Treasured Haight-Ashbury clothing store closing after four decades

Distractions, a 41-year-old clothing store and Haight-Ashbury mainstay, will close by the end of this month. 

The store’s founder, Jim Siegel, announced plans to retire at the end of October via a sign on the window late this summer, but had also been trying to find a buyer for the business so that it could remain open without him. That search is over, according to the San Francisco Standard, which reported that a total closure will officially happen this month. Distractions will be selling the rest of its wares, including vintage clothing and costumes, at half off.

“I’ve had five people come in crying that we’re closing,” Siegel told the Standard. “It’s gonna be a loss for San Francisco.”

Siegel opened Distractions in 1982 as a “new wave gift and clothing store,” his sign read. Since then, the store has moved through various counterculture waves and is now best known for being a popular place for Burning Man attendees to purchase clothes and costumes. 

“I moved to the Haight as a teenager in the early 1970’s at a time the Haight was a boarded up street with mostly liquor stores and about 70% vacant,” the sign reads. 

A few years later, Siegel decided to open a counterculture store in order to “keep the hippie spirit alive in the Haight-Ashbury.” He opened his first store on Haight Street, The White Rabbit, with two friends in 1976 using money from a government stipend. Drug use caused the store to fail by 1978, Siegel wrote on the sign, but later that year he opened the nearby tobacco store Pipe Dreams with business partners George Walsh and Marcella LaFever. Siegel left to open Distractions in 1982, but Pipe Dreams still exists today. 

“What a trip I have taken with you! Thank you all for allowing this to happen,” Siegel’s sign says.