The Summer of Love was a major social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. As many as 100,000 people, mostly young people, hippies, beatniks, and 1960s counterculture figures, converged in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed hippie culture, spiritual awakening, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war sentiment, and free love throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City. An episode of the PBS documentary series American Experience referred to the Summer of Love as "the largest migration of young people in the history of America".
A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, which describes a fictional island society in the New World.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
The Diggers were a group of religious and political dissidents in England, associated with agrarian socialism. Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, amongst many others, were known as True Levellers in 1649, in reference to their split from the Levellers, and later became known as Diggers because of their attempts to farm on common land.
The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and street theatre actors operating from 1966 to 1968, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics have been categorized as "left-wing;" more accurately, they were "community anarchists" who blended a desire for freedom with a consciousness of the community in which they lived. The Diggers' central tenet was to be "authentic," seeking to create a society free from the dictates of money and capitalism.
Sylvester James Jr., known simply as Sylvester, was an American singer-songwriter. Primarily active in the genres of disco, rhythm and blues, and soul, he was known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance, falsetto singing voice, and hit disco singles in the late 1970s and 1980s.
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, and typically share responsibilities and property. This way of life is sometimes characterized as an "alternative lifestyle". Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, Hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
Kerista was a utopian community that was started in New York City in 1956 by John Peltz "Bro Jud" Presmont. Throughout much of its history, Kerista was centered on the ideals of polyfidelity and creation of intentional communities. Kerista underwent several incarnations that later became known as the "Old Tribe," which was associated with a fairly large, but fluid membership.
The Koreshan Unity was a communal utopia formed by Cyrus Teed, a distant relative of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. The Koreshans followed Teed's beliefs, called Koreshanity, and he was regarded by his adherents as "the new Messiah now in the World". After moving from New York to Illinois, the group eventually settled in Estero, Florida. The last person to officially admit membership to the Koreshans died in 1982.
The Cockettes were an avant garde psychedelic hippie theater group founded by Hibiscus in the fall of 1969. The troupe was formed out of a group of hippie artists, men and women, who were living in Kaliflower, one of the many communes in Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Hibiscus came to live with them because of their preference for dressing outrageously and proposed the idea of putting their lifestyle on the stage. Later in the storefront at 992 Valencia Street, now Artists' Television Access.
Hibiscus was an American actor and performance artist. Starting his career in New York City, he moved to San Francisco, where in the early 1970s he founded the psychedelic gay liberation theater collective known as the Cockettes.
The Really Really Free Market (RRFM) movement is a horizontally organized collective of individuals who form a temporary market based on an alternative gift economy. RRFM events are often hosted by people unaffiliated with any large organization, and are encouraged to sprout up by anyone, anytime, anywhere. The RRFM movement aims to counteract capitalism in a proactive way by creating a positive example to challenge the questioned myths of scarcity and competition. The name Really Really Free Market is itself a play on words as it is a reinterpretation and re-envisioning of the term free market, which generally refers to an economy of competition governed by supply and demand. The RRFM holds as a major goal to build a community based on sharing resources, caring for one another and improving the collective lives of all. Markets often vary in character, but they generally offer both goods and services. A RRFM usually takes place in an open community space such as a public park or community commons.
Food Conspiracy is a term applied to a movement begun in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 in which households pooled their resources to buy food in bulk from farmers and small wholesalers and distribute it cheaply. The name came to describe a loose network of autonomous collectives which shared common values and, in many cases, suppliers. Many participants were seeking an alternative to supermarkets and became involved to obtain direct control of the quality and type of food they were sourcing, with a strong focus on wholefoods and organic produce.
Llano del Rio was a commune located in what is now Llano, California, east of Palmdale in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County. The colony was devised by lawyer and socialist politician Job Harriman after he had failed his bid to become the mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. The colony's land was acquired in 1913 and it was formally launched on May 1, 1914.
Morningstar Commune was an active open land counterculture commune in rural Sonoma County, California, located at 12542 Graton Road near Occidental.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
Daniel Nicoletta is an Italian-American photographer, photojournalist and gay rights activist.
The American Union of Associationists (AUA) was a national organization of supporters of the economic ideas of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) in the United States of America. Organized in 1846 in New York City as a federation of independent local Fourierist groups, the AUA published a weekly magazine called The Harbinger and published more than 70 books and pamphlets, which helped it to enjoy a brief moment of influence spreading the ideas of communitarianism to a circle of leading intellectuals.
Irving Street Kitchen was a restaurant serving American cuisine in Portland, Oregon's Pearl District, in the United States. Conceived by Doug Washington, Mitch Rosenthal and Steve Rosenthal as their interpretation on American cuisine with a Southern influence, it opened on May 6, 2010. With executive chef Sarah Schafer, Irving Street Kitchen added to their serving hours over the years, opening up for lunch and brunch. The restaurant also shifted towards casual dining in 2019, revamping its menu and ambiance. Irving Street Kitchen ultimately closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
