Grateful Dead House — 710 Ashbury Street

From October 1966 to March 1968, 710 Ashbury Street served as the communal home and de facto rehearsal headquarters of the Grateful Dead, financed in large part by Owsley Stanley — the band's sound engineer and one of the era's most prolific manufacturers of LSD. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan all lived in the Victorian house at the heart of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during the most turbulent period of the counterculture. According to the band, it was in the front room of this house, while browsing a dictionary, that Garcia came across the phrase 'grateful dead' and the band's name was chosen.

The house's most notorious moment came on 2 October 1967, when narcotics agents raided the property, arresting Bob Weir, Pigpen, and eight others on marijuana charges. Rather than retreating from the publicity, the band held a defiant press conference on the front steps, turning the bust into a statement against drug prohibition. The raid was reported on the cover of the very first issue of Rolling Stone magazine — making 710 Ashbury arguably the birthplace of that publication's founding mythology as much as the Dead's.

Today 710 Ashbury is a private residence in one of San Francisco's most visited neighbourhoods. It carries no official plaque but is well-known to fans and appears on walking tours of the Haight. The house directly across the street, 715 Ashbury, was simultaneously the San Francisco chapter headquarters of the Hells Angels — a detail that captures something essential about the strange, combustible atmosphere of the Summer of Love.