Narrator: For many longtime residents of Haight-Ashbury, the growing hippie community was unwelcome.
Gerrans: We had an influx of all people from all over the country. I mean, from all over the country. We'd stop 'em and find out they were from the Midwest, from back east, they wanted to come out experience what was going on in the Haight-Ashbury.
Narrator: Art Gerrans was born in the Haight and joined the San Francisco police department at age 22, assigned to Park Station.
Gerrans: It was kind of a quiet station, until the hippies came. The old-timers that lived out there didn't like it. They were used to having a nice, quiet neighborhood.
Virginia Snyder: Our neighborhood here was just really lovely. We could push our buggies and strollers down Haight Street. There were three or four bakeries, there was a candy shop, there was a Woolworth's I was annoyed with them for changing my neighborhood.
Narrator: By late March, Haight Street was already bursting with hippies and hippie wannabes. Many feared that when schools let out for the summer, San Francisco would erupt into chaos.
Jay Thelin: There were these headlines "HIPPIES WARN SAN FRANCISCO." Big print. "HIPPIES WARN SAN FRANCISCO" about all these kids coming. And then a couple days later, "MAYOR WARNS HIPPIES."
Mayor Jack Shelley (archival): The hippies seem to be a new way of life. That's their right. But they have no right to inflict their way of life on everybody else to the detriment and the exclusion of people continuing in their way and when they block the streets, then it is interference with the normal routine life of a community. It will be stopped.
Narrator: Hippie leaders were incredulous.
Steven Levine (archival): The mayor is ... This is really very insidious what he's up to he wants to stop human growth. He's trying to throw the seeds of this growth out of the sandbox, which is a presumption that it's his sandbox, and it isn't because it's a very cosmic sandbox, it just happens to be occurring here.
Man 1 (archival): I took a trip in December and I talked to a lot of kids in some other cities to see if they were coming out here. They said "I don't know, we've read the magazines and heard a lot of talk, but I don't know, you know. We've got a scene here. We're happy" You know, but as soon as the Mayor puts a taboo on the thing ...
Man 2 (archival): By telling them they're not welcome, he should have thought about it first.
Man 1 (archival): What he doesn't know is that we don't want them to come yet. This neighborhood is by no means prepared to handle that many people.
George Tsongas (archival): Haight-Ashbury can't handle a hundred thousand because there isn't room. The city of San Francisco can, the state of California can, everyone can. And if they open up their hearts, they can, and I say that welcome them.
News reporter (archival): The city of San Francisco has been warned of a hippie invasion come summer in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend. The park and recreation department has ruled that no longer will the hippies be allowed to sleep in Golden Gate Park. And Police Chief Thomas Cahill says the rule will be rigidly enforced.
Thomas Cahill (archival): If they come in and you have them in the park where there are no facilities for them, then you are going to have a health problem.
Reporter (archival): Chief, are you threatening to kick them out of San Francisco?
Cahill (archival): I never said a word about that but I will take whatever police action is necessary. And I'm not going to cross bridges until I come to them. And certainly, nobody should let their young children come into San Francisco unsupervised to become a part of a group such as that.
Willie Brown, State Assemblyman: The powers to be in the city wanted to erect a way in which no newcomers would be welcome to the Haight-Ashbury. There was the assumption that this was an absolute drug-out culture; this was a place where all of the so-called family values were challenged. I was just absolutely blown away by how distant what the Supes and the Mayor were attempting to do was from my understanding of a democracy.
Selvin: The white middle-class establishment starts reacting to this movement with anger and vehemence. And they move to repress this thing and shut it down, acting just like we thought they would.
Narrator: The clash of cultures reverberated throughout the city.
Joe Dolan Radio Show (archival): Now, certainly these shaggies and hippies with their talk about peace and brotherhood and understanding and international amity, all this ridiculous nonsense. Naturally, the newspapers are going to play up the things they say, especially when these people bang tambourines and, like Allen Ginsberg, go into these absurd chants, these Hindu chants. Well, naturally they're going to play this sort of thing up. It would be absurd to expect that they're not going to do this.
Art Gerrans: Where I grew up, my neighborhood were mostly Irish and Italian kids, and, you know, we'd go to church together. But we had work ethics, and, mostly blue collar workers and you learned from your mother and your father about, you know, going to work and being responsible and doing the right thing. Where these kids here, they don't want to work. They wanted to fall out. They don't want to work, they don't want responsibility. They want nobody tell them what to do. They wanted to have sex, they wanted to have dope, and just sightsee and go in the park and get stoned and they were sort of wasting their life. They weren't going nowhere.
Reporter (archival): Why don't you like the hippies around here?
Ruth McCalister (archival): I don't like their morals. I don't like the example they're setting for younger people. I don't like being pushed off the street, walking in their filth on the streets. I don't like to look at them. I don't like the sound of their voices and their filthy words they use. I don't like their filthy posters. I just don't like them.
Narrator: Soon a sight-seeing company began running a bus down Haight Street, calling it the only foreign tour in the domestic United States.
Bus driver (archival): The hippies take many trips, and the trip of the hippies is generally an unusual one. A world about themselves and of themselves. And marijuana, of course, with LSD, is being used.
Narrator: Tourists were even provided with definitions of hippie slang.
Passenger: TEENIE BOPPER is a hippie in early teens. SPEED, combination of heroin and methedrine. STONED, high, as on LSD. STRAIGHT, square, conventional. TRIP is an LSD experience. TURN ON is to commence a far out experience as to turn on with LSD. WEED is marijuana.
Bus driver: We've seen the better and the worse of the Haight-Ashbury district and now, back into Golden Gate Park and our next stop will be the Japanese Tea Garden.