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San Francisco Diggers

The social laboratory out of which the idea of the Diggers formed was the summer planning sessions of the Artists Liberation Front held at the Mime Troupe loft on Howard Street. Emmett Grogan is prominent in the photographs of those sessions. By the fall, ALF was planning a series of neighborhood street Free Fairs. These would be the first time street art came to some of San Francisco's neighborhoods, for example, the Tenderloin. And not only street art -- this would be the first time rock and roll bands played outdoors on city streets. Santana would play in their home territory, on Shotwell street in the Mission District. In the coming months, the Be-In as a participatory event model swept the country. The first Be-In, which the planners called A Gathering of the Tribes, happened a few months after the Free Fairs that the Artists Liberation Front carried out.

It is worthy to note that the impetus for these events, including the Artists Liberation Front's planning sessions, came from the Mime Troupe's run-in with City Hall and the "Arts Establishment" earlier in the spring of 1966. Kenneth Rexroth, the venerable critic, author, and Old Left eminence gris, first suggested taking the battle into the neighborhoods. Ronnie Davis, the Mime Troupe founder and director, shortly called the first meeting of artists to band together for mutual aid. From late spring to early fall, then, a series of meetings brought together many of the avant garde, more-or-less politically active artists, writers, actors, musicians, poets, or hangers on.

In the early Digger papers, the Diggers call for a renewal of purpose. The ALF meetings by this time were debating allowing booths to sell food and other goods at the Free Fairs. To the Diggers, this seemed like business as usual. There are at least six sheets that are from this period. In addition there are several notices and articles that appeared in the Berkeley Barb which document these nascent days.

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The Free City Collective
San Francisco
Fall 1967 to Spring 1968

In the summer of 1967, the Diggers gave away their last, final, possession — their name. Henceforth, they called themselves The Free City Collective. One of the last events that the Diggers (under that name) created was the Death Of Hippie in October, 1967. The name "diggers" had become so widely used that it was like a ripple wave in a pond. People called themselves Diggers all over the map of the now burgeoning counterculture, in the same way that the Berkeley Provos had adopted the name of the Dutch group the previous fall.

The Digger vision, which had loosely been "Free Street" now expands into the vision of the Free City, which included not just the Haight-Ashbury but many other of San Francisco's unique neighborhoods: the Mission, Fillmore, Chinatown, Castro, Potrero Hill, Noe Valley. The Free City Collective, ever life-actors looking to expand their art, brought their events to the stage of the larger urban context. Free City Convention, Free Poetry Readings on City Hall Steps, Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice. These were the cycle of events that the Free City gang created to put forth a newer more communal energy. Free Food Distribution was the new Free Food program. Instead of free food distributed to groups of strangers in the parks, the Free City Collective began distributing free groceries to the communes in the City. The Food Conspiracy later took up this need, albeit on a "for-pay" basis.

The energy of Free was transmuting itself from the street back indoors inside the walls of the new communal spaces that had popped up all over the City, usually in old Victorian houses that badly needed the loving care that the hippie counterculture bestowed on San Francisco's "Painted Ladies."

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