San Francisco revels, reflects as Summer of Love turns 50

Hoping for another invasion of visitors — this time with tourist dollars — the city is celebrating with museum exhibits, music and film festivals, Summer of Love-inspired dance parties and lecture panels.

Hotels are offering discount packages that include psychedelic cocktails, ''Love Bus tours, tie-dyed tote bags and bubble wands.

The city's travel bureau, which is coordinating the effort, calls it an "exhilarating celebration of the most iconic cultural event in San Francisco history."

San Francisco remains a magnet for young people, but even those earning six-figure Silicon Valley salaries complain about the cost of living.

The bands dropped by each other's houses and played music nearby, often in free outdoor concerts at Golden Gate Park and its eastward extension known as the Panhandle.

Several of its most influential local acts — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which launched Joplin's career — shot to fame during the summer's three-day Monterey Pop Festival.

McNally uncovered 100 photographs, some never seen publicly, that trace San Francisco's contrarian roots to the Beat poets of the 1950s, followed by civil rights demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s.

The national media paid little attention to San Francisco's psychedelic community until January 1967, when poets and bands joined forces for the "Human Be-In," a Golden Gate Park gathering that unexpectedly drew about 50,000 people, McNally said.

There's a psychedelic light show, a 1960s soundtrack and galleries with iconic concert posters, classic photographs and hippie chic fashions worn by Joplin, Jerry Garcia and others.