Pandora's Box: For What It's Worth Happened Here

By the fall of nineteen sixty-six, the Sunset Strip between Doheny Drive and Crescent Heights had become something the County of Los Angeles had not planned for: a spontaneous public commons for the city's young counterculture. Every night, teenagers gathered outside Pandora's Box coffee house, Ciro's, the Whisky a Go Go, and the club called the Trip.

Local merchants complained to the West Hollywood sheriff's station. The county responded with an ordinance: a ten PM curfew on anyone under eighteen, and a ban on loitering on the Strip.

On the night of November twelfth, nineteen sixty-six, hundreds of young people staged a sit-in at Pandora's Box at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights to protest the ordinance. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arrived in riot gear. The crowd held the street for hours.

Somewhere nearby, Buffalo Springfield was in rehearsal. Members of the band drove past, stopped, and watched for a while, then drove on. Within a month, Stephen Stills had written a song about what he saw: a crowd watching police on a street corner, a feeling he could not quite name. The song was called For What It's Worth. It was recorded in December nineteen sixty-six. It became the sound of American protest for the following decade, not because Stills intended it that way, but because the feeling turned out to be widely available.

Pandora's Box was demolished in nineteen sixty-seven to widen the intersection.