Haight-Ashbury is a district of San Francisco, California, US, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. It is commonly called The Haight. The district generally encompasses the neighborhood surrounding Haight Street, bounded by Stanyan Street and Golden Gate Park on the West, Oak Street and the Golden Gate Park Panhandle on the North, Baker Street and Buena Vista Park to the East, and Frederick Street and Ashbury Heights and Cole Valley neighborhoods to the South.

The area is further subdivided into the Upper Haight and the Haight-Fillmore or Lower Haight districts; the latter being lower in elevation and part of what was previously the principal African-American and Japanese neighborhoods in San Francisco's early years. The street names themselves commemorate two early San Francisco leaders: Pioneer and exchange banker Henry Haight[1], or, (though it is arguable) the tenth governor of California, Henry Huntley Haight, the former's nephew, and Munroe Ashbury, one of the city's first politicians, who served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 1864 to 1870.[2] Both Haight and his nephew as well as Ashbury had a hand in the planning of the neighborhood, and, more importantly, nearby Golden Gate Park at its inception.

The district is famous for its role as a center of the 1960s hippie movement, a post-runner and closely associated offshoot of the Beat generation or beat movement, members of which swarmed San Francisco's "in" North Beach neighborhood two to eight years before the "Summer of Love" in 1967. Many who could not find space to live in San Francisco's northside found it in the quaint, relatively cheap and underpopulated Haight-Ashbury. The '60s era and modern American counterculture have been synonymous with San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood ever since.

The area still maintains its bohemian ambiance, though the effects of gentrification are also apparent. Though Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream is now located at the famous Haight-Ashbury intersection, the neighborhood remains a thriving center of independent local businesses. It is home to a number of independent restaurants and bars, as well as clothing boutiques, booksellers, head shops and record stores including the well-known Amoeba Music. The cohabitation between throw-backs to the Fifties lounge scene, the organic and spiritual New Age ambiance via the Sixties, and the punk-rock scene of the Seventies and beyond is one of the neighborhood's most interesting and endearing aspects.

Courtesy of www.wikipedia.org