A lot of things slipped through the cracks because so much was going on. For many, the Summer of Love inspires visions of hippies laughing as they strolled arm-in-arm through Haight-Ashbury, flowers in their hair, joints in hand, Jefferson Airplane playing in the background. Such activities certainly took place, but saw more than just love and peace. Police clashed with the community, city officials condemned the hippie movement, STDs were rampant, and drug overdoses and murders were not uncommon.
The Summer of Love has been tidied up and neatly wrapped in a tie-dye package. Maycox was one of them. In , he spent much of his time in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, where students from S. State or the University of San Francisco rented out whole blocks of houses with their friends. It was all artists, musicians, social activists. Most of the people were activists.
But that changed with the influx of hippies. On Jan. A team of health inspectors was deployed to the neighborhood. When water is shut off from failure to pay the bill, toilets are not being used. Garbage is thrown around, and this attracts flies and rats. Bubonic plague is carried by rats on fleas, and it is not impossible there might be an outbreak of epidemic meningitis. By June, the number of people visiting the Haight was predicted to be close to , Every spare couch was filled, runaways huddled in doorways at night, and school buses converted into mobile homes lined the Panhandle along Oak and Fell streets.
There was an influx of young runaways, many from well-to-do families. They were expecting a city of love and found a city like any other city, and a lot of them ended up being prostitutes.
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Maycox confirms this. A lot of young girls would end up as prostitutes. What surprised me was how fast that happened. Runaway teens drew cops to the neighborhood, as frantic parents across the country tried to track them down. Soon, even the Diggers, a radical activist group, were rejecting people under 18 from their community houses, out of fear cops would raid them and find drugs. Running away was a crime, and those who were caught were tossed in the Youth Guidance Center, a juvenile-delinquent center on Twin Peaks with bars on the windows.
