Also in effect was a lot of plain old looking out for one another. Talbot tells an amusing story about a rising local band called the Grateful Dead. On their way home from a grocery run, band member Jerry Garcia and his girlfriend, Mountain Girl, were hailed by a neighbor from her window across the street. “I’m so glad you got my groceries,” the neighbor hollered. “Come up right now.” The pair picked up on what was happening: a police raid of their house, which — the Dead being the Dead — was not a drug-free zone. Garcia and Mountain Girl accepted the invitation and “weren’t arrested that day.”
Meanwhile, some shoppers had needs that not even a free store could meet, such as treatment for the overdosed and justice for the harassed. Striking what Talbot calls a “devil’s bargain,” the denizens of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, ground zero for the Summer of Love, enlisted a thuggish motorcycle club called the Hell’s Angels as guardians. “In return for protecting them from violent cops, bad drug dealers, and other rogue elements,” Talbot writes, “the neighborhood turned a blind eye to the Angels’ own bare-knuckled behavior.”
Legitimizing the Angels came with a price. In 1969, several miles inland from San Francisco Bay at Altamont Pass, the Rolling Stones threw a free concert for which the Angels provided security. In the parlance of the day, they proved to be the problem, not the solution, when they stabbed and stomped a concertgoer to death. The anguish caused by the incident was only a prelude. As Talbot puts it, “No city would go through more convulsions than San Francisco as it processed the 1960s.”
There was the terror reign of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst, demanded a gargantuan ransom from her wealthy father and robbed a bank before coming to a fiery end. There was a wave of random killings by black militants. The police responded with racial profiling and brutal crackdowns, and Mayor Joseph Alioto proposed massive civic renewal, which would have entailed razing certain troublesome neighborhoods. Skeptical citizens portrayed the city as facing a clear choice: “Was it to become a Manhattan of the West, whose office towers and high-rise apartment buildings overshadowed everything else, or remain an affordable, human-scale city of light nestled into the hills and hollows?” In the midst of all the turmoil, then, San Francisco was called upon to wrestle with its identity.
The arc of misery peaked with two grim sagas in 1978: the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and the mass suicide of the Rev. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple followers in Guyana. Milk was the city’s — and the nation’s — first openly gay politician, and Dan White, the man who killed him and the mayor (and also, a few years later, himself), was a scion of the Irish-Catholic contingent that, with help from Italian Americans, had dominated local politics for decades. Not long before his death, Milk told a friend he had a feeling that White himself was gay, in which case his rampage probably had a psychosexual dimension. In any event, he represented an element that resented the transformation of San Francisco into the gayest of American cities.
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