A Move to Landmark The Upper Haight Is Underway
September 15, 2016
While ground zero for the nation’s “hippie” and counter-culture movement in the 1960s, and one of the neighborhoods most commonly associated with the ethos of San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, or The Upper Haight, isn’t one of the City’s twelve Landmark Districts. But that could soon change.
Roughly defined as Haight Street from Stanyan to Buena Vista Park, the Haight-Ashbury District has been added to the City’s Landmark Designation Work Program, community outreach will soon begin, and Planning’s production of a report making the case for landmarking the district (which is both “significant for its association with the events of counter-culture movement” and “concentration of intact Victorian era architecture”) is about to get underway.
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Excellent!
Does that mean they have to leave it all filthy permanently?
Only a representation.
🙂
Instead of Haight & Ashbury they should rename it Snide & Prejudice
Or heroin alley
Hippies…so much added value.
I’m more surprised it wasn’t already a landmark. The bar is so low in this city I thought they would have got around to it in the 70’s.
It will be great for music fans who want to identify with the earthy hardscrabble accommodations of their counterculture heroes.
Do the part-time bums still occupy that street? I haven’t been there in a few years because I don’t like being harassed by trustafarians with pit bulls.
Oh just landmark the whole city and be done with it.
Yes, landmark the outer sunset for sure. Such memorable. So architecture. Wow!
And landmark status means what? Getting a permit to renovate your kitchen will take 3 years instead of 2?
Until recently, I hadn’t been in the Haight in years until we wandered through it one Saturday afternoon. What a gas!
This is good news and long overdue.
Landmark district? I think it is a total dump.
Another step towards the Fishermans-Wharf-ification of the upper Haight. Great to try to lock in that special odor of stale cigarettes and patchouli so the tourists will flock in perpetuity. Sunglass shops and tie dye, git me some!
The Haight is a dump and an embarrassment to people who live in the neighborhood. I can’t think of any other residential neighborhood in the City that is allowed to fester like that for some perceived tourist value over the needs of the people who live there.
I live there and Haight Street is an embarrassment. If this is an historic district, it’s better that this history be forgotten. Jerry, Jimi, and Janis were great and all, but they’re all dead from the excesses that many merchants in the neighborhood celebrate. Would that we could ban tourists and tour buses. They are the reason for the miserable stores and crappy restaurants. They draw the bums and junkies like flies. Can we please move on?
Look how ugly our City looks. The roads, the buildings, the overhead wires, a grey sky. Looking at the photo makes me wonder if I might be better off in the Peninsula or LA.
I bet most people who look at that photo are not going to have their first thought be, “how ugly.” So yeah, maybe. Variety is the spice of life.
Ahh yes, the peninsula or LA: Where there are no such things as buildings, or roads, or overhead wires, and the skies are never anything less than cerulean.
We really should landmark all of the main commercial corridors in the City. The best locations for density infill development should be permanently locked into amber as low-rise 2-3 story buildings.
music has been dead in the upper haight for decades and the area is a tourist trap full of weirdos for midwesterners to gawk at and east coast new yorkers to make fun of and assert their provincial superiority. It is not very useful if you actually live and work for a living in SF and is full of empty storefronts. Make it a landmark and build a statue to every hippie who moved here, made money in drugs and then moved into real estate as the true heir to the “summer of love”
I love how they did the cross walks to represent the area, like The Castro did.