Panhandle park
This point of interest is available as audio on the tour: Visit San Francisco, The Summer of Love
You’re now crossing the Panhandle Park, for its long and narrow shape. This strip of greenery is only one block wide and eight blocks long. It’s an extension of the Golden Gate Park. It actually served as a testing ground, if not a draft, for landscapers and botanists to practice before tackling more serious projects. You can even admire the city’s oldest eucalyptus tree there. If you could go back in time to the Summer of Love in ’67, you would witness free concerts by Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, or The Grateful Dead on the Panhandle lawns. Much quieter today, the park remains a meeting point for artists, and it’s not uncommon to encounter guitarists, writers, or jugglers there. In late September 1967, a procession of hippies paraded through the park carrying a coffin filled with symbolic objects, flowers, and feathers, signifying the death of the movement. The message was quickly picked up by the media, and the summer of ’67 marked not only the peak but also the end of the hippie movement. However, what the participants really wanted was to break away from the increasingly negative image that was being portrayed by the press.
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