Narrator: By July, the great mass of young people had reached staggering proportions. Estimates ranged from 50 to over 100 thousand. Gawking tourists only added to the congestion.
Tourist 1 (archival): I've heard about this place. I'm from Southern California and enjoying seeing what I've read about. They're literally hundreds of these fellows; bearded, and girls that are dressed eccentrically. And cars with flowers painted on them. It's really just out of this world
Tourist 2 (archival): We drove up and down the street and then I said let's get out and really get a good look at them.
Hippie (archival): The last two months or so, the newspapers and the television stations and all sorts of people have been writing various articles about the hippies as if they were animals, something to look at. Thus, we've gotten hundreds and literally thousands of people coming up to Haight-Ashbury to watch people. But people here are human, they want to be talked to, they don't want to be watched. And the irritation, the frustration, the friction that builds up because of this make Haight-Ashbury a terribly unpleasant place to be in.
Narrator: The Haight had become a circus, a caricature of its idealistic beginnings. Shops now catered to souvenir-hungry tourists and "weekend hippies." College kids with no intention of "dropping out" took on hippie personas for the summer. Hundreds of young runaways wandered the streets aimlessly. For many, the capitol of the counterculture no longer seemed a shimmering wonderland.
Hedgepeth: This strain of mysticism and utopianism can only work in small groups. You can't really have 50,000 people living like they were in Haight-Ashbury.
Kasper: Things were getting tougher, the attitudes were getting tougher. There were people who were coming, who were just coming for the drugs, who weren't coming for, say, a spiritual awakening or for a sense of community, or to be part of something bigger than themselves. If the Be-in was the bringing together of all that energy from the previous years, it was the high point and the Summer of Love was the beginning of the end.
Narrator: William Hedgepeth's article for Look came out in August. He reflected on the "finer angels" he'd witnessed. "Hippies are working toward an open, loving, tension-free, nature-oriented world," he wrote. But he also told of a darker side, of spending the night in a "filthy, litter-strewn dope fortress," with "half-a-dozen hippies lying in various stages of drug stupor."
Hedgepeth: I happened to be there at a time when it was just past the major blossoming People were talking about the fact that the Haight just isn't like it used to be.
Sandi Stein: I was really part of a vagrant street crowd. And most of those people that were on the streets were under 17. They were my age. You know, people thought of college students. They didn't realize how many young children, 13, 14, 15, 16, were out there.
Reporter (archival): What do you think they've got here that makes you want to come here?
Girl #1(archival): Freedom. You can be what you are.
Reporter (archival): Freedom to what?
Girl #2 (archival): To love!
Girl #1 (archival): You can be yourself. You don't have to be what adults want you to be. And everything like that.
Reporter (archival): What do you want to do here that your parents wouldn't want you to do?
Girl #1 (archival): Nothing!
Willie Brown: For many of them, they didn't find what they thought was the magic, and their resources expired, and they disappeared. They decided not to go the route that so many kids did go by staying without resources.
Virginia Snyder: I used to volunteer at our rectory on Masonic, and they would come, filthy, filthy, dirty. They were sleeping in the park, sleeping here or there. I can remember going to Park Police Station one time with a group, and the entire wall were snap shots of runaway children from all over.
Reporter (archival): Sandra, your father says you've run away from home three times and you've been gone now for some time.
Sandra, runaway (archival): Yes
Reporter (archival): But you say you're not.
Sandra, runaway (archival): No I'm not. I don't consider myself a runaway at all.
Reporter (archival): Where did you spend last night?
Sandra, runaway (archival): That's none of anybody's business. And I won't tell. I won't tell where I've been for the past two weeks. Ever.
Reporter (archival): How old are you Sandra?
Sandra, Runaway (archival): Fourteen.
Jay Thelin: Periodically, paddy wagons would drive down Haight Street, and the officers on the sidewalk would just go in and grab kids out of restaurants and, if you didn't have an I.D. or even if you did, you went in the paddy wagon and you went to Park Station.
Police officer (archival): Let me see your identification again.
Gerrans: And we would have to book them in youth guidance center, and the parents would have to come from wherever they were in the country, the Midwest or the East, they would have to come back out and recover their children.
Police officer (archival): You're not 18, I can tell you that. I raised a girl myself and I know that you're not 18.
Runaway (archival): I don't care.
Police officer (archival): Come on in here.
Hedgepeth: Many of them just simply didn't know how to take care of themselves. And they would go barefoot on the street and get infections and whatnot. And they didn't -- they couldn't feed themselves right.
Narrator: The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, established at the beginning of summer by a group of young doctors, treated dozens of kids every day, kids suffering from malnutrition or hepatitis or drug overdoses.
Person at Free Clinic (archival): Today we went down to the city clinic and we talked to the people down there about the venereal disease that's spreading throughout the Haight-Ashbury.
Narrator: The Diggers offered new arrivals a "survival school," teaching how to get decent nutrition, how to find a clean place to stay, how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.
Person at Free Clinic (archival): Anyone who wants to come down shouldn't be afraid to come for a check up. Or if they think they have this disease to go down there right away to get it fixed.
Narrator: LSD, the revered sacrament of the original hippies, was becoming a source of grave concern as more and more people experienced frightening bad trips.
Kasper: There were runaways taking drugs who really didn't have the ego structure to deal with it. When you deconstruct your world, as many of us did with the stronger psychedelics, you have to build it back up again. And for some people they simply couldn't build it back up again and got stuck in a very painful place and couldn't see their way out of it.
Gerrans: We got a call of a woman screaming for help, so we pushed the door open, and we see this naked woman slithering around on the floor like a snake. We [went in.] She jumps up and runs and she goes down to the back of the house and we were behind her. She's totally naked, she jumps up on a bed, like it was a springboard, hits the bed, and goes head first into the window.
Narrator: Drug dealers took advantage of susceptible young kids and began pushing highly addictive drugs like speed, cocaine and heroin.
Kasper: The psychedelic movement was dying out and these other drugs really hit the scene. It created paranoia in people. People didn't take care of their bodies.
Claudia King: I started noticing garbage on the street and people's expressions, wrinkled brows and cold sores. And little kids not looking like they were being taken care of or loved very well.
Selvin: These initial charming, innocent steps forward had changed, like the Diggers free soup. I had Diggers' soup. It was fun, it was neat. You go and get a bowl of soup, eat with some people you don't know and be amongst all this new community. That was fun. The next time I went back, man, those people waiting in line for that soup needed it. I didn't stay. Cause now it was squalid. The utopian moment had been and gone.