Drop City: the legend and the legacy



UPDATE:  A documentary about Drop City and its inspiration is in progress.  Production has begun and a "KickStarter" campaign has been launched to fund this exciting project.  Please donate what you can, so the film will go forward.  See a video trailer and pledge info here:  http://kck.st/9uk7Ed  Thanks.

Clark Richert's Preview of Drop City - 1967

Most of us have heard of it.  The image resonates, in my mind, with the philosophy of the 60s, a nebulous state of cool.  But what was Drop City.. a city of drop-outs or Timothy Leary’s acid-dropping experiment?  Or T.C. Boyle's wayward book of the same name?

Nope, it was none of these.

 

Drop City was an intentional community formed in the hills near Trinidad, Colorado in 1965, the inspiration of artists Clark Richert, Gene and Jo Ann Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit who just wanted to escape the system, live rent free and focus on their art.  It was a scrubby goat pasture they bought for $450, and the "first rural hippie commune."

Known for its geodesic dome-style architecture, combining the principles of Buckminster Fuller with salvaged car roofs and old telephone poles, Drop City* became an icon of rural communal living.  In 1967, fourteen residents lived with the land and created paintings, sculptures, furniture, and the domes, works of art themselves.  Eventually, nine domes, including the Icosadome, the kitchen, theater, and the Triple dropped onto the horizon.  The droppers lived to their hearts content, with no intention of becoming a large community. But, media coverage and the Joy Festival in June 1967 attracted hundreds of hippies, and Drop City grew.  

According to Gene Bernofsky,  "...we were not models, hippies, or a commune. Those trademarks are strictly the invention of establishment media." 

But, like it or not, the Droppers had the kind of visionary optimism that would soon characterize the entire hippie movement.  Jo Ann Bernofsky says, "We knew that we wanted to do something outrageous and we knew we wanted to do it with other people. . . . It was full of vitality… exciting and wonderful. You had the sense that anything was possible."

To Clark Richert, inspired by Mark Rothko and Bucky Fuller, his own limitless art/science sensibilities and the junk yards of southern Colorado, Drop City was his passion.  He remembers the synergetic interaction between artists and residents that created experimental expression. 

Since 1973, he has worked as an artist, geometer, philosopher, and professor at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design.  In February, Clark presented a highly acclaimed retrospective of his work, “1960 – Present,” in Denver.  This summer, he was honored as participant in the Biennial of the Americas. 

One of Clark’s current goals is to develop another creative-person community, and soon.  Drop City may rise again!

            *In 1967, Drop City won Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion award for innovative and economic housing construction.

http://www.dropcitydoc.com/Watch_the_Trailer.html

 http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=pondchadwick&annotation_id=annotation_203430&feature=iv#p/a/u/0/Nb-DbSGg4Qg

Alternative Living Today

      Sitting on the shore of a remote isle in the Pacific Northwest, where scrub oak and madrone tumble from the hills to the high water line, and residents ferry to their chosen isolated lifestyle, we’re thinking of alternatives to our traditional American way.  Here, we feel at once the slowing of island time and the awareness of lost immediacy.  There is the comfort of self-dependence, the forced inaccessibility, the certain confidence in ones ability to accept, and find the freedom in, the limitations.  For the effort, we are greatly and naturally rewarded.

       Though it was instinctual at the time, I know why we chose remoteness, challenges and self-sufficiency in the 70s: the satisfaction and low impact of paying attention to every cause and effect.  Before debates over climate change and resource depletion, it felt good to take only our share.

The Threshold of a Dream: the sixties

When the 1960s began, I was a six-year old kid discovering the friends and fields of my Connecticut neighborhood.  Daddy drove his Mercedes coupe to his radio station; Mommy filled the Country Squire with chatty girls.  My three sisters and I explored Greenfield Hill at will, and I was happily oblivious to the world.  But the sixties held changes unimagined.

MLK and "I have a dream,” the Beatles, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, rock ‘n’ roll music, Civil Rights, the yogis, Drop City (look for it in my next post) and the ERA contradicted the Bay of Pigs, assassinations of our visionaries, In Cold Blood and the Vietnam War.  Wrapping up with Woodstock, psychedelic drugs and free love, riots and be-ins, the country was gripped by a true revolution.  It was an amazing decade, energy toward enlightenment and violence divided the country.

In my little town, my parents worked and partied, succeeded and fretted, while we kids built a frenetic world of our imaginations.  In the sixties, I grew through Ginny Dolls to Barbie to horses to making out, drinking and smoking.  And music, always music.  By 1968, I had experienced the World’s Fair, Broadway, Europe, Jazz Festivals, and Playland.  Then, the ultimate betrayal and gift, Daddy sold everything and packed us off on a trip-around-the-world. 

Life would never be the same.

That decade spun me round and spit me out a bold teenager with wide eyes and few skills.  In 1970, I quit high school and moved away, dropped LSD and road-tripped in a VW van, and I began MY life as a W-O-M-A-N, in the new era.  Anything was possible, and I believed it.

Where were you in 1970?  

Memorials & Memories

My mother (World War II era) and I (Vietnam War era) stood at my father’s grave for the Memorial Day ceremony.  Around us, the purple mountains and fruited plains stood witness as the proud and the brave gathered.  “Love your country and remember those who died for your freedom,” said a WWII vet.  The 21-gun salute, military fly-over, “Taps” and lone bagpiper brought tears to hundreds of eyes.

When I looked into the faces of the Vietnam Vets gathered there, I saw my peers, the horrors and pride still burning in their eyes.  It broke my heart.  I thought about my anti-Vietnam stand in the 70s, about my dodging and dissenting friends.  We were never anti-soldier; only anti-war.  Not anti-American, we were anti-violence.  The soldiers believed they were fighting for a just cause, and more than 211,000 troops were killed or wounded in a war we would/could never win.  We believed our government was sacrificing their lives in a senseless war.

Then I looked down at my 3-year-old grandson, and imagined “a brotherhood of man.”  I am still anti-war, but I am mostly pro-peace.

See Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robt. S. McNamara  and Imagine by John Lennon