ISKCON San Francisco (founding West Coast temple)

In 1967 — the same year ISKCON was founded in New York — A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s followers, led by Mukunda Goswami (then Mukunda Das), rented a storefront in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to establish the movement’s second American center, amid the neighborhood’s countercultural ferment. A benefit concert held on 29 January 1967 at the Avalon Ballroom, the Mantra-Rock Dance, featuring the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, and Moby Grape, raised funds and public awareness for the fledgling temple, which Prabhupada is said to have later named New Jagannatha Puri; later that same year the community organized San Francisco’s first Ratha Yatra, credited as the beginning of the now-worldwide Western Ratha Yatra tradition. By 1968 the San Francisco temple was established enough that Prabhupada sent three married couples from its ranks to found ISKCON’s first London center. An organized ISKCON community remained active in the wider Bay Area (including Berkeley) at least into 1980, and the Festival of Chariots tradition the temple started continued to be held in San Francisco in subsequent decades, though this entry cannot independently confirm a single current temple address.