[225] When the Hippies Took Over Praireville

in the August 2009 issue of 225 magazine

The front page of the Sunday Advocate on Sept 1, 1969, offered a pair of divergent accounts of the event. One spoke of the New Orleans Pop Festival as “overflowing with communes of brightly painted tents with their inhabitants coming from every state in the union to hear their rock idols and to join in a few days of peace and music.” In the adjacent column, readers learned that “five young psychiatrists who have set up shop in a tin shed on the grounds of the racetrack had seen about 30 whose trips were really bad.” The hippies had descended on Baton Rouge International Speedway in Prairieville for the incongruously titled New Orleans Pop Festival, held just two weeks after Woodstock inspired hope for—or incited fear of—youth culture, depending on where you stood.

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