When hippies were a tourist attraction
Photographer captured Gray Line ride through Haight- Ashbury
In his 40 years as a Chronicle photog- rapher and photo editor, Art Frisch always seemed to be looking for the most interesting angle.
So when he received the April 1967 assignment to cover the first voyage of the Gray Line “Hippie Tour” bus in the Haight- Ashbury neighborhood, he chose to shoot from inside the bus — simultaneously capturing both the tourists and the young people.
The Chronicle ran just one photo in the newspaper, but Frisch took dozens, which now offer a unique window into this transitional time and place for San Francisco, just weeks before the Summer of Love. The cache of negatives was discovered in The Chronicle’s archives a month ago, while researching an Our San Francisco chapter on tourism that ran in April. It’s a unique piece of street photography from a changing time.
Gray Line, still operating, was a dominant tour bus company in the 1960s and 1970s, visiting places like Golden Gate Park and Muir Woods. The “Hippie Tour” was advertised as a “safari through psychedelia.”
“They billed it as ‘ the only foreign tour
within the continental limits of the United States,’ ” J. Campbell Bruce wrote in the 1967 Chronicle article, “and the new scene drew more stares than the Mint, Mission Dolores and Twin Peaks combined.”
The tourists, many from theMidwest and East Coast, seemed a bit disappointed. The young Haight residents, seen going about their day, didn’t look deranged or scary— and who knows if they called themselves hippies. ( A more accurate name for Gray Line might have been the Young PeopleWho Wear Their Hair a Little Bit Long Tour.)
But as captured by Frisch, who retired in 1984 and died in 2008, the photos couldn’t be more authentic. One young Haight dweller glares at the bus and points, as if to say, “Go back where you came from.” Some seem to be amused by the tourists. Others don’t notice, deep in thought or lost in their own troubles.
The neighborhood is the most striking character, especially for Bay Area residents who grew up visiting a post- Summer of Love Haight- Ashbury. There are no head shops, tie- dye T- shirt peddlers or other businesses set up for the tourists. The Haight, for the last time, looks like a working- class neighborhood.
Frisch also captured the tourists, who seem alternately amused and entranced. A middle- aged woman sits protectively with her child. An older man in a suit and hat shoots photos. Nobody ventures out of the bus.
“Some had read about San Francisco’s hippie land; some had never heard the term, most had never seen a live hippie,” The Chronicle’s article reported. “A little old lady kept insisting, ‘ You’re sure they’re not beatniks? have beatniks in Cleveland.’ ”
The Hippie Tour received a ton of press in 1967, but most of it was negative, and the gimmick was short- lived. Gray Line still visits the HaightAshbury, but the Hippie Tour is long gone.
Herb Caen, generally a booster of tourism, in 1967 called the tour “a creepycrawly thing, reeking of fast buck- ism.”
“The outside world is a bunch of tourists with their noses pressed to the windows, staring at the hippies staring at them?” Caen wrote. “The question that comes to mind is: ‘ Who’s in the cage?’ ”