How could I not have? It had been glorified in songs and movies. There was also all the paraphernalia once thought to be so cool—leather vests, peace signs, water pipes, black-light posters, incense, and assorted psychedelia. That was one reason I hadn’t quite known what to expect when I’d first landed in San Francisco. Just one quick stroll through the Haight had been enough to discover that it was now a glorified walk through a Disneyfied world of hippiedom. I parked my Ford on Cole Street and got out. Once again, I was not disappointed. Teens with long hair and tie-dyed shirts wandered about smoking doobies, just as their predecessors had done nearly forty years ago. However, since then a few other things had changed. Who would have dreamt there’d be a Gap, a Banana Republic, and a Ben & Jerry’s near the corner of Haight and Ashbury—once the heart of the anti-establishment rebellion? But that was nothing compared to all the souvenir shops blatantly packaging and hawking the counter-culture experience.
