Kresge College Memories Part 2

Here is a flickr set I am starting about Kresge. I'll add more as I go along.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56679160@N00/sets/72057594084492705/

My first year at Kresge, 77-78, There were still many students seniors and juniors living on campus. The rents were cheap then and because of the low enrollment at UCSC in general, it was easy to get a spot on campus. When I came back in 81 after spending a few year at Foothill College and San Jose State, it was much harder to stay in on-campus housing your whole four years. This, combined with the fact that most of the people who founded Kresge had left and that the campus was involved in a major push to make its image more conservative, meant that there was little continuity and the students who came in later had very little connection to or understnding of the original goals of the college.

I myself had only a hazy understanding of it due to the factors I mentioned in part one of this story. Bateson had left Kresge the year before, only Michael Kahn was left of the prime movers and I think he was a little weary of the experiment.

Santa Cruz and San Jose memories

My family moved from southern California to San Jose in 1962 when I was 2. I remember reading many years later that the population of San Jose at that time was 60,000. Quite a difference from the millions it is today. I remember looking down from Mount Hamilton sometime around then and seeing mostly trees covering the Santa Clara valley, prune plum trees on the west side of the valley and apricots on the east with a long narrow straight streets such as Alum Rock avenue cutting through them and the Bank of America building sticking up one of the few high spots that rose above the trees.

We would go on summer weekends occasionally to Santa Cruz to go to the beach and the boardwalk. I remember sitting in the shade under the band shell or under the boardwalk when it got too hot or wandering around the castle which was still at castle beach.

The boardwalk at that time had the Giant Dipper and Mad Mouse rollercoasters. I was too young or too short to go on them. I was always curious about what the Mad Mouse was like to ride. It was a cube shaped coaster and the cars did 90 degree turns when they came to the corners of the cube. It was replaced by a rather mild log flume ride before I every got a chance to ride it.

I think I mostly went on rides like the tilt-a-whirl, went in the fun house and played "skee-bowl". The fun house at that time had a giant slide, moving sidewalks, a rolling barrel you could walk through, a large disk that you sat on until centripetal force flung you off, and funhouse mirrors. Apparently the slide was built over what used to be an indoor pool.

I lusted after the big skee-bowl prizes such as the portable TV which took hundreds or thousands of tickets to win. I only ever saved up enough tickets to get the little toy prizes. The only one I remember was a miniature hurricane lamp about 3 inches high. I do wish I still had that one though.

I never got to go on the roller coasters when I was a kid but later on, when I went to college in Santa Cruz, I made it a personal ritual to go on the Giant Dipper about a dozen times in a row after my last final for each quarter.

The castle at castle beach was actually just a regular building made of stucco. Most of the times that we were there it was closed. I don't know what was in the rest of the building but the bottom floor had a snack bar and a recreation room with ping pong tables ad such.

Kresge College UCSC, Memories 1977-78 part 1

I arrived at Kresge College in early October 1977. The first three or four days of classes it rained almost non-stop. I remember sitting in the Idler cafe (next to the Kresge Town Hall) reading and looking out at the redwoods in the rain.

During our orientation weekend the architect who designed Kresge spoke to our class (this must have been Charles Moore, http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/moorekresge/kresge.html ). [Apparently this was more likely Bill Turnbull, see: http://www.well.com/~abs/Cyb/4.669211660910299067185320382047/c3m_0311.txt for some very interesting commentary on Kresge from the years just before I got there. I just found this link a few days ago.] He said that the original inspiration for Kresge was a small Mediterranean village. The exterior walls were to be covered with wood shingles and the street down the middle was to be cobblestone. there were fountains distributed throughout the college, connected by a small stream that flowed from one end of the school to the other.

But during the construction of the college the Kresge foundation said that it was costing too much money so the shingles and cobblestones were replaced with stucco and asphalt. I don't know if the project was over budget or what but we students always assumed that they were just cheap. This fit into our idea of the Kresge foundation since Kresge is the "K" in Kmart, home of the blue light special.

The fountains were turned off during the water shortage of the early 70s. One or two of them at the bottom of the college have been turned back on from time to time but the one at the top of the college has been removed. It was in the center of the courtyard between the Town Hall and the cafe with wooden benches around it and a wooden cover that could be put over it when it was not in use. It was replaced with a very nice bronze plaque made by Kresge alum and Santa Cruz bronze artist Sean Monaghan (sp?).

The architect said that he had gotten quite a bit of flak for the design of the "suites", one of the three types of apartments at Kresge. the suites originally had 8 bedrooms surrounding a large central bathroom with two toilet stalls, a large shower enclosure with two shower heads and a larger main part of the room with sinks and mirrors.

Since the only other rooms were bedrooms (mostly singles of fairly modest size), the bathrooms ended up being the place the students would congregate. Moore attributed the fact that the bathroom was so huge and central to the fact that he had grown up during the anal retentive 1950s which had somehow subconciously influenced his design.

Two of the single rooms in each of the suites have since been converted to a kitchen and a living room but the bathrooms still end up being natural gathering spots. When I was a student there, one of the key pieces of furniture in the apartments was large foam chairs, basically a 6' cube of foam with a notch cut out of it and tucked in and a cloth cover over it. These were some of the most comfortable chairs I have ever sat in and each one held two people comfortably if they liked cuddling up. In at least on of the suites the students moved these chairs into the bathroom which became a very comfortable place to hang out. The one suite I remember which was set up this was had white sheets coveering the walls with a "light organ" with colored lights which would change in time to the music on their stereo.

The other main piece of furniture were "palasets" (sp?). These were 70's Danish modern plastic cubes about 16" on a side. Some were cupboards with doors, some open shelves. They could be stacked and connected in any combination to make bed frames, desks, etc. I think I made a bed loft of mine and put my desk below it. Oh yes, there were also wooden desks and chairs, some of which I have seen for sale from UC surplus recently for $5 apiece. They were quite nice, well built oak desks that seemed to stand up to anything.

The other two types of apartments were "flats" with two twin rooms , a large living room and a kitchen nook and the "Sextets", multi-level apartments without any walls except for the bathroom. I believe they were called sextets because they held six students but given the culture of Kresge at that time I always imagined it had to do with sexual experimentation. One of my first year roommates said he got an invitation to an orgy in the sextets in his mailbox. He looked in on it and said that it wasn't really very interesting.

The first year that I was at Kresge I lived in R-6, in the top left suite. Later on I was in a suite in R-8 which was called "The Zoo" because the lower level was a long row of rooms with sliding glass doors right on the street so people would always look in as they walked by. . At that time all of the buildings had names. R-9 or 10 was called "bittersuite". R-3 was "the corner of the college" It was specifically designated as an internationally oriented building and a social hub. The sextets were just the sextets. I wish I could remember what the rest of them were. If anyone does, please post.

[Along with the above mentioned link to the article on The Well by Scrivener, I also have just found a number of articles in the Special Collections section of the McHenry library about the early years at Kresge. Apparently I got there in 1977 just as the original experiment of Kresge was in its last throws of dying (or being killed depending on who you ask) several of the main reasons that I went to UCSC had vanished a few years before or were just ending unbeknownst to me. I had often wondered why Kresge and UCSC were so different from the way I thought they would be and am only finding out the more interesting reasons for this right now. ]

Santa Cruz Conference Center

Last year Santa Cruz decided not to build a conference center out by the wharf amidst rather heated debate about the trade-offs we would make in order to have this presumed money maker. Over the years the residents of Santa Cruz have rejected other money makers because of the ways they would affect the environment and the quality of life here. We have avoided having heavy industry or large developments on the coast.

But there are always trade-offs for everything. If we choose not to have industry here we must either choose to find the money for the public amenities we want elsewhere or do without. In the past I think we have avoided these choices because the cost of living in Santa Cruz was relatively cheap, the California economy was booming and the people who chose to live in Santa Cruz were by and large willing to do withouth certain public services in return for the protection of open space.

Over the past 20 years the population of Santa Cruz has been changing. Many of the people who went to college here chose to stay and have now grown up and are raising families of their own. I believe there are also more people who originally lived over the hill who figure that since the were commuting an hour to work anyway, they might as well raise their families in a beautiful place on the coast. The people who could afford to move here were relatively wealthy and this combined with the number of people already in town who want to buy homes, the landlocked nature of SC and the restrictive nature of our building laws has sent the cost of housing through the roof.

Both of those populations are raising families and so their perceptions of what public services are important is changing. They want to make sure we have the best schools, parks, etc.

In other places like Lafayette and Orinda, the residents have chosen to keep industry out and pay very high local taxes to pay for the services they want. Less wealthy communities make the trade-off and court one industry or another. If the residents of Santa Cruz county choose towards higher local taxes and fees I believe we will even further reduce the diversity of this areaby forcing out even more of the artists and other people of modest income.

But if we do decide to fund the services we want/need by inviting in particular industries, what industries will have the least impact on our environment and our way of life? What blend of industries will be best for the Santa Cruz we want to create for tomorrow?