Ashbury Tech, an only-in-San-Francisco unicorn, combines two classic eras in the city’s unique history: hippies and tech
Just a few doors down the street from the iconic corner of Haight and Ashbury, ground zero for San Francisco’s Summer of Love 50 years ago, sits a most unusual store. On the ground floor of a building once occupied by Jimi Hendrix, Ashbury Tech is a unique melding of old and new San Francisco.
From tobacco to tech
That’s because the three-level is store is not your garden-variety electronics shop. Until earlier this year, in fact, it had been known as Ashbury Tobacco Center for the past 23 years. And approximately half of its floor space is still dedicated to bongs, pipes, vapes and other accouterments of what is commonly known as a head shop.
According to published reports, due to extensive competition in the head shop business in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the goal is to transition the store primarily towards sales of new and refurbished computers, phones, accessories, drones and other devices, as well as repair services.
The store’s website doesn’t mention the smoking supplies, but the owner reportedly says it will continue to devote at least some space to pipes and such. Currently, however, the shop is split essentially in half. When you walk in the entrance, you see mobile phone and computer accessories on the left, pipes and tobacco products on the right. Downstairs in the back lie case after case of bongs and pipes, while Apple computers are lined up in a loft area, which also sports a tech repair room.
According to a clerk, sales currently run about 50-50 between paraphernalia and tech services, “depending on the customer.” When I asked if anyone avails themselves of both parts of the store’s stock, I was told that it didn’t happen often, but occasionally someone will be buying a pipe and say, “Oh, you sell phone chargers, too? I’ll take one of those!”
A real-life time capsule for two different eras
What makes this schizophrenic store so interesting to me, though, is its totally un-self-conscious combination of two very different eras in San Francisco history.
For decades, San Francisco was best known for tie-dye and the Grateful Dead—and hippie culture in general. While the rest of the world may have moved on long ago, that counter-culture spirit happily lives on in the Bay Area, and nowhere more vividly than in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Meanwhile, just as psychedelia spread from San Francisco’s music scene a half century ago, today’s Bay Area tech innovations—which some claim are replacing drugs in the lives of teenagers—are transforming the entire world.
To see both ends of that spectrum combined in a humble storefront brings a moment of poignancy to what’s now mostly a tourist street where vintage shops sell souvenirs to sightseers. Walking in the door, I had to ask myself: How long will it be before iPhones and drones and Macs also become the dated detritus of a bygone era?
