Wilting Flowers

SAN FRANCISCO

It might be the evening scene in any city slum. Unkempt youths clot the stoops of dilapidated tenements, talking overboldly of drugs; drunks reel along gutters foul with garbage; young toughs from neighboring turf methodically proposition every girl who passes by, while older strangers hunt homosexual action. The night air smells of decay and anger. For all its ugly familiarity, however, this is not just another ghetto. This is the scene in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, once the citadel of hippiedom and symbol of flower-power love.

Love has fled the Hashbury. Although antidraft hipsters recently held an amorous assembly knee-deep in a pool by city hall, love has been replaced by cynical commercialism, loneliness and fear, sporadic brutality and growing militance. Parks Superintendent Frank Foehr calls the current crop of flower children "a different element--young hoodlums." Once they loved blossoms; now, Foehr says, they come to Golden Gate Park to "put garbage in Albert Lake and break the rhododendrons." Infected communal needles boost the already soaring viral-hepatitis rate. Free stores and communal kitchens are not in evidence; now the tourist is lured by professionally made hippie costumes Pacifism, once the heart of flower power, has been supplanted by talk of armed violence. Most significant of all, the cast of characters has changed. City Supervisor William Blake says flatly: "The real hippies of last summer are gone."

What have they left behind? Two U.S. Public Health Service psychiatrists, who surveyed 232 Haight denizens, found three clusters: kids, beards and toughs. The "lost youth" are younger, less adept. Says a free-clinic nurse: "There are more misfits now, more who can't make it." The "Haight types," with beards and beads, were found to have been disenchanted enough to "split to a Zen monastery." As for the "indigenous-leadership cluster," Methedrine addicts have replaced the work-oriented Diggers and driven them out.

Love died last fall as .the waning flow of tourists sent the hippies panhandling, selling papers, drifting into the drug trade. Said the survey: "Love didn't necessarily fit if you hadn't had a meal in two days." This spring, City Supervisor Roger Boas warns: "My advice to kids around the country is not to come here. There must be hippie havens other than San Francisco." But flower beds are scarce all over. New York City's East Village scene now seems as loveless as that in the Haight. As Los Angeles' underground newspaper Open City declared: "Hippies are dead--the whole thing went out to lunch."

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