Only in San Francisco could a young man who took a near-lethal dose from Janis Joplin’s needle wind up overseeing the city’s criminal justice system—but that’s precisely what Terry “Kayo” Hallinan did three decades later when he was elected San Francisco’s district attorney.

IN THE MID-1960S, San Francisco was still a city of tribal villages. The Castro district and the Noe Valley neighborhood were working-class Irish, though the Irish in the adjacent Mission district were giving way to Latino immigrants. The

SAN FRANCISCO WAS BUILT on a dare. The city was tossed up overnight on the shimmying, heaving, mischievous crust of the Pacific rim.

San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. We knew we didn’t have to speechify about what we should and shouldn’t do. We just did.”

remains in its thrall years after his death. He called the town “Baghdad by the Bay” in his column, conjuring the exotic wonders of ancient Babylon. But his San Francisco was more like Oz, Wonderland, and Gotham City all rolled together. If much of it was Caen’s own creation, it’s the city that San Franciscans wanted to live in.

THE HUMAN BE-IN was the beginning of the story for thousands of people, many of whom would go on to take primary roles in San Francisco’s revolution.

Music was at the heart of San Francisco’s magical transformation in the 1960s. And at the beginning of the decade, the Fillmore was the music’s hot center. They called the Fillmore “the Harlem of the West.”

Armstrong—who was maintaining his own strict health

“What I liked was that the game was not always on the goal line out there. It wasn’t always life and death. There were time-out signs. It was a nicer game.” Graham