, 1967. The culture supported MDMA use and some LSD use. During the summer of 2007, San Francisco celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love by holding numerous events around the region, culminating on September 2, 2007, when over 150,000 people attended the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love concert, held in Golden Gate Park in Speedway Meadows.