Does anyone remember 1090 Page Street?

Just wondering if anyone who had been there was still alive.

 

Not quite, when I was a kid I visited 1090 Page Street in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, it was a hippy commune-come-crashpad where the Jefferson Airplane and others used to rehearse in the basement.

 

1090 Page St was part of the Good Earth Commune. They were bombed, yes the pigs bombed the house and let it burn down to the ground. Over a bycycle. They thought a nine month pregnant girl carried a bike up three flights of stairs so they came and demanded her to be turned over to them. When they were refused they fired a inceninary(sp) bomb into the front window. There were several familes living in the house at the time and lost everything. Such was life in the Haight.

 

Those cops deserve the Barney Fife Award.

 

That' s funny I didn't know that, what I do know is that I spent 4 days there and had a great time, before the police raided the place and arrested me and put me in the back of a squad car then went back in looking for a run away girl. I was only about 17 at the time so I wasn't handcuffed somehow I twisted the metal cap that was where the arm should be to roll down the window , got it down, got out and drove a stolen car down to Big Sur to chill out. Never looked back so I don't know if the cops burned the place down afterward or not, but I remember it was around the time of "people's park".
We must be about the same age shameless, good times for sure and good to still be alive to tell about it.

 

I came to Haight in 66, I was 16, not a runaway from my parents, but away from an abusive husband. Life was quite different in the Haight back then, many wild times and experiences. I live a much quiter life now. Slow and easy on the farm.
Blessings.
SH

 

Are you sure you don't mean 1090 Haight Street? After I lost my apartment at 63 Octavia St., I briefly moved there in August of 1967 until I returned to PA. It was a notorious crash pad--30-40 people every night. It was bad news-- one day on the street I got the word that a bust was imminent. Usually I ignored all that paranoid bullshit, but I had a gut (ESP?) feeling the rumor was right, so that evening I bought a six-pack of Ranier Ale and sat across the street in Buena Vista Park (I think that was its name) and drank ale with some shady dude that said he was "connected", Mafia-wise, and discussed how there was a million-dollar contract on Joe Valachi. (Eventually, someone collected-- he was defenestrated from a hotel window while supposedly under police guard.)


But... I digress. Sure enough, about 6 police cars pulled up and hauled away about ten runaways or people that were holding. After the excitement was over, I went back and crashed on the floor-- it was cool then for another 2 weeks or so.

I remember it well-- I picked up my first (but definitly not the last) dose of clap there.

Ah, sweet memories.

 

The real deal on 1090 Page is that the building was a beautifiul old Victorian that was owned by a relative of one of the members of Big Brother And The Holding Co.--The band got together and used the basement for a practice room-This is where Janis Joplin first started singing with the group-The rooms were rented out kinda like a boarding house but a little wilder!--I don't know why it was tore down-that's a shame as it held alot of history-Someone said the Airplane practiced there; no-they had their own place on Fulton St. up the road from Haight next to the park-The Grateful Dead also had a house in the Haight at that time-All three groups lived real close to each other-I first went to 1090 in 66"-for weed--as I was only 18; it was a real eye opener;so ta speak-

 

The bombing on page st. took place around 74 I belive.
Jefferson Airplane later moved their sound studio to Fell St on the otherside of the panhandle around 73' I think or 72', anyway they had commissioned the good earth to paint it, we painted it black with the huge pillers in front gold. We were right on the other side of the park from them, on Oak and Cole. By that time Gracie had lost her mind already.
There was another house on Page St that I stayed at. My ole man (Cliff) took me there. We had just been there a day when the pigs kicked in the door and drug me down to city prison on drug charges.
I was standing in the living room ironing a shirt, there was a knocking on the door, I asked who it was and the door came crashing in on me as I went to unlock it. I was 7 mos PG and by myself. They came in like gang busters, eight of them, with guns drawn. They started tearing through all the cubboards and closets, throwing everything on the floor yelling at me. I was freeking out covering up my pregant belly as they pointed their guns at me, I was 18.
They kept asking me questions about the people who lived there, I told them I had just moved in the place the day before and no one else was here but me, I told them my ole man and me just lived there..They took flour and salt from the kitchen and said it was drugs. I tried to tell them we had no drugs and that was cooking stuff. There was one dude that didn't have on a uniform that was saying, that I wasn't one of them. But they just handcuffed me and put me in the paddy wagon, a whole big paddy wagon, just for a 5'2" prego me scared out of her mind.
I heard them talking about a rip-off, apperently the dude without the uniform was an undercover narc and had made a deal for some big time drugs and he got ripped off there at that place on Page St. I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I spent 4 days in city prison, barefoot and up against some pretty rough women that did not like white hippie girls. They took my food and pushed me around making rude comments and calling me dirty names. I wanted out of there. I hadn't done anything, WTF was going on. Finely they they just released me, no charges, no court date, no nothing. I was thrown out of jail?!? Whatever, I was glad to be out. Now to track down the s.o.b ole man of mine and beat the shit from him for leaving me in a place like that.
sh

 

I had a run in one time myself with the SF cops-Me and my girlfriend were drivin thru the park in my vw van-When we came to the end to go on the main st. out of the bushes jumps a bunch of cops with riot guns pointing at us-There had a guy raping women in that park and drove a van like mine and he looked like me-So ' after my girlfriend told them they had the wrong guy they put down the guns' ran a check on me and I had a couple outstanding traffic tickets-So they took me to jail-nice eh?-Lots of drag queens in there-very strange place-so' while I'm there they brought in the right guy- they caught him and he did look alot like me-I told him thanks asshole!and bailed out-ruined my day-nothin quite like shotguns pointed at your head by shaky city cops!-but then the next day was fine again! The End

 

Heifer: very good memory on the details but one: actually the incident you describe was not 1090 Page....it was on the 1600 block of Page. Several members of the White Panthers, including Tom Stevens, their leader and spokesperson, were living in a third-floor flat. I and a couple of my partners in the Omnibus Cafe on Haight lived on the same level in the building next door, 1634 Page. On July 12, 1974, a couple of plainclothes banged on the Panthers' door, and as you state, were trying to bust a pregnant woman for doing a second-story job (...right). They busted the door down, without a warrant, and began climbing the stairs. Tom and one of the other Panthers fired warning shots into the ceiling...the cops took off, and so did everyone in the flat out the back door before the inevitable arrival of the SWAT team. Remember, this was the summer of '74....Patty Hearst had been kidnapped, the SLA was all over the papers, and there were more FBI and other plainclothesmen casing the Haight than panhandlers, all with very itchy trigger fingers.

In any case, when the shots went off, I was sleeping, having closed the bar the night before. My roommates were at the bar doing morning cleanup, so I was the only one in the flat. The shots woke me up, of course (being just on the other side of the two walls), and I got out of bed, rather groggily. Within minutes, the S.F. SWAT team had swarmed the entire 1600 block of Page, snipers positioned themselves across the rooftops across the street and began firing into the Panthers' flat. At this point, I'm flat on the floor, I can see the snipers through the crack in the curtain, and I knew instinctively that sticking my head out the window to see what was going on was tantamount to suicide. I crawled on my knees to the back of the flat and looked out the back window.....snipers were all over the backyards, including mine. I crawled to the kitchen and called my roommates down at the bar, and told them what was going down....at first, they thought I was joking! After I screamed at them to get down there to see what I was talking about, I hung up and slunk back towards my bedroom at the front.

That's when the SWAT boys shot the first incendiary grenade into the next-door flat. For a spit second, the entire floor under me dropped an inch...I was flat on my belly floating on air. The thought burst into my head at that second that the L.A.P.D. and FBI had wiped out the SLA house in L.A. just a couple months before, and I realized that it was happening all over again....but this time I was right in the middle of it! And that's about when the second grenade went off. I quickly moved back into the kitchen, in the middle of the house, hoping that my buds had come back down to Page and told the cops I was trapped inside. I began to worry that the fire I was sure had been started by the grenades would start to burn through the wall. It was an hour more of anxious waiting, though, the gunfire gradually subsiding, before I heard a loud, heavy banging on my front door.

Finally! I ran down the stairs and opened the door. In front of me was the biggest cop I'd ever seen....6'4", all muscle, arms like trees, holding a sawed-off shotgun. "Fire next door....you gotta leave" was all he said. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Off to the right a little down the street I could see a large crowd of enraged locals behind a yellow police ribbon, who commenced cheering like crazy. That's when it dawned on me that I was standing there in my doorway in my underwear! Having been woken up by gunfire and being focused on saving my skinny white ass, I'd never thought to put on my jeans! I grinned at the cop and ran back up the stairs and threw on some clothes, ran back down and closed the front door, instinctively locking it in the process.

The cop led me over to where the crowd was yelling, and I saw one of my roommates/bar partners. That's the first time I was able to look back and see exactly what they had done to the top floor of the Panthers' flat. It was totally engulfed in flames, just like L.A. And it was only then, after assuring themselves that they had incinerated anything and everything inside that flat, that the SWAT team finally let the fire department onto the block. And how were the firemen going to put out the fire? Well, by going up through the flat next door, of course! I saw a group of firemen run up the stoop and totally bust down our front door.....damn, guess I shouldn't have locked it! The hoses started coming and I don't know how many got pulled into our flat. It was another couple of hours before they'd put the fire out to the point where they let us come back into the flat. There must have been half a dozen hoses snaking up the stairwell.....water coming down the stairs like a cascade. I get up to the top of the stairs...there's firemen and a few cops everywhere. I walk into the living room....and there....sitting on the living room table....is the bowl holding the two-pound family stash of Panama Red!!! Ooops...forgot that, too! I'm standing there looking at the dope, all these firemen and cops walking around me in my own living room...basically frozen as to what I'm going to say or do next. That's when a cop looked at me looking down at the weed. He started laughing..."Hey, don't worry about it.....we're not here for you!". That was the second bullet I'd dodged in one day.

I was so shaken up, the next day I packed my backpack with pounds of trail mix and jerky, borrowed a friend's car, drove all the way up north, west of Yreka and Ft. Jones, and packed into the Marble Mountain Wilderness alone for a week!

So that's how it happened, chillun. Another story from the annals of hippie history. When the City tried and convicted Tom Stevens and a few others to prison, they never allowed testimony as to the armaments used in the seige. Apparently, it might not have been good PR to let Americans know their local PDs were now using grenades to clean up the riff-raff. Peace out, little ones!

 

I happened across this thread just becuase i was thinking today about an incident there. I googled, and this thread appeared. on the off-chance that anyone actually still cares about this, here are my recollections. I lived at 1090 from shortly after my arrival in the late summer of 66. I crashed for a few nights on Broderick, and soon heard about 1090. When i got there it was essentially a crash-pad. Individual rooms were contoled by hippie factions, some of which paid rent to a realty aoutfit, most had stopped paying anyone. I lived in a first floor front room that had the only working bathtub, I believe it was #7. The third-floor was still controlled by people associated with BB, and folks who called themselves praknsters lived in the basement and back garages. there was a dark curtain over the stairway to the third floor, and new people were warned not to approach the curtain. Most of the rooms were on the second floor, and the hallways were deep cherry red panelling. During the course of the fall almost everyone quit paying rent, and there was enourmous turnoever, with virtually all the original inhabitants gone by sept or oct 66 - the city condemned it shortly thereafter and it was vacated in december 1966. By that time the only people there were the cranksters. I left two days before they brought in Clevelend Wreckers, and moved into an attic at 625 Ashbury.

 

I just stumbled on this particular thread today, and somehow feel as if I've been in a time warp; doesn't anyone who lived in the Haight during the late '60s sign on to this site? Everyone here seems to have been there either before or after I was!
I remember the Good Earth from my time during 1969-70, when the street was turning from beautiful to bad, when the happy people were leaving for the outskirts, like Big Sur, Russian River, Mendocino, Napa, etc., and the speed freaks, junkies, heavy dealers, etc. were really moving in. But earlier in the year, things were still kinda mellow; I remember one night, maybe a month after I arrived in the spring of '69, that I was visiting another house with a friend I'd met on the street, and all of us were just sitting around enjoying some really outrageous hash, when someone banged on the door. One of the house residents said "Don't answer it", but too late, someone opened the door and five or six cops barged in looking for someone that they claimed ran into the building after robbing someone. Well, it turned out to be the wrong door they banged on, but, since they were there..............they decided to arrest everyone since the hash was in the same room, so we all spent the night in jail. We were released the next day, with no charges, as they didn't have a warrant to search for dope. We all laughed and just chalked it up as another experience.

 

Of course people who lived there should still be alive. One of them, Bruce P, who rented a small room there which I visited, is not much older than I. That puts him around 63 or 64... YOUNG! 60 is the new 50. I remember it as a really cool place, and I'm so sad it wasn't preserved. It was exciting to be in the Haight in l965 to 67. The interior decor was so original, creative, eccentric. Too bad it all went south... but then change is part of life...

 

Wow...great stories and experiences. SF cops sound pretty brutal..or at least they where back then.

 

I lived at 1891 Page. The Airplane was in the house on Fell St in 1971 because I remember going there. I remember the gold pillars.

 

I posted some pictures in an album here from the early 70's in SF Haight.

 

Hey Kat,
Is that a pic of Sag Darel. If so, I can let him know that you're asking about him.

sh

 

Yes I think that was his name. Awesome! Thanks!