Why was San Francisco the soure of the counter-culture revolution and what effect did the revolution have on american culture!?
i know, its a two-part question, but either part would help a ton!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
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Position:Home>History> What made san francisco a good place for the hippie movement (counter-culture reQuestion: What made san francisco a good place for the hippie movement (counter-culture revolution of the sixties)!? Why was San Francisco the soure of the counter-culture revolution and what effect did the revolution have on american culture!?
i know, its a two-part question, but either part would help a ton!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: San Francisco is a city with a unique history!. It really goes back to the California Gold Rush, the event that made California a state!. Gold was discovered in 1848 and in 1849 thousands of people came to California from everywhere, cities were built, communities were established!. San Francisco grew from a town of a few hundred to tens of thousands in a matter of a year or two!. It's hard to imagine! The earliest picture of San Francisco shows rows and rows of old wooden sailing ships in the background!. Ships would dock there and the whole crew would desert to go to the goldfields!. The ships themselves then served as apartment buildings, hospitals, stores, prisons, etc!. Well, most places have 'old families', the old rich, the people who run the old, well-established businesses, and the city council!. But in a situation like this there are no leaders, no 'old families'!. So California in the early days was very democratic!. Everyone was just as good as everyone else!. Nobody cared where people came from because there were people there from all over the world!. It was probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world!. That spirit of democracy and tolerance remains to this day!. For many years SF was sort of the crossroads of the world, the jumping-off point to anywhere!. So people from all over were welcome there!. Artists found cheap places to live (sadly no longer!) Gays were accepted in SF before they were anywhere else!. It was the first American city to be racially integrated, in fact it had a famous district of black jazz and blues clubs and restaurants!. So it was the perfect place for the hippie movement! If you look at a map of San Francisco and see Golden Gate Park, there is a long strip of park that extends eastward from the park, called the Panhandle!. The purpose of this is because when the park was built in the 1870s there were 'squatters' who lived on the land!. The whole western half of the city was just sand dunes, but people lived out there and built little homes and didn't pay any rent or taxes or anything!. When the park was built the city worried about the people who would be displaced, so they built the panhandle to give them a place to pitch tents! And this was the area the hippies took over!. For a whole Summer in 1967 it was like a big campground!. The police didn't even mind! This was why the center of the movement was the Haight Ashbury district, it was the closest business district, only a block or two away!. There was another, very similar movement in San Francisco only a few years earlier, the 'Beat Generation'!. Much of that is still evident in North Beach (which used to be the Italian neighborhood)!. A lot of people though the hippies were just the next generation of 'beatniks'!.Www@QuestionHome@Com It's location was part of it!. Berkeley was very near and was the locale for some of the anti-war movement!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Really it wasnt just a couple of songs made it look that way Hell's Angels & Black Panthers were much more in the bay at that timeWww@QuestionHome@Com |