The District Goes Radical in the 1960s
Michael Rossman and the Dragon's Eye Commune (a)
Rossman described the Dragon's Eye Commune in an email written in April 2008, just one month before he died:
The commune had a working focus, loose enough to leave some members in only or barely supportive roles, but tightly-focused enough to involve most of the twelve to sixteen permanent residents in coordinated activities in the educational reform movement...
Our commune was networked with other communes of workers in ed reform from Philadelphia to Urbana, Illinois to San Diego. We hosted travelers and groups from these affiliated communes and were so hosted in turn, sometimes even exchanging personnel...
Most of the funding for these ventures came from cooperative student governments, but Dragon's Eye and other such communes also managed to work the institutional grant interface well enough to have several projects modestly funded...
We participated regularly in anti-war activities, other civic protests, the building of People's Park and its defense and the planting of the BART strip as Ohlone Park after People's Park was destroyed;
we played music and sunbathed naked in the yard; we consumed a fair variety and quantity of weed and psychedelic agents fairly responsibly and fruitfully; we held street picnics, went to dances in the Haight Ashbury and elsewhere, and helped to organize the closure and public festivity of Telegraph Avenue.