[My SF Past] Haight Ashury Tour 1

[Gloria Lenhart]

Buena Vista Park

This steep, hilltop park offers wide sweeping views of  San Francisco and the Bay.  It was named by the early Spanish settlers who used it as a vantage point.        

 Climb the stairs up from Lyon Street (this is the strenuous part of the walk) until you run out of steps near the playground.   Look back through the trees for the view.   The green square off to the left is  Alamo Square, home of the much photographed Victorian Houses, called Postcard Row.   The twin spires on your right belong to St. Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of California, a private Catholic college.  St. Ignatius sits on the hill that used to be the site of four of the cities cemetaries.

 The black-and-white granite squares lining the gutters alongside the paths in the park are made from abandoned gravestones left behind in 1912 when the last of the city's graves were moved to Colma.  A few original inscriptions can be seen on these stones if you climb up higher near the top of the park, but most were placed face down.

Death of the Hippies

Buena Vista West at Waller

This square of grass was the site of a mock funeral  organized in 1968 by Haight merchants and residents who were tired of having their neighborhood taken over by the Hippies and gawkers.  They  invited the news media to watch them bury an empty cardboard casket in this patch of grass and announced the end of the Hippie movement.

Spreckels Mansion

737 Buena Vista West

Edward J. Vogel, architect  1887

Built for a nephew of the Sugar King Claus Spreckels, who offered suites on the top floor to artists and writers including Ambrose Bierce and Jack London.  More recently it was owned  actor Danny Glover.  The same architect did the Norris House we saw at the beginning of the tour, and the two houses share many of the same decorative details.

Graham Nash Mansion

731 Buena Vista West

This house was owned by Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash who had the iron gate installed.  It was later owned by Bobby McFerrin.

Grateful Dead House

710 Ashbury

This was the communal home of the iconic band in 1966 and 1967.  The Hells Angels lived across the street at 719 Ashbury and this is where the friendship between the two groups began. The band is long gone, and later owners of the house put up the iron gates to keep the steady stream of tourists the house continues to attract from sitting on the steps and ringing their doorbell.   

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Posted By Gloria Lenhart to My SF Past at 11/05/2011 02:57:00 PM