IN SAN FRANCISCO, WHERE FLOWER POWER STILL BLOOMS

HAIGHT-ASHBURY was once a place to buy psychedelic T-shirts,
Jefferson Airplane posters and so-called tobacco-enjoyment products.
Vagrants and panhandlers sat on the sidewalks, using their dogs as
pillows or making peace signs on the sidewalk out of pennies. The
bongs and beggars remain, but Haight-Ashbury, also known as the Upper
Haight, is stepping out of its own shadow.

"There are 150 years of history on this street," said Betsy Rix, 57,
a founder of the Red Vic movie house, a collectively owned Haight
Street business. "And yet so many people want to focus on one year."

That would be 1967, year of the Summer of Love, when hippie culture
was in its first flowering and this neighborhood was its national
capital. Today tourists still cluster at the intersection of Haight
and Ashbury Streets, where a two-faced clock seems frozen at 4:20 and
"high noon," winking references to marijuana culture. And you will
still find hippies and 1960s rock fans paying their respects to Janis
Joplin and Jerry Garcia.

But the Haight is also a place to go on a self-guided tour of
century-old Queen Anne homes, or to climb to the viewpoint in Buena
Vista Park to see the sun sink down on the Golden Gate Bridge. Locals
and outsiders crowd its pubs and cafes and line up outside high-end
footwear stores where the clientele is so fervent that the management
must employ bouncers on sale days. When the weather heats up, throngs
gather at free concerts in nearby Golden Gate Park.

Those who seek edgier pleasures might lay down $5 for a "star map"
showing where the neighborhood's famous and infamous residents once
lived. Or they might browse through Kidrobot, a quirky chain store
whose wares include a teddy bear with visible rib cage and viscera
and a jackrabbit toting an automatic weapon. The tag says "Sniper
Bunny, Regular Version."

One rainy night, a young reveler stopped by La Rosa Vintage Boutique,
where items date from the hippie '60s back to the 1870s, when the
area took shape. Preparing for a party, he tried on a blood-red
dinner jacket from the '50s, worn over a puffy shirt that invoked
memories of a Seinfeld episode. "Do you have cummerbunds?" he asked
the manager. "And are they velvet?"

The Haight doesn't look like any other neighborhood in San Francisco
because its houses survived the 1906 earthquake, which leveled most
of the city. It doesn't even sound like anywhere else. Electric buses
rattle down the street, almost drowning out the come-ons of a fortune
teller sitting on a paisley carpet and the droning of a sitar player.
The acoustics are uncanny. Some nights, you will hear bongos,
cowbells and chanting from Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park when
you're 10 blocks away.

At times the scene gets seedy, especially if you enter Golden Gate
Park near the intersection of Stanyan and Haight Streets (you may
prefer to enter the park two blocks to the north, on John F. Kennedy
Drive). In parts of the neighborhood, you might even stumble across a
man sleeping off a bender on a futon laid out on the sidewalk, or see
harmless but determined dealers offering "sticky green bud," a potent
form of cannabis, to everyone in sight.

But the great thing about the Haight is that these things are easily
avoided; moving up one street from Haight Street to Waller Street, or
making your way up Cole Street, is literally like changing a TV
station. Suddenly the neighborhood becomes quiet and genteel, and you
find yourself in Cole Valley, a tiny neighboring enclave where diners
at Eos Restaurant and Wine Bar barely react if they feel tremors
while they pick at their ahi tuna and avocado poke rolls. It's only
the N-Judah train rolling in front of the restaurant.

One cold night in early winter, Tommy Netzband, a thoughtful,
soft-spoken local resident, led tourists from Texas, Missouri and
Washington, D.C., on a homespun Haight-Ashbury ghost tour, walking
the group straight into a localized fog. The group stopped at an
unassuming Cole Street house inhabited by Charles Manson in 1967 and
passed through a field where a local musician named Buck Naked was
shot dead while walking his dog. "People talk about being in the park
at night, and hearing someone say 'here boy,' but no one is there"
Mr. Netzband said.

In one of the Haight's endearing contradictions, this neighborhood
that worked so hard to throw off the strictures of convention 40
years ago now works hard to preserve its past. Many houses look so
well-tended they seem like museums, until you notice the Vespa
scooters and Toyota 4-Runners in the driveways.

These century-old piles may be Victorian, but there is nothing
repressed or prim about them. Some look like princess cakes slathered
in white, pink, purple, lemon, lavender and orange frosting. Many are
made of first-growth redwood. They have Munchkin-sized balconies,
Corinthian columns, sunbursts, widow's walks, fish-scale shingles,
gilt griffons, spindles, cupolas, dormers and pitched roofs with
windows in every pitch. Sometimes the owners leave the curtains
half-drawn and billowing; you can peer in to see high, rose-colored
ceilings, century-old molding and wainscoting on the walls. Some of
the most striking Victorians can be seen along Page and Ashbury
Streets; 710 Ashbury was the home of the Grateful Dead between 1966
and 1968. Others are near the intersection of Masonic Avenue and
Waller Street. The Abner Phelps house, at 1111 Oak Street was built
circa 1851 and is said to be the city's oldest.

Even the businesses strike a balance between culture and commerce.
Instead of Starbucks, there's Coffee to the People at the corner of
Masonic and Haight, where patrons have been seen reading "The Epic of
Gilgamesh" and decorated tables pay tribute to Emma Goldman and the
Black Panthers. There's a McDonald's at the far end of Haight Street,
but the lines are much longer for the Pork Store Cafe, where the
weekend brunch is always a mob scene.

At the homey, one-screen Red Vic, the staff serves organic popcorn in
reusable wooden bowls and seats some of its patrons on church-style
pew benches padded with futon cushions. Before running the features,
the theater shows an old homemade film in which one character gets
doused with a bucket of water for smoking in the theater and another
is pulled below the seats by a green monster after littering in the
aisles. Movies are intense here, perhaps because the screen is so big
and the room so small. During a recent showing of "No Country for Old
Men," the entire audience was audibly whimpering.

Outside, public art lures people into stores: the shapely pair of
oversized mannequin legs in fishnet stockings protruding from the
Piedmont Boutique clothing shop, the purple-polka-dotted dinosaur
beckoning shoppers into Shoe Biz II, and the mannequins staging a
wild party in the window display at RVCA - part art gallery, part
clothing boutique, part youth education center.

The 33-year-old Booksmith doles out free black-and-white
baseball-style cards with writers' faces on them to promote
appearances by authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Neil Gaiman and Linda
Barry. Allen Ginsberg gave his last reading there. To celebrate its
thousandth card, issued for the Bay Area-based bestselling author
Mary Roach's latest book, "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and
Sex," the Booksmith threw a party complete with anatomically correct
cakes - his and hers, with pink frosting.

The Haight is also a jumping off point to Golden Gate Park, a
beautifully tended and mercifully level expanse of trees, statues,
hidden waterfalls and attractions including the Conservatory of
Flowers, a glass palace with storybook gardens and 1,700 species of
plants; the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences, boasting a
four-story rain forest and a live anaconda; and the redesigned de
Young art museum.
When day is done, a Haight wayfarer could bed down at the Stanyan
Park Hotel, where several rooms have unimpeded views of Golden Gate
Park, or at Red Victorian Bed, Breakfast & Art, in a 104-year-old
Haight Street building. The Red Victorian also hosts a nonprofit
peace center and social organization in its downstairs cafe. Each of
the 18 rooms has been designed by the innkeeper, Sami Sunchild, 83,
who doubles as artist in residence. She even designed the rest rooms,
one of them festooned with a real bird's nest.

"This is the center of the universe," Ms. Sunchild said when asked
about Haight-Ashbury. "This is where it all began. This is a business
built on love. We get people here who say, I was here in 1967, or my
parents wouldn't let me come here in 1967, but now I'm a big girl and
I'm coming here on my own.

[sidebar]

IF YOU GO

WHERE TO STAY

Stanyan Park Hotel, 750 Stanyan Street; (415) 751-1000; rooms starting at $139.

Red Victorian Bed, Breakfast & Art, 1665 Haight Street; (415)
864-1978; rooms starting at $89.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

The Alembic Bar, 1725 Haight Street; (415) 666-0822;
www.alembicbar.com; old-time cocktails $9; small plates including
little fried fish and an endive-Asian pear salad, both $9.

Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery, 1398 Haight Street; (415) 864-7468.

Pork Store Cafe, 1451 Haight Street; (415) 864-6981; Pork Store
Special (two pork chops, two eggs, hash browns and biscuit); $9.50.

Eos Restaurant and Wine Bar, 901 Cole Street; (415) 566-3063;
www.eossf.com; changing menu recently included tea-smoked Peking duck
breast for $17.

WHAT TO DO

Haunted Haight tour, departing from 1206 Masonic Avenue; (415) 863-1416; $20.

Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight Street; (415) 668-3994; $9.

The Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street; (800) 493-7323; schedule of
readings at www.booksmith.com.

Conservatory of Flowers, John F. Kennedy Drive; (415) 666-7001; 9
a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday; $5.

California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive; (415)
379-8000; Monday to Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m.
to 5 p.m.; $24.95.

De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive; (415) 750-3600;
Tuesday to Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.; Friday until 8:45 p.m.; $10.

WHERE TO SHOP

Piedmont Boutique, 1452 Haight Street; (415) 864-8075.

RVCA, 1485 Haight Street; (415) 701-7822; shop.rvca.com.

Kidrobot, 1512 Haight Street; (415) 487-9000; kidrobot.com.

La Rosa Vintage Boutique, 1711 Haight Street; (415) 668-3744.

Shoe Biz II, 1553 Haight Street, (415) 861-3933; www.shoebizsf.com.