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James Millican looks like someone who would have thrived in the Haight-Ashbury district’s heyday.
Decked from head to toe in blue-and-white, tie-dye shirt and pants, sporting a scraggly beard and ponytail, Millican looks like the hippies who flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s calling for peace and free love.
But on Sunday, he visited the neighborhood for the first time to attend the 24th annual Haight-Ashbury Street Fair. He was not altogether pleased.
“Forgive me if I wonder out loud,” he said, “whether most of these people care for their fellow human beings, or whether they’re just out for another block party.”
The annual street festival, which extended for miles along Haight Street, was a chance for ex-hippies to reminisce, for tourists to explore and for people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds to sample the variety of arts, crafts, clothing and other wares on sale.
For people like Millican, it was a chance to ponder just how the spirit of the 1960’s might be relevant today.
In a sense Millican is a child of the ‘60s. That is, he was born in the ‘60s. Millican, a 36-year-old native of El Paso, Tex., was too young to experience the hippie movement of that era, and for him this is a source of profound grief.
“Boy, did I miss out,” he said, burying his face in his hands over coffee in All You Knead, a café on Haight Street.
In 2001, Millican straddles two worlds.
In one world, he reminisces about the mostly lost ideals of the ‘60s. Peace. Love. Understanding. Social activism. And yes, drugs and free love.
In the more immediate world he is caught up in a modern-day upheaval in the Bay Area: the rise and fall of the high-tech industry.
For all his hand-wringing about commercialization, Millican, a trained linguist, went to work as a “knowledge engineer” for a tech company in the Bay Area around Memorial Day last year. On Friday, he joined the roll of thousands of high-tech workers who have been laid off amid the industry’s precipitous crash.
As he looks for a new job, he plans to attend street festivals and “look and see what’s left of that spirit, what’s left of that set of ideas.” As he gazed out on the endless rows of money tables, he was not optimistic.
“we live in a different day and age,” he said. “Most of this is just about making money.”
“You pay through the nose for tie-dyes here. Hell, you should just buy a white T-shirt and make your own.”
Millican’s lament resonated with a more authentic hipster.
Jack, who would not give his name, is a haggard, middle-aged man with graying, unkempt hair that falls nearly to his waist. As a resident on the 1960’s, he was one of the people who helped make Haight-Ashbury the epicenter of the hippie movement.
On Sunday, he returned for the first time in 15 years. He said he was not a bit nostalgic.
“A lot of people here today are not really seeing the Haight as it was,” he said.
He remembers the neighborhood as “a little bubble where you could get away with things.”
Back then, Jack and some friends lived in a garage behind one of Haight’s famous Victorian homes. Beneath the garage was a secret basement where Jack and his friends kept liquor “and other things.”
But on Sunday, Jack was a little fed up, especially with the “yuppies who took the hippies’ ideas and cashed in on them.”
“I see too many hippies turned yuppies,” he said, shaking his head. “They just come in and join the party.”
Millican and Jack both point to commercialism as one of the culprits that brought an end to the Haight-Ashbury of old.
One piece of evidence can be seen at Haight-Ashbury T-shirts, situated on the corner of those two famous streets.
The store bristles with 1960s relics, including posters of the Grateful Dead and bumper stickers that read, “Thank you for pot smoking.”
But just as Millican warned, tie-dyed T-shirts start at about $18 and run as high as $30.
The owner, Paul Marti, 54, is himself a child of the ‘60s. Although he graduated from college, always held a job and “didn’t really drop out,” he marched in protests of the Vietnam War.
Marti sees no contradiction in making his living selling products full of anti-capitalist, anti-authority symbols.
“I think the artists charge the retailers so much, and the retailers charge the customers so much,” he said, “It’s pretty much standard retail procedure.”
“It hasn’t slowed business.”
More evidence of commerce’s inexorable creep into Haight-Ashbury are the skyrocketing rental rates.
In 1989, Elizabeth Kirchner, 48, fulfilled a longtime dream by moving into an apartment on Clayton Street in Haight-Ashbury.
Back in the 1960s, when she used to frequent the neighborhood, that apartment would have cost about $125 per month. Now the monthly rent is close to $1,000. That makes it difficult for authentic hippies to have their “crash pads” there. She said.
During the Vietnam War, Kirchner and her friends used to go to Berkeley to protest the war. About a dozen of her high school classmates were killed in Vietnam less that two weeks after arriving, she says.
In Berkeley, she and her friends tried to block trains that were transporting soldiers destined for Vietnam.
“We did a lot of protesting in Berkeley, but this is where the parties were,” she said.
She remembers Haight fondly. She speaks warmly of David Smith, the doctor who started a free medical clinic to treat “overdose, freak-outs and people with VD.”
She especially liked those crash pads, where strangers were always welcome.
“Usually there were no strings attached,” she said. “And if there were, they were not altogether unwelcome, if you will.”
Kirchner is more charitable about the current state of the neighborhood than Millican and Jack. She says she still feels the spirit of the ‘60s here. But it has lost some of its charm to the forces of greed, she said.
“I’m kind of disconcerted by some of the changes in attitude here, “ she said. “It’s gotten more like, ‘I’ve got mine, too bad if you don’t have yours.”
For some people who attended the street festival, including many young people, those laments rang hollow.
Maggia Paola, 25, moved to San Francisco from New York seven months ago. She is trying to get a job as a fashion designer, and in the meantime she hawks her wares at street festivals like the one in Haight-Ashbury.
Each one of her self-designed, hand-dyed T-shirts is unique—a different design on one, a different cut on another. For her, street festivals like the one in Haight are a chance to make a little extra money and enjoy the atmosphere.
“It has a nice vibe to it,” she said. “It’s eclectic and funky, and everyone has their own style.”
Her parents lived through the 1960s, and Paola believes that would have been a tough time for young people. Although she admires the “laid-back” attitude of the hippies, she disagrees with those who say the street fair is nothing but a capitalist sell-out.
“I think it’s more,” she said. “it’s not just making a buck. It’s people coming out and displaying what they’ve made. I believe it’s all about making art.”
Jenny Cortez, 26, visited the street fair for the second year in a row on Sunday. She said she went to shop around and see if anything piques her interest. The people are nice, she said, “because they’re high.”
Although she enjoys an occasional diversion into hippie culture, for her it’s simply a “novelty.” The hippie lament from people like Millican, Jack, and Kirchner, she said, is childish nonsense.
“To be perfectly honest, for people to hold onto that way of life decades after it happened is alittle pathetic,” she said.
Millican is resigned to the end of the ‘60s. He also acknowledges the era’s dark side. For all the talk of love, peace, and understanding, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont—where Hell’s Angels security guards killed a concertgoer—is a “more accurate image of the ‘60s,” he said.
But he rejects out of hand any arguments that hippy values contributes to family breakdown, drug abuse, crime, declining educational achievement and other social pathologies. He says conservatives who make those arguments would have supported Oliver Cromwell’s regime in Britain and the Puritan era in North America.
The key for latter-day hippies, he said, is “not just to worry about the next party, but to worry about where’s the next enlightenment.”
Millican laments the commercialization of things like the Haight-Ashbury street Fair. But he is mindful that he wants to re-enter the business world soon himself.
The world of commerce may threaten the ‘60s values, he said, but people like himself who are hippies in spirit can get by if they “treat human beings as the come, not as people be marketed to.”
“Helping take care of people, doing things right and expanding your consciousness without getting f---ed up—those are still very valid points that we desperately need to do,” he said.
In All You Knead, Millican agonized over how to reconcile idealism with reality—“OK, God, how much naïve romanticism is coming out,” he said – but he holds onto hope.
“As stupid and snappy as it sounds,” he said, “maybe there’s a spark still left somewhere. Maybe people will catch it and it will set on fire.”
