The Love Pageant Rally took place on October 6, 1966—the day LSD became illegal—in the 'panhandle' of Golden Gate Park, a narrower section that projects into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The 'Haight' was a neighborhood of run-down turn-of-the-20th-century housing that was the center of San Francisco's counterculture in the 1960s. "Without confrontation," said Allen Cohen, "we wanted to create a celebration of innocence. We were not guilty of using illegal substances. We were celebrating transcendental consciousness. The beauty of the universe. The beauty of being."