My Life on "The Hill," 1969-2009

We settled on University Hill by lucky accident. Shortly after accepting a teaching position, I received a letter from my then-chairman Harold Kelling, urging me to write immediately to Professor J. D. A. Ogilvy, who had a house to rent near the University. I jumped to follow instructions and in August, 1969, the four of us (ages 30, 29, 4 and 2) took up residence in a small and lovely jewel of a Craftsman bungalow at 9th and College. It was not only a splendid home in which to start life in Boulder but it was also conveniently located: walking distance to Norlin Library, to the bus to Denver and to the Boulder Public Library, as well as just a block and a half from Highland Elementary School. We lived in that fine house contentedly until January of 1973, when (we were now 5, Eve having joined us in June of 1970) it became clear that we needed room to grow. The boys, Nathaniel and Ben, were adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons school district (Highland had been closed and abandoned -- a significant loss to the community). The children had good instincts; Flatirons Elementary was a wonderful school. It was led by Robert Rea, the finest principal I've ever known. During the winter of '73, we migrated from 9th all the way to a 10th street house that had, as they say, "good bones" but which had been "modernized" -- actually brutalized -- by a succession of owners who had trashed almost all of its Arts and Crafts splendors in favor of oversized mirrors, bright green shag rugs, beaded curtains, flocked wallpaper, and plate glass (replacing stained glass) windows. But heck, it was spacious for a family of five even though fabulously expensive ($46,500). We felt fortunate. There was a bonus: when Althea returned to work after a seven-year interval of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing, she was able to walk back and forth to Boulder High School, where she taught mathematics for many years. With the purchase of the house, our commitment to the Hill strengthened.

10th street was our home for 35 years. Over the course of the decades, we restored our abused home to the extent that our resources permitted. We added insulation (its first) and a modern kitchen, refinished the oak floors and stripped the paint from the warm fir woodwork, replaced the wallpaper and allowed the ornate brass registers to glow once again -- and moreover, transformed a backyard wasteland into a pleasing peony-iris-daylily garden. I'm proud to say that we left the house in much better shape than we found it. Meanwhile the neighborhood, sad to say, did not improve along with us but spiraled downward. In 1973, when we arrived, three quarters of the 24 houses on our street were owner-occupied; when we departed in 2009, only four or five houses remained in family hands and the rest had devolved into rentals -- occupied and often over-occupied by CU students. Our block was representative of developments that took place on the Hill during our years of residence. While the Hill had once been an essentially peaceful place, with only a rare disturbance, by the turn of the century, it had deteriorated into a combat zone where we and our adult neighbors engaged in constant struggle with graffiti, overflowing trash bins, weedy untended lawns, noisy late night and early morning sleep-obliterating parties, neglected barking dogs, gratuitous intermittent fireworks (explosions, actually!), thefts, vandalism, as well as fraught face-to-face encounters with rude entitled young malefactors.

What had happened between 1969 and 2009? What caused the decline from a thriving pacific neighborhood to a disorderly student ghetto? There were a host of factors, a few of which I can enumerate. Probably most important is that the University added at least 10,000 students during those years and did not provide housing for a single soul. The Hill, just across Broadway, was easy pickings for enterprising landlords, many of them decent but some unscrupulous, who bought advantageously, and (inasmuch as rental licensing codes were largely ignored and unenforced), maximized their income by dividing dignified, solid old Victorian or Arts and Crafts homes into rabbit-warrens. Many of the new occupants were first-time-from-home students who came from far away, spent a semester or two boozed up and hung over, failed out, and left behind their tuition money, their damage, and their trash. What might have been profitable for CU was disastrous for the neighborhood. Along with the increase in the absolute number of students came a resurgence of fraternities. During the late 60s and early 70s, when many students opposed the Vietnam war and conceived themselves to be anti-establishment, fraternities were among the institutions that were disfavored. Membership in the frat clubs declined significantly, but then recovered with the coming of the more conservative, less troubled Reagan era. I need not dwell on the fact that the burgeoning fraternities, flaunting an ethic that was anti-intellectual and pro-alcohol, were a major cause of increased neighborhood disruption. Along with these factors, came the replacement of marijuana, the drug of choice during the antiwar era, with beer. Marijuana, at least in the mild varieties of the 70s, is a contemplative drug while beer is a noisy one.The turn to alcohol had the effect of increasing the number of bars at 13th and College; while there had only been a couple of drinking establishments when I arrived (Boulder had been "dry" until 1967), by the time I left, there were more than twenty such, and the area had become a drinking "destination" that attracted outsiders to the street and inevitably also to Hill fraternity and house parties. And then sometime during the 70s or perhaps early 80s, the University moved many classes from a Monday-Wednesday-Friday to a Monday-Wednesday schedule, which meant that the weekend, and weekend drinking, now began on Thursday night and continued until Monday morning. It was sometime during this period that a couple of national magazines proclaimed CU as the nation's Number One Party School, which I must assume negatively impacted its pool of applicants. In addition, the welcome liberation of women from oppressive social restrictions had an unintended consequence: it led to much more alcohol consumption by female students. What had once been a rarity -- a drunken woman -- became, I'm sorry to say, commonplace. (I had become accustomed to male revelers untrussing and pissing on my roses, but I was genuinely flabbergasted to see young women pull down their panties to squat on my front lawn). Still another factor was the advent of the cell phone, which made it easy for small nomadic bands of young people to find each other and rapidly coalesce into sprawling alcoholic hullabaloos. Both the city government and the university, two institutions that should have noticed these developments, remained supine and indifferent.

Then came the riots. In 1971 there had been a protest, which turned violent, against Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia. But the scary riots of the 80s lacked a political or social agenda -- as far I or anyone else could tell, they were meaningless expressions of anomie, anarchy, and vandalism. Asked for justification, students claimed that "there's nothing to do in Boulder but drink" -- an unpersuasive argument about one of the most prosperous small cities in the nation, one in which gymnasiums, theaters, libraries, hiking and climbing trails, swimming pools, and other recreational opportunities abound. The Hill experienced four riots in three years -- associated, if I remember correctly, with Hallowe'en or homecoming. Sloppy, reeling revelers crammed the streets, overturned vehicles, and hauled couches off porches to set dangerous street-corner fires. I remember one instance in which rioters on the prowl for fuel appropriated a substantial section of the wooden fence at the alley side of my lot. At last, the city took notice. A commission was empaneled to study and make recommendations. I attended a few of these meetings and was impressed by the seriousness with which the panel took its responsibilities. Members from the Hill neighborhood were Terry Rodrigue and Annie Fox. A report was issue and recommendations were made, but to no perceptible effect, and the deterioration continued. 

The riots led to the re-founding of the University Hill Neighborhood Association by the late Jane Stoyva, Rosemary Crowley, Steven Walsh, Lisa Spaulding, and  Eleanor DePuy, among many others. With my children now departed for college, I was able to become a contributing participant. Simply put, the Association was divided into two camps, which I thought of as the "enforcers" and the "socializers." The enforcers (among them Terry Rodgers, Gregg deBoever, and Ken Wilson) patrolled the neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, calling in violations to the police. The "socializers" (myself and many others) tried every which way to integrate the students into the community. In retrospect, neither the one nor the other technique had much of an impact.

Nevertheless, the effort to socialize the young folk had very beneficial social side-effects, at least for me. For example, I was a member of a small group (with Kathy Tucker, Terry Rodrigue, and LeRoy Leach) that established the annual Beach Park Party (does it still exist?). Not only did these neighbors, who had been until then no more than faces to me, become my friends, but I had the delightful experience, several years in succession, of dishing out free ice cream to both adults and children. It was my best job, ever. On 10th Street, Althea and I initiated an annual block party, where, for many successive Septembers, we explained to new arrivals over hamburgers and beans that they were welcome to the neighborhood but that they should respect the people with jobs and young children who also lived on the street. For three or four years I was part of a group that met monthly at The Academy, trying to figure out how to make use of that institution's resources to benefit the community. I made a lasting friend with one of the participants, Ron Roschke, then pastor of Grace Lutheran. I edited an upbeat, cheerful bi-monthly newsletter that was distributed throughout the hill to permanent and new residents alike. In addition, I represented aggrieved neighbors at restorative justice hearings, where young scamps were counseled by their practiced attorneys that to clear their records and escape punishment, all they needed to do was to grovel a bit and feign remorse. I attended and spoke at many City Council meetings. I made many friends by patrolling our street on Sunday mornings with a black plastic bag, picking up beer and soda cans, empty cigarette packs, those ubiquitous red beer cups, and various pieces of discarded clothing. (If there's a good reason why a bra should lie in the gutter on a weekend morning, I can't imagine what it might be.) I made my best Hill friend, Vin Scarelli, when we met at 2 AM, both of us on the hunt for "trumpet man" -- a student who like to pop out of his house in the wee hours, blow his trumpet (it might have been a bugle) as loud as possible, and then scurry inside before anyone could nab him. The reward for these activities was that I became member of a vibrant community -- and there's nothing like a common enemy to bring people together

I left the Hill in 2009 in part because I was exhausted by the fight but also because Althea's illness had progressed to the point that we needed to live on one floor, with an elevator.

I reside now in an age-appropriate downtown condo, but I regret that I can no longer walk around the block and enjoy a brief "how are you" with neighbors with whom I've collaborated on one project or another. I miss the society of the Hill, but not its disorder. Among its other virtues, there could have been no better place to raise children.

One might succumb to nostalgia -- except that when I sit on my Walnut Street balcony on a summer evening, I can hear distant booms coming from up there on the Hill, and I remember that they were exceedingly jarring and disturbing. The far off blasts remind me why I relocated and they cancel out any longing to return. But let me confess that if I were to come back to the Hill, I would return as a committed "enforcer."

Can the Hill be saved, or is it doomed to further decline?  There's no better location -- everything is at your doorstep -- schools, libraries, Chautauqua, foothills, all the diverse riches of a large University. It's a neighborhood of great architectural integrity -- an outdoor museum of 1900-1920 American design, almost as interesting as antebellum New Orleans or Art Nouveau Riga. Its housing stock is unparalleled in Boulder; in a better world, it would be a tourist destination. UHNA does a wonderful job of advocacy, but it's in an unequal contest with powerful political and business forces. I think it was during the 90s that a few of us, the late Neil King most prominently, tried to engage the university in an improve-the-Hill project. We proposed that the neighbors and the university (we hoped also for grant support) pitch in to create an entity that would buy houses on the Hill and rent them to, say, newly-arriving professors or staff who would otherwise be forced to commute from Lafayette -- nowadays, Erie or Ft Lupton. And by doing so little by little to undo and reverse the tipping point and rebalance the ratio of adults to students. Although Neil was persuasive and influential (he had once been city attorney), he could not develop any traction with either the city or CU. I am not sure if our plan was workable, but I learned that to save the Hill will not be easy and will require big money, big thinking, and the coordination of many disparate groups. 

In the meanwhile, the struggle between the  enforcers and the socializers continues. Should police educate or should they arrest and ticket our student hooligans?  Let's do both. If a new first year student arrives in Boulder on a Thursday, misbehaves during the weekend, and the following Monday forwards to his mommy and daddy the news of a $5000 fine -- well, that will certainly be educational, will it not?

Comments

[Jimmie Simmons]

This story is not unique to Boulder, and sounds all too familiar. In addition to the reactivation of our neighborhood associations, and all of the above solutions, our university city/wretched little village now allows a deed restriction. A homeowner designates his/her property "single-family" and sells it as such. Further, the NA's proposed a "no-more-than-two-unrelated" occupancy rule for landlords that City Council approved about ten years ago. These moves forced the University to provide on-campus housing. Our "Hill" benefitted from these measures. (The sports problem remains).

[Bill Briggs]

Hi Vivian --

As one who has memories of Boulder and CU even more distant than yours, I truly enjoyed your reminiscences. I think there is one major omission in your tale of how we got from the 1970s to 2020: it's athletics, a major contributor to the party school image, to the alcohol culture, and to the general demise of CU as an institution at which (undergraduate) education is a priority. Perhaps we should collaborate on that story. Thanks.