Haight-Ashbury’s gentrification has been well-documented, with prices creeping up and vintage scores becoming harder to sniff out. Although the thriving hippie neighborhood is one of San Francisco’s post-pandemic success stories, it faces a tremendous loss as a 47-year-old shop is set to close later this month.
Distractions, which has been at one address or another on Haight Street in some form since 1976, will shut its doors forever at an unspecified date in late October. Proprietor Jim Siegel, a hippie and raver whose counterculture cred is all but impeccable, posted a sign in the window a few weeks back announcing the store would close on Halloween, but the last day of business is actually a bit before that. He doesn’t want to give out the actual date, for fear of a mob scene—one with hordes of vintage fans fighting over what will likely be a thoroughly picked-over selection of steampunk by then.
Siegel, who’s in his 60s, said he was getting ready to retire anyway, but Distractions’ demise has been hastened by the “doom loop” narrative engulfing San Francisco these days.
“Business has been down since Covid, and all the bad media publicity is hurting,” Siegel told The Standard. “Every Merchant on Haight is down by a third because of negative reports on break-ins and burglaries—which aren’t that bad. It’s given San Francisco a really bad national reputation.”
Throngs of shoppers that used to come every weekend from the East Bay and beyond no longer materialize, he added. He had wanted to hand over the store and its Victoriana to his employees, but a sympathetic news article about Distractions some months ago had an unintended consequence: Realtors began hounding his landlord, promising they could find a new tenant willing and able to pay many times Siegel’s current rent.
“It was the worst thing that could happen,” Siegel said.
He suspects that a vape store—characterless and anonymous in a neighborhood with plenty of head shops already—will replace Distractions and its racks full of Hawaiian shirts and sequined onesies, $2 buttons and a rotating 1970s glass case jammed with evil-eye earrings. That outcome would be like a Spirit Halloween replacing Mission District curio shop Paxton Gate.
It’s especially galling because, in Siegel’s telling, he’s among the generation that has kept the neighborhood’s 1960s spirit alive from the 1970s straight through to the present. A teenage runaway who arrived in San Francisco in 1972, he dabbled in gay sex work and lived in a commune whose members instructed one another to take LSD and see a psychiatrist in the hopes of getting on public assistance. Eventually, he and some long-ago business partners opened a succession of shops.
“The neighborhood was pretty boarded up when I started,” he said of the Haight. “There were only a few businesses, like Roberts Hardware and Persian Aub Zam Zam.”
Siegel’s business prospered. Over time, as the hippie old guard dispersed and faded, Distractions became a place for Burning Man attendees to buy tickets, and new generations of oddballs and party animals kept business strong.
“I never did this for money,” he said, somewhat impishly. “It was all about keeping the counterculture spirit alive in the Haight, but it has been very profitable over the years.”
Over time, Siegel started snapping up inexpensive real estate. In 1986, he bought the five-story Westerfeld House on Alamo Square mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Siegel lives there today, with a roommate.
For the next few days, he’ll be refreshing the racks with the very last of his wares to keep Distractions from looking depleted. When it comes time to liquidate the merch, he’s open to selling the fixtures and decor—apart from the rave posters and his Lewis-Carroll/Jefferson-Airplane mascot, the mischievous White Rabbit that hangs in one corner.
Siegel has spoken with representatives from the city’s Legacy Business Registry about his current employees’ options if they were to reopen Distractions elsewhere—they have two years to do so and retain the designation—and received a phone call from Mayor London Breed, a Western Addition native who expressed her dismay. Old-school hippies, regulars, Haight residents, Burners—everyone has come in to pay their respects.
“Because our roots go so far back, we’ve got a couple communities,” Siegel said. “I’ve had five people come in crying that we’re closing. It’s gonna be a loss for San Francisco.”