FLOWERS IN THEIR HAIR: REMEMBER THE SUMMER OF LOVE? NO? Lucky you, Andrew Ferguson writes on location at Haight-Ashbury:

When the tour was over I walked back downtown to the library to take a last look at the exhibits there. I saw something I’d missed in my first walk through. There was another thing absent from all the celebrations: They were neglecting the people who lived in the Haight before the Summer of Love, before the freaks arrived and the world changed. But here they were, in the basement of the library. At the end of the exhibit there’s a single display case, labeled “The Rest of Us,” as a reminder that not every San Franciscan participated in the Summer of Love.

They are photos from the mid-sixties. One shows a beauty shop, beehived women lined up for their weekly rinse; another is a family picture of a wedding party, fading with that washed-out color you find in sixties Polaroids. In another a line of middle-school cheerleaders smiles brightly, and there are a few men in suits and ties. They all look so odd — odder to the eye than the surrounding pictures of dancing hippies — and not simply because they’re antiques a half-century old. They look odd because, with the smiles and the attitude of self-assurance and contentment, they look clueless. We know something they don’t know. They don’t know what’s about to hit them.

When Alfred Hitchcock was shooting Vertigo on location in San Francisco in the fall of 1957, he thought he was making a sexually-charged psychological thriller. What he actually produced was a time capsule of city about to be utterly transformed by forces just as powerful and destructive in their own way as the 1906 earthquake – and whose effects have been infinitely more long-lasting.