In 1966 and 1967, while Urban was opening its doors on Washington Street for its first year, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was blooming with peace and love. Music floated from record shops and apartments as colorful art lined the sidewalks. Peeling Victorian houses, draped with posters and bead curtains, were filled with people laughing in doorways and on stoops.

 The 1967 Summer of Love — a cultural movement where thousands of young people flooded into San Francisco, embracing peace, music and anti-establishment ideals — influenced a style of communal living called communes. These shared houses pooled resources for members’ benefits and rejected traditional social structures. 

At the movement’s peak, there were upwards of 5,000 communes and 100,000 members across the Bay Area. Most communes reflected typical hippie values: peace, love, drug use and nonconformism.

To many, the optimism of that period felt endless. Little did they know how close the end was. “’66 was wonderful — it was like [a] fairyland,” said former San Francisco resident Linda Penn, who observed the atmosphere of that era, in an interview with The Urban Legend. “But by the end of ’67, the crystal meth came in.”

In the late 1960s, methamphetamine and heroin, a potent stimulant and a powerful opioid, began to replace psychedelics among San Franciscans as stronger alternatives. Heroin reached the Haight through illegal drug networks and meth spread via prescription abuse. The Haight rapidly transformed from a haven of peace and love to the home of the meth and heroin crisis — bringing the Summer of Love to an end. 

On Oct. 7, 1967, a three-day event ended in a symbolic funeral as hippies declared the social movement’s end in response to the meth and heroin crisis, calling it the Death of the Hippies. 

During the ceremony, the group marched from the Haight to Buena Vista Park, carrying a coffin filled with memories of the Summer of Love: love beads, incense, shaved beards and marijuana. The coffin also contained the Psychedelic Shop’s sign, an influential Haight store that sold posters, books and drug paraphernalia before closing due to police pressure and its association with drug culture. The movement’s sudden end led to a slow decline in San Francisco commune populations.

The year after the Death of the Hippies, Cyril Isaacs and Steve Kever — also known as Steve Stacy — met in High Desert State prison. Isaacs’ charges are unknown; Kever was serving time for armed robbery. There, the two formed a friendship and began discussing their plans after release. “They got turned on to the whole idea of … hippies and wonderfulness,” Penn said. “So when they got out of prison, they started the Good Earth.” Although the two had no previous ties to hippie culture, the movement deeply influenced them, leading to the creation of a commune.

The Good Earth commune, also known as the Good Earth Church, began to dominate the Haight in 1970, relaunching commune culture despite the previous drop in attendance. With locations on Oak, Fell, Cole, Central and Haight streets, the commune totaled around 2,000 members at its peak in the early 1970s. 

The commune welcomed people of all races, classes, genders and ages, with no minimum age requirement to join. After the Death of the Hippies, commune members called themselves the last of the flower children, or the last prevailing hippies in the Haight after the meth crisis. The commune aimed to return the neighborhood to its former state.

“I hitchhiked out to California, got into San Francisco and got to the Good Earth house, and they welcomed me,” commune member William Wexler said in an interview with The Urban Legend. “There was no initiation, there was no nothing. You were just there.”

After hearing about the commune from a coworker, Penn also joined Good Earth. At her initial meeting, she and members of the commune decided to head to the Fillmore Auditorium. They crowded into an overflowing van of people, taking with them a substantial stash of marijuana. On the way, the driver, Brian, mentioned he needed to make a stop in Berkeley. “Next thing I know, the cops have [us] surrounded, and I’m in jail for three days,” Penn said. “So that didn’t work out real well. And poor Brian’s running down the street with a guitar case full of pot.”

While detained for marijuana possession, Penn recalled how she and her fellow commune members passed the time while in jail. “We just sang Broadway songs. … For some reason, we had a good time,” she said.

Selling marijuana — which was illegal for recreational use in California until 2016 — was not Good Earth’s only venture. Dressed in horseback riding boots and a black velvet skirt, Penn and other commune members opened up the Ever Loving Trading Post, a trinket shop on Haight. “Every morning, we’d get up and we’d walk over all the bodies in the street,” Penn said. “They weren’t dead, but they were meth freaks sleeping. … And we were just happy hippies. And on we went into the Ever Loving Trading Post.”

On top of working at the trading post, Penn hitchhiked across the Bay Bridge every day to attend college at UC Berkeley.

Penn had no trouble working in the noisy and jam-packed Good Earth house on Oak Street. “There were rock and roll bands … in the basement. There was pot dealing up on the third floor. You know, it was just like a crazy, … wild house,” she said. “But I could shut the door and I could write my papers. I didn’t hear a thing. It really was a magical little room.”

Work ethic and community service were quintessential elements of the commune. “Good Earth had a very articulated philosophy of work,” said Calvin Welch, former Haight-Ashbury community organizer, in an interview with The Urban Legend. Welch was an activist in the Haight in the 1970s and knew several members of Good Earth. “It was important, not just simply to smoke dope and skip rope, but to work,” he said.

Kever opposed the widespread hippie stereotypes of laziness and unproductiveness. When creating the commune, he combatted these stereotypes by arranging a system of work in exchange for shelter. 

Every commune member had to contribute in some way, whether that was through illicit marijuana dealing, working for the commune’s roofing and painting business, or distributing food to commune members and people in its community. Kever became known as the commune’s minister of exterior and acted as a communication link to assess what civic work was needed to take care of the community.

Kever’s philosophy around work changed commune members’ lives. “Many of [the commune members] came from abusive families. Fathers that beat them, mothers that were substance abusers and ignored them,” Welch said. “I saw really marginal people — … guys that were on the thin edge of a life of crime [or] a wasted life of addiction — turned around by the Good Earth commune, made whole.”

Both men and women were responsible for cooking, cleaning, laundry and childcare — contrasting typical labor dynamics of the 1960s and ’70s. The commune was also home to around 80 children. 

In an email to The Urban Legend, Isaacs’ daughter, Dawn Hollenbeck, wrote, “My father had possibly 23 children. We have confirmed 12 so far. Most of these children were conceived or born during the years he was at the Good Church. He never had more than two children per mother.” 

As the commune grew in numbers and power, police run-ins became more frequent. Wexler recalled one of these interactions. “The police supposedly saw a lot of marijuana on the living room floor. The only problem was, the living room floor was 15 feet above the sidewalk,” he said. “How they saw it, nobody knows. They came crashing through [the building], and they went into the backyard … whereupon they heard the click of rifle bolts and decided not to go any further.”

Many commune members were U.S. Army veterans, and the group actively opposed police, heroin dealers and anyone who threatened their goals.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, heroin dealers in the Haight were notoriously violent and aggressive. Good Earth joined broader community efforts to push dealers out of the neighborhood, sometimes engaging in physical confrontations with dealers. This forceful stance set Good Earth apart from most other San Francisco communes.

Despite police interference, Good Earth continued its illegal practices. The commune held press conferences to criticize the police raids they faced. In 1971, the commune filed a $240,000 lawsuit against the city of San Francisco for damages after a police raid. Then-Mayor Joseph Alioto ordered many of the raids as part of his redevelopment plan that opposed the commune — the lawsuit was also a form of protest against Alioto. 

To further oppose Alioto’s redevelopment plan, Good Earth’s lawyer, Tony Serra, ran against Alioto for mayor as he campaigned for a second term. Competing against Alioto and Dianne Feinstein, who was serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the time, the commune didn’t expect Serra to win. Instead, the campaign functioned as a form of protest against Alioto’s redevelopment agenda. 

After Serra lost the election, police raided Good Earth in May 1972. It was the most brutal raid yet: Police burst into commune houses, arresting more than 80 members of Good Earth and destroying belongings. 

In the aftermath of the raid, Feinstein, had dinner at the Good Earth commune house on Oak Street. “Good Earth became so prominent that the politicians realized that it was important to get this group on their side,” Penn said. 

Although their influence and power were at its pinnacle, the commune suffered in the wake of the raid. Commune members were on edge, and cocaine usage spread rapidly. Previously, the commune prohibited “hard” drugs, which referred to all substances other than psychedelics, marijuana and alcohol. As cocaine became more popular in the Haight, the commune labeled the drug “soft,” and many began to heavily consume it.

“I didn’t like it so much when the cocaine came in, because that’s when people started getting kind of nasty and fighting with each other,” Penn said. “So that’s when I moved along. I didn’t really want to be around it anymore.” After leaving the commune in 1972, Penn moved between Bay Area communes before settling in Hawaii. 

Good Earth’s membership slowly tapered off. Kever faced a second incarceration on charges of cocaine distribution, and after he was released, he became addicted to crack cocaine. After eventually recovering, Kever passed away at age 78 on July 21, 2017.

Isaacs passed away in 2000. “While he had a lot of children at that time, and it was probably his happiest time of life, … [he] died young from alcoholism and never raised any of his children past five years old,” Hollenbeck wrote. 

Although the group lost the strength it once possessed, Good Earth never truly died. Wexler reflected on the perpetual status of the commune. He said, “I’d like to think that it never really ended as long as we’re still alive.”