Nestled between a grocery chain and a bougie little toy store, near the corner of Haight and Ashbury, is a bright red three-story property with a facade inspired by a facade. 

Walk by 1524 Haight St., and there’s a decent chance a tourist will be there, snapping photos of the building — the “Jimi Hendrix Red House,” as a banner proudly proclaims. Dozens of city tours offer a look at the outside of 1524 Haight, where Hendrix lived “for a few years in the 1960s,” according to a post on the San Francisco Travel Association’s blog.

Google “Jimi Hendrix Red House,” and you’ll be inundated with unsourced blogs and articles about how Hendrix lived at 1524 Haight St. at some point during the ’60s. Some even go so far as to imply Hendrix wrote the song “Red House” based on his time staying in a ground-floor apartment, adjacent to what is now a dog grooming business. 

I’ve walked by the building many times, but didn’t give it much thought until my dad — a huge Hendrix fan — came to town. I did a quick Google search of the address to brush up on my tour guide basics, and was immediately struck by how vague it all was: No one offered specific dates or photographic evidence, a highly suspicious omission for anything regarding Hendrix, whose brief life has been chronicled in obsessive detail by numerous biographies and documentaries. But the rumor is maddeningly persistent, even popping up on this very website from time to time.

A view of the pet grooming store on the ground floor of 1524 Haight St., in San Francisco, on Feb. 6, 2023. 

It only took me a couple of calls with biographers to confirm that there’s no way Hendrix lived at 1524 Haight. In fact, despite murals and rumors to the contrary, there’s no evidence he lived anywhere in San Francisco during his 27 years on Earth. 

The biographers may have validated my skepticism, but that only left me with more questions. Where did this story come from? Who put up the “Jimi Hendrix Red House” sign? And — perhaps most unknowably — did Hendrix ever have any connection to the building at all? 

I started to dig. I combed through newspaper archives and queried music journalists and former Haight Street hippies. I got the building’s historical ownership records from the city Accessor-Recorder’s Office, which led me to former owners and tenants of the building, dating back to the ’60s. Everyone had their own version of the story about Hendrix’s purported Haight Street residency — everyone, that is, except the current property owners, who ignored repeated requests for comment through email and messages left at a business they own.

The "Jimi Hendrix Red House" and sign as pictured in December 2013.

An ad for the Haight Ashbury Tobacco Center at 1524 Haight St, in San Francisco. 

I almost gave up, until an unlikely source answered the phone. They offered the most plausible explanation for how 1524 Haight St. came to be linked with Hendrix, and, in turn, how it came to represent something far less flattering: a cultureless, capital-germinated nostalgia for a totally extinct era of San Francisco.

Let’s get this out of the way: Jimi Hendrix “spent very, very little time in San Francisco” or the Bay Area at large, according to Joel Selvin, author of books “The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution” and “San Francisco: The Musical History Tour.” If anyone would know about a countercultural icon’s time in the Haight, it’s Selvin. And yet, he’d never even heard of 1524 Haight St. until a few years ago. 

Hendrix spent much of his childhood in Seattle. He joined the military in 1961, when he was 18, and was discharged a year later. He began touring with established acts like Little Richard and the Isley Brothers as part of the Chitlin Circuit — venues, many in the South, that were accepting of Black artists during the Jim Crow era. Hendrix reportedly moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1966, where he was discovered by the Animals bassist/music producer Chas Chandler, who talked Hendrix into moving to London later that year.

American rock guitarist and singer Jimi Hendrix performs on stage playing a black Fender Stratocaster guitar with the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Feb. 24, 1969.

After the single “Hey Joe” was released in December 1966, Hendrix became one of the most famous musicians on the planet. For the next three-and-a-half years — until his death in 1970 — Hendrix’s every move was obsessively documented, serving as the source material for numerous biographies and documentaries. We know almost precisely when he was in the Bay Area during that range of time. It adds up to about 19 days, total, including his iconic showing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, when he lit his guitar on fire. His longest stay in the Bay Area was approximately eight days, and many visits lasted a single day. 

So, the assertion that Hendrix ever lived here? 

“I can tell you unequivocally that is in complete error,” said Charles Cross, who wrote a biography on Hendrix called “Room Full of Mirrors.”

“To think that he could have lived unobtrusively in a house on Haight Street? That just defies imagination,” said Keith Dion, a self-identified Hendrix historian who has lived in San Francisco for decades, and came highly recommended by Cross.

Co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine Jann Wenner interviews legendary rock guitarist, singer and songwriter Jimi Hendrix before his concert at the Fillmore Auditorium, on Feb. 1, 1968, in San Francisco. 

Peter Albin, bassist for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, told me that he met Hendrix at a show they played together at the Fillmore in June of 1967. The two of them went on a beer run before their sets; walking around the city, it was clear to Albin that “this was only the first or second time [Hendrix] had been to San Francisco.”

What about the rumors that Hendrix’s song “Red House” was written about 1524 Haight St.? 

“Absolutely, completely wrong” is how Brad Schreiber, author of the biography “Becoming Jimi Hendrix,” described the “Red House” rumor. 

Cross concurred. “The song is absolutely not about that individual house in San Francisco,” he told me.

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It was easy enough to solve the mystery of whether Hendrix ever lived in the Haight. Still, I was left with a nagging question: Where the hell did this rumor come from? 

Determined to get some answers, I used property records kindly provided by the assessor’s office to track down former owners and tenants of 1524 Haight St., including Norma Jackson, whose late husband Oscar Jackson bought the building a month before Hendrix’s first documented Bay Area performances. Norma told me her husband had never said a word to her about housing Hendrix, even temporarily.

“He would have told me if he knew or had seen or rented to Jimi Hendrix, because he loved music,” she said.

Oscar Jackson’s son, Oscar Jackson Jr., is better known as the Bay Area rapper Paris. He was born in October 1967, and grew up at the nearby 1352 Haight St.; he told me he never heard his dad talk about Hendrix, either. (Paris was just as surprised to hear from me as I was to come across his name while traveling down my hippie-induced rabbit hole. “You’re killing me now with this,” he said when we connected over the phone. “This is real Frisco OG s—t.”)

According to former building owner Jimmy Siegel, the Hendrix rumors had already been circling for years when he bought 1524 Haight St. in 1998. Siegel, who has lived in San Francisco for decades, told me he remembered hearing stories about Hendrix living in the Haight as far back as the ’70s, including that “Red House” was about a girlfriend who lived at 1524 Haight. 

Frank Ditto, who lived in the building with his wife Julie from the early ’90s until 2005, told me by the time he moved to the Haight in the ’80s, “everybody who knew of anybody” had heard that Hendrix lived there. (Frank Ditto also floated that Hendrix had not one, but two girlfriends living at 1524 Haight Street, and the song “Red House” is about dating both of them.)

Frank Ditto, who lived in the "Jimi Hendrix Red House" in the '90s and early 2000s, held onto an old sign from the property after moving out.

A mural of Jimi Hendrix on the wall of 1524 Haight St., in San Francisco.

Frank’s wife, Julie Ditto, answered one of my biggest outstanding questions: where the “Jimi Hendrix Red House” banner came from. The current owner, Marwan Zeidan, hung it sometime in the 2000s. He now runs one of the building’s apartments as a Hendrix-themed Airbnb, with a listing that reads “Amazing unit & backyard at Jimi Hendrix red house.” Tour buses started coming to the house in the 2010s, especially after local artists painted Hendrix-inspired murals on the sides of the building in 2013 and 2014. (The murals were painted over in, yes, bright red, as part of a restoration project that was unveiled in 2020.)

“They're the ones that hung the sign — and they used that to boost their business,” Julie told me, referring to the Zeidan family.

Siegel, though, who sold the building to the Zeidans in 2001, defended their motives. “I'm good friends with [Marwan Zeidan],” he told me. “He really, really wants to believe that’s the Jimi Hendrix house.”

At this point, I’d been trying for weeks to reach Zeidan. I’d sent emails, called cellphones and numbers associated with businesses he owns; nothing worked. Finally, I had a breakthrough: The third time I called the dog grooming shop on the first floor of 1524 Haight — also owned by Zeidan — a very nice employee listened to my (possibly slightly unhinged) appeal, and agreed to re-route me to the shop’s manager, Gordon Ruark.

First, Ruark told me he wasn’t comfortable giving out Zeidan’s number. My heart sank. Then he said the words I’d been waiting to hear for months: “I know pretty much everything.” 

Ruark has lived in the Haight, half a block away from the Red House, for about 30 years. He came of age in the neighborhood, too, moving there as a kid in 1968 and staying until 1979, when he enlisted in the military at age 19. Back then, he told me, 1524 Haight St. was known as “the water house,” as in, the drugs flowed like water. He dismissed the possibility of any celebrity — burgeoning or otherwise — staying at the property. 

“It was a s—thole,” he said, bluntly. “Jimi Hendrix never even stepped foot in that f—king place.”

Ruark strongly believes the culprit for spreading the “Red House” rumor was Pablo Heising, a well-regarded figure long unofficially known as the “Mayor of the Haight,” who died in 2006. According to Ruark, Heising “propagated the lie” that Hendrix or a girlfriend lived there; the city’s tour guides adopted the same story after the “Jimi Hendrix Red House” banner went up.

A view of the "Jimi Hendrix Red House" at 1524 Haight St., in San Francisco, on Feb. 6, 2023. 

After talking to Ruark, I reached back out to people who had been associated with the property, to ask whether his version of events made sense. Howard Coon, who bought the building in 1975, had confirmed the condition of the property during our initial conversation, although he described it slightly more politely.

“When I got there, basically all of the rooms in those two railroad flats were filled up from wall to wall with mattresses. It was a complete and total crashpad. It was decayed; there was old plumbing, old electrical, etc. But it had some real charm,” he told me over the phone. 

I later texted Coon to ask about the “water house” nickname. He didn’t remember it, but confirmed the implication behind it. “I can certainly attest to the fact that during my tenure the drugs did flow like water,” he wrote back. 

Then, I remembered a conversation I’d had earlier in my Red House journey. Lawrence Hultberg ran a shop on the first floor of 1524 Haight in the ’70s; the first time we’d spoken, he’d mentioned offhand that he’d known Heising. So I called him back, and asked if Heising had a reputation as a fabricator. 

Hultberg let out a deep breath, and then told me that Heising was his first true friend in California. They had a complicated relationship; while he didn’t remember Heising ever telling him about the Red House, he did recall a story Heising told him about hitchhiking in Southern California, getting picked up by a group that included Jimi Hendrix, and venturing to Charles Manson’s Spahn Ranch. This struck me as an obvious tall tale, but Hultberg demurred on whether it was made up.

“I can see the [Hendrix Red House] story coming from Pablo, and I can see him thinking it was genuine, or believing it was genuine,” he added. “I don’t think that’s the story he would make up just to try to embellish his own ego. He did that enough in other ways.”

A view of the "Jimi Hendrix Red House" at 1524 Haight St., in San Francisco, on Feb. 6, 2023. 

I told Ruark that while his theory was unproven, it was the closest I’d gotten to something with a beginning, middle and end. I also told him I didn’t want him to get fired for talking to me. Was he really OK with me publishing his account?

“Oh, I couldn't care less. It might draw better karma to the store,” he said with a laugh. “Honestly, I think it's a negative karma thing when all these people come to see the Jimi Hendrix house. … I shoot people down in flames every day. They might come from Germany. And I'm like, ‘Well, you know he never lived here?’”

While I admit I’m holding out hope that a silver bullet answer emerges from the inevitable flood of emails this story will compel, I’m resigned to settling for “almost-sure” on the question of whether the “Jimi Hendrix Red House” rumor is based on any whispers of truth.  

Here’s what I can say: I certainly don’t think Hendrix ever lived at 1524 Haight St.; I’m extremely doubtful he ever visited, and if he did, I’m even more doubtful he slept there. I also don’t think the building owner did something nefarious (although the “Jimi Hendrix Red House” branding certainly deserves a bit of side-eye). They seem to have excitedly taken advantage of a business opportunity that emerged from decades of passive whispers, amplified by internet aggregators run amok.

Left, a late 1970s real estate ad for 1524 Haight St. Right, a 2008 Google Street View image of 1524 Haight St.

But I’m still a little puzzled. Historic properties, musical legends and ’60s hippie lore are three of the city’s defining features, and that’s especially true of the Haight. Given the enormous number of real legends who actually lived and worked in San Francisco, why would so many people cling to the idea of 1524 Haight St. as something it’s not?

I asked Paris, the rapper who grew up down the block, why he thought the rumor was so sticky. He hypothesized that people want Hendrix to have lived in the city because they’re desperately hanging onto a culture, and an ethos, that’s long gone. It’s a perspective he understands, having grown up around the musical greats of San Francisco. It’s also one he’s thoroughly sick of. 

“We run the risk of being stuck in the past and being bitter about things that we can’t control, as opposed to just moving forward and forging a new way. The Hendrix house, people want to be able to monetize and take advantage of it, but the soul of it all no longer exists,” he told me. “I’m past being nostalgic for what San Francisco used to represent.”

Alex Shultz is the local editor for SFGATE. You can reach him at alex.shultz@sfgate.com.