is the Haight-asbury still pretty hip?

ive heard that the place has a lot of junkies now. what's the scene like there nowadays?

 

obviously not, you're not going to find a place anywhere in america that has 18-bedroom houses for $400 a month nowadays... especially not in san fransisco.

 

Anything that's hip will also be really expensive. You ever try living in New York?

 

I visited it about 5 years ago and while there were some pretty cool people around it had become more of a tourist attraction than a hippie hangout. According to anybody who was there the Haight started going downhill right after the summer of love and hasn't been the same since. Once it became famous, everyone and their sister wanted to get in on the scene, but there was only so much to go around. As the Eagles sang in their song The Last Resort, call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.

 

eh im sure its nothing like it used to be..very much calmed down, but there are still some interesting shops for a few blocks, a really good record store..and thats about it..theres a few crowds of cool people that come out in the evening/night time, though. and a cafe that has open mic nights ..so its still an interesting place to go.

 

According to The Grateful Dead, the big deal about Height-Ashbury was that the rent was super cheap. it had nothing to do with stores or anything, just that you could fit a whole bunch of your friends into a huge townhouse and everybody would only have to pay $10 a month or so.

 

in any city in the older section apartments were cheap all thru out the USA in the 1960s . maybe not so much in NYC . most of those people did not have a job . jobs in the 1960s were not exacly abundant . most parents would give the kids easy 10 to 30 dollars a month to do what ever . this how many of them were able to rent a house. the extra money for drugs were either hustle drugs or some kind of a part time job or gas stations etc etc type of work. many hippies had well off to rich parents those did party out big time.

 

The Lower East Side, esp in the region of Alphabet City, had a huge scene in 1967-- probably even larger than the west coast ones. The hippies of the East Village were mostly driven out, not by prices, but by the Puerto Rican immigrants of the neighborhood who began to use violence (there were quite a few murders of hippies) to make the point clear they didn't like a buncha middle-class white kids flooding their tenements and pretending to be poor.

 

They still do the same today from a guy who went to a area like that in New York and was drop off by a cab by accident in the wrong place lucky hes was of spanish decent but not P.R any way they let him leave in 1 piece by the P.R gangs . The leader of the gang at that particular time of the day turn out to a mild dude. but could had turn out very ugly for him.