Speaker 1: The plan was that we were going to go to New York and then we were going to go to Africa
00:23
JoAnn Bernofsky: and buy horses when we got to Morocco and ride the horses along the Mediterranean
00:29
JoAnn Bernofsky: until we got to the Nile and then take a right turn down the Nile
00:37
JoAnn Bernofsky: and follow the Nile until we came to an area where no people lived
00:41
JoAnn Bernofsky: and we were going to build a civilization.
00:48
JoAnn Bernofsky: Oh, God.
00:51
JoAnn Bernofsky: Anyway, we got a ticket on a Yugoslavian freighter from New York.
00:53
JoAnn Bernofsky: This is after these horrible months in New York in the winter.
00:58
JoAnn Bernofsky: We got to Morocco, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven,
01:03
JoAnn Bernofsky: because Morocco was absolutely so beautiful.
01:08
JoAnn Bernofsky: At one point, Gene bought a hammer and some nails to take with us on our journey
01:13
JoAnn Bernofsky: to this new civilization, and the nails, I think, were made in China,
01:18
JoAnn Bernofsky: and they bent immediately, and he...
01:22
JoAnn Bernofsky: You know, and Gene was not as enamored of his experience there as I was,
01:26
JoAnn Bernofsky: and so he said, ah, this is it. We can't do this here.
01:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: Let's go back to the United States,
01:34
JoAnn Bernofsky: and we'll start the civilization in the United States.
01:37
Gene Bernofsky: It was kind of a rebellion against important people and authoritarianism and a real depression and sickness that we all felt coming off of the intensity of the Vietnam
War, which was just being crammed down everyone's craw constantly, consistently. It was very hard to get away from that.
01:46
Gene Bernofsky: Would we be able to move off onto some uninhabited little patch of ground
02:16
Gene Bernofsky: and build something ourselves that came from ourselves?
02:23
Clark Richert: I was really attracted to the idea of the artist community when I was in high school.
02:30
Clark Richert: And I think this is because my mother had gone to Taos, New Mexico, and she came back and was
02:37
Clark Richert: talking about this artist community. So I formed these visions of an artist community.
02:44
Clark Richert: I remember once I was at my grandparents farm looking at the barns and the buildings. I was
02:48
Clark Richert: visualizing them all being turned into artist studios. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas and there
02:54
Clark Richert: is a fairly large concentration of Mennonites in the Wichita area. But the family I grew up in was
03:01
Clark Richert: pretty much assimilated into mainstream middle-class culture.
03:08
Clark Richert: Mennonite farmers are fairly communal and they're very supportive of each other,
03:14
Clark Richert: building barns and building houses. And I think I was attracted to that.
03:20
Gene Bernofsky: In the year of our Lord, 1962, Clark Rickard and I were friends and roommates at 704 and a half
03:33
Gene Bernofsky: Massachusetts Street, downtown Lawrence, Kansas.
03:50
Gene Bernofsky: Clark and I had a hell of a good time.
04:00
Gene Bernofsky: He had a wonderful technique.
04:04
Gene Bernofsky: He'd set up a blank canvas at one end of this big studio.
04:06
Gene Bernofsky: And we would stick our hands into these buckets of paint,
04:13
Gene Bernofsky: pull up great big globs of them and throw them at the canvas.
04:18
Clark Richert: I did like the idea of freedom of expression,
04:24
Clark Richert: making art kind of driven by feelings.
04:27
Gene Bernofsky: We can break down all of the myriad, thousands of years
04:32
Gene Bernofsky: of structures and structure regarding artistic pursuits.
04:37
Clark Richert: We went to the roof of our loft building and started painting rocks,
04:42
Clark Richert: And then we started dropping the rocks down on the passers-by on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence.
04:48
Clark Richert: Not on the passers-by, but near the passers-by.
04:57
Clark Richert: And one thing that was really amazing to us was the response of the passers-by.
05:00
Gene Bernofsky: So Clark said, let's make this breakfast and set it out on the sidewalk in front of the Eldridge Hotel.
05:05
Gene Bernofsky: Instead of making things and hanging them up in sterile environments,
05:12
Gene Bernofsky: why don't we get them into the general activity and behavior of everyday life?
05:17
Gene Bernofsky: And we're dropping in. We're making a drop-in.
05:24
Gene Bernofsky: And then we'll get back up at our windows, high overlooking,
05:28
Gene Bernofsky: and watch the impact of it on people as they're going up and down the street.
05:32
Gene Bernofsky: It's breakfast.
05:35
Clark Richert: We saw this as a new role reversal between audience and artists.
05:37
Clark Richert: So we named the new art form "Droppings" or "Drop Art."
05:42
Gene Bernofsky: We got in our car and went down to Boulder,
06:01
Gene Bernofsky: and I made this proposal to Clark.
06:04
Gene Bernofsky: "Why don't you join our venture?"
06:07
Gene Bernofsky: and you and me go around Colorado a little bit
06:08
Gene Bernofsky: and see if we can find some land.
06:11
Clark Richert: So we headed south May 3rd, 1965.
06:15
Clark Richert: I remember the date because it was my birthday.
06:19
Clark Richert: We found the property.
06:22
Clark Richert: It was within our price range, and we thought it looked good.
06:23
Clark Richert: On the spot, we bought the property for $450.
06:26
JoAnn Bernofsky: Jean and I bought it. It was in our names.
06:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: And we packed all our stuff up in a funky car,
06:35
JoAnn Bernofsky: and we drove to Trinidad, Colorado,
06:38
JoAnn Bernofsky: to this piece of land that became Drop City.
06:41
JoAnn Bernofsky: And then Richard came.
06:48
JoAnn Bernofsky: Richard was a friend of Clark's from art school,
06:50
JoAnn Bernofsky: and so there were four of us on this piece of land.
06:54
Speaker 5: It's sort of like a West, young man.
06:57
Speaker 5: It's like time traveling.
07:00
Speaker 5: You go back in time really easy.
07:01
Speaker 5: It's harder to go back in time in the East Coast, I think.
07:04
Speaker 5: That was sort of like America's fantasy land.
07:09
Speaker 5: Cowboys, Indians, last frontier.
07:14
Clark Richert: After we purchased the land,
07:23
Clark Richert: I attended some lectures by Buckminster Fuller
07:26
Clark Richert: at the World Affairs Conference in Boulder, Colorado.
07:29
Clark Richert: people would sit listening to Bucky for six hours straight.
07:33
Clark Richert: And I thought that I would be capable of building
07:38
Clark Richert: one of those genetic domes.
07:41
Speaker 6: Students all around the earth are beginning to realize
07:43
Speaker 6: that we have a design revolution on our hands
07:47
Speaker 6: and not a political revolution.
07:49
Speaker 6: Instead of having to leave it to somebody else,
07:51
Speaker 6: to leave it to the politician,
07:53
Speaker 6: there's something they can do themselves.
07:54
Clark Richert: Gene and I were driving around the farmlands around Boulder,
08:02
Clark Richert: and we found a farmer who had built a small geodesic dome greenhouse.
08:05
Clark Richert: So we stopped the car and jumped over there and ran over to the dome.
08:11
Clark Richert: And so I took some measurements and we ran back to the car.
08:15
Clark Richert: Then I actually caught some straws and toothpicks
08:18
Clark Richert: and built my first five-fold symmetrical dome.
08:21
JoAnn Bernofsky: We put up the wooden structure out of 2x4s,
08:27
JoAnn Bernofsky: And the way we got the two by fours was by going to this mill
08:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: and getting their mill ends and piecing them together
08:34
JoAnn Bernofsky: to make longer pieces.
08:36
Gene Bernofsky: We hardly ever had to buy anything.
08:38
Gene Bernofsky: There'd be construction workers that
08:42
Gene Bernofsky: were taking an old house upon.
08:44
Gene Bernofsky: We'd go up to them and say, we can clean these boards up
08:46
Gene Bernofsky: for you and pull all these nails if we can have the nails.
08:49
Gene Bernofsky: Well, sure you can have the nails.
08:52
Gene Bernofsky: You're going to clean up the boards.
08:54
Gene Bernofsky: Why, you can even have some of the boards.
08:56
Speaker 7: Our scrounging became quite elaborate.
08:59
Speaker 7: Farmers would come up when we were in Trinidad and say,
09:01
Speaker 7: we know you guys are trying to do something really creative
09:04
Speaker 7: and nice here, but what you thought was an abandoned barn
09:07
Speaker 7: and where you took out the main brace,
09:12
Speaker 7: well, it wasn't abandoned.
09:15
JoAnn Bernofsky: None of us had ever had any building experience.
09:18
JoAnn Bernofsky: So we went to town and we asked the people that we met,
09:22
JoAnn Bernofsky: you know, well, what do you cover your houses with?
09:26
JoAnn Bernofsky: And they said, "Oh, well, what you do is you put up tar paper and then chicken wire, and then you cover it with stucco.
09:28
JoAnn Bernofsky: The only thing is it doesn't work at all on a dome because a dome is not a vertical structure.
09:36
JoAnn Bernofsky: The tar paper sagged and the chicken wire was up here, so we had to come up with this solution, how to make a thinner skin.
09:41
JoAnn Bernofsky: I think I had the idea of using bottle caps.
09:51
Gene Bernofsky: We collected thousands of those bottle caps
09:55
Gene Bernofsky: and used some of those old nails we had found
09:59
Gene Bernofsky: to pound holes in them,
10:02
Gene Bernofsky: and that's how we bound together the skin
10:03
Gene Bernofsky: of that first dodecahedron dome.
10:08
JoAnn Bernofsky: And then that was our main house, and we all lived in that structure.
10:27
JoAnn Bernofsky: It was our bedrooms, our kitchen, but it was extremely exciting to have pulled it off.
10:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: And it was kind of wonderful and magical to be in this space that was totally unlike any space I'd ever been in.
10:39
Gene Bernofsky: We'd look up at the bottle caps and those bottle caps would just be picking up light.
10:48
Gene Bernofsky: And it was almost like being out in space.
10:54
Clark Richert: For me, it became way more than just the structure of the J.S.I.G.D.
11:00
Clark Richert: It became the whole Bucky philosophy of structural integrity.
11:04
Clark Richert: economy of means, the ecology of the world.
11:09
Clark Richert: So it was more than just a house to live in,
11:14
Clark Richert: it was also kind of a participation in a large world vision.
11:16
JoAnn Bernofsky: We discovered that there was this stuff called Celotex,
11:21
JoAnn Bernofsky: which was cheap and light and easy to cut.
11:25
JoAnn Bernofsky: We were quick learners.
11:28
JoAnn Bernofsky: Somehow we heard about this thing where if you put flaps
11:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: all around the bottom at the floor level
11:35
JoAnn Bernofsky: that could open up in the summer and have screens.
11:38
JoAnn Bernofsky: And then up at the ceiling,
11:42
JoAnn Bernofsky: there was a sort of a cornucopia with air spaces.
11:44
JoAnn Bernofsky: You had this natural air conditioning
11:48
JoAnn Bernofsky: where there was this air flow.
11:50
JoAnn Bernofsky: And it was very wonderful
11:52
JoAnn Bernofsky: because all this light showed at the bottom.
11:53
JoAnn Bernofsky: By that time, I was pregnant.
11:58
Clark Richert: For the first winter,
12:02
Clark Richert: Gene and Joanne went to New York,
12:03
Clark Richert: and Richard had gone to a graduate school in Albuquerque.
12:05
Clark Richert: So I was left there all by myself,
12:10
Clark Richert: and it was a cold winter.
12:12
Clark Richert: I'd get up in the morning,
12:14
Clark Richert: have my breakfast and coffee,
12:15
Clark Richert: and then go out into the cold,
12:18
Clark Richert: and work on the theater dome.
12:21
Clark Richert: In the center of the dome was this big scaffold,
12:23
Clark Richert: so I would climb up the scaffold,
12:25
Clark Richert: and it was an awkward thing.
12:27
Clark Richert: To build a dome, you really need at least two people.
12:29
Clark Richert: guitar solo
12:43
Clark Richert: kept as a space for film, screening, and projected sound imagery.
13:02
Gene Bernofsky: Monk Tyson was a reporter for the Denver Post. He came down to Drop City. He asked me what my
13:23
Gene Bernofsky: And I just told him off the bat,
13:32
Gene Bernofsky: "Oh, I'm Curly Benson."
13:35
Gene Bernofsky: And Clark said, "Well, I'm Clard Svensson."
13:38
Gene Bernofsky: And, uh, Richard said, "I'm Larry Lard."
13:42
Gene Bernofsky: Well, after that story got published,
13:45
Gene Bernofsky: the National Insider asked me to write a story
13:48
Gene Bernofsky: for their series called "The Heretics."
13:53
Gene Bernofsky: They said that they would pay me 20 bucks for the story.
13:56
Gene Bernofsky: And I thought, well, okay, 20 bucks. This is great.
13:59
Gene Bernofsky: Working for a living is complete insanity as far as we residents of Drop City, Colorado are concerned.
14:06
Gene Bernofsky: We droppers dropped this gruesome responsibility months ago, and we never intend to work again.
14:15
Gene Bernofsky: We were raised as you were, to feel guilty about doing nothing.
14:25
JoAnn Bernofsky: There was no doing nothing.
14:30
JoAnn Bernofsky: There was a lot of putting people on.
14:32
JoAnn Bernofsky: The next spring, people started moving there and living in tents and building domes out of a variety of materials and becoming a community.
14:43
JoAnn Bernofsky: And they were mostly friends or friends of friends that heard about it.
14:53
JoAnn Bernofsky: By the summer, there were 12 people living there.
14:58
Gene Bernofsky: Whatever we were doing, we thought at the time we were inventing it for the first time ever.
15:03
Gene Bernofsky: I don't think that we had any intellectual idea of communities or past history of communes.
15:09
Gene Bernofsky: I don't think we had any idea of that at all.
15:20
Speaker 8: I came across this book, The Laws of Form, by G. Spencer Brown.
15:26
Speaker 8: The way I remember it is not what's in the book.
15:32
Speaker 8: It said something to the effect that elegance is achieved
15:36
Speaker 8: when as much as is needed is condensed into as little as is needed.
15:41
Speaker 8: The book, it's about mathematics.
15:47
Speaker 8: The whole, the rest of the book is all these symbols,
15:50
Speaker 8: unfamiliar mathematical symbols,
15:54
Speaker 8: but the first equation, the way I remember it,
15:56
Speaker 8: but it's not in the book,
16:00
Speaker 8: was one minus one equals two.
16:05
Speaker 8: You can never subtract, you can only do more,
16:09
Speaker 8: which really relates to pain.
16:15
Speaker 8: Even if you try to subtract something by scraping,
16:18
Speaker 8: that's still another thing that you did, and it shows.
16:22
Speaker 8: Or if you have a color, say, black,
16:27
Speaker 8: and you paint it white, you make another move.
16:32
Speaker 8: You can cover, but you can't hide.
16:37
Speaker 8: These are things that most people are not really interested in.
16:41
Speaker 8: I think a few other painters dig what I'm talking about.
16:46
Speaker 9: It was interesting being the straight dropper rather than the artist.
16:50
Speaker 9: In Boulder, I worried about money a lot.
16:56
Speaker 9: With two kids, you do worry about that.
16:58
Speaker 9: And you really want to make sure that there's a degree of stability in your life.
17:01
Speaker 9: And we just didn't have it.
17:06
Speaker 9: We were very, very young.
17:08
Speaker 9: I don't blame Charlie.
17:10
Speaker 9: He was an artist the way he is.
17:12
Speaker 9: So moving to Drop City was kind of different because the responsibility was more diffuse.
17:14
Speaker 10: This woman named Frances Chandler had a gallery in Texas.
17:24
Speaker 10: She was interested in avant-garde art.
17:29
Speaker 10: So Charlie and I talked her into hiring the droppers for an event.
17:32
Speaker 10: The doomsday gig, it was fantastic.
17:40
Speaker 10: We had a band, which we called Fast Eddie and the Electric Japs.
17:44
Speaker 10: We had this motor scooter in there, and oh, God, it was smoke and exhaust.
17:51
Speaker 10: When the doomsday gig was over, we went back to Fort Worth to my house at that time,
17:57
Speaker 10: packed up my wife and kid, and off we went to Trinidad.
18:05
Speaker 10: I rode the motor scooter.
18:10
Speaker 11: I started to realize at an early age that writing, you need a pencil, piece of paper.
18:17
Speaker 11: You know, matter how poor you were, at least on one level, it's a very democratic form.
18:23
Speaker 11: And so that's partly why I took to writing.
18:29
Speaker 11: I was looking for a home in this world.
18:34
Speaker 11: I'd grown up in New York City, and I couldn't live there permanently.
18:36
Speaker 11: It was just too rough, too hard-edged.
18:40
Speaker 11: The first impression was just amazing.
18:43
Speaker 11: It was cattle country, ranches.
18:45
Speaker 11: Kind of out of nowhere was suddenly this huge dome structure,
18:49
Speaker 11: and then in the background were these smaller aluminum domes.
18:52
Speaker 11: It was like stepping into somewhat of a magical world.
18:56
Speaker 10: All those southern Colorado communities
19:00
Speaker 10: were coal mining communities,
19:03
Speaker 10: and the coal mines had all been abandoned,
19:05
Speaker 10: and they were just loaded with building materials,
19:08
Speaker 10: exquisite building materials.
19:12
Gene Bernofsky: We like to be able to collect the detritus
19:15
Gene Bernofsky: that we found around us and to make things.
19:19
Gene Bernofsky: We had the land divided into equilateral triangles.
19:24
Gene Bernofsky: At every apex of the triangle,
19:29
Gene Bernofsky: there was a two by four that we had pounded into the ground.
19:32
Gene Bernofsky: It was just this giant, wonderful, joyous dropping
19:37
Gene Bernofsky: that we had built of the land itself.
19:41
Clark Richert: There was an idea that there would be a continuation
19:48
Clark Richert: of these grid lines that would go all the way around the world
19:51
Clark Richert: that other such communities could start up
19:55
Clark Richert: at different locations on the same grid system.
19:59
JoAnn Bernofsky: Here we were on this piece of land with very few needs.
20:05
JoAnn Bernofsky: I mean, we just barely needed to eat food, unlimited junk.
20:09
JoAnn Bernofsky: Not only were we making something out of nothing,
20:14
JoAnn Bernofsky: but we were doing it together.
20:17
Clark Richert: One thing about getting involved in Ducky Fuller thinking
20:20
Clark Richert: in the genetic dome is it really got me and others
20:24
Clark Richert: involved in the study of geometry.
20:29
Clark Richert: And we applied the geometrical ideas to our art making.
20:31
Clark Richert: And we also were very interested in fractal geometry.
20:35
Clark Richert: And that was before the term fractal.
20:39
JoAnn Bernofsky: We started making this unique thing
20:43
JoAnn Bernofsky: that was called the ultimate painting.
20:45
Speaker 7: Clark had made spinning paintings
20:49
Speaker 7: when he was in Kansas that use a strobe.
20:52
Speaker 7: And one was he had Donald Duck mouth would go up and down.
20:55
Speaker 7: He came up with the idea,
20:59
Speaker 7: Well, let's make a spinning painting.
21:00
Speaker 7: We plotted it out, and then various people would work on it.
21:02
Speaker 7: You couldn't wipe out anybody else's stuff.
21:06
Speaker 7: You could only elaborate it.
21:08
Clark Richert: The paintings were very carefully calibrated
21:11
Clark Richert: so that they would synchronize with the strobe lights
21:14
Clark Richert: to form animations.
21:17
Clark Richert: When flashing at different frequencies
21:19
Clark Richert: would actually pull different patterns out of these paintings.
21:21
Clark Richert: We produced the big bag, and we believe
21:26
Clark Richert: that that is the first underground comic.
21:30
Clark Richert: The comic book was produced by this imaginary company,
21:33
Clark Richert: Lucid Productions.
21:37
Speaker 8: At our little silkscreen studio set up,
21:40
Speaker 8: we had clotheslines across the space,
21:44
Speaker 8: and every time one would come off,
21:47
Speaker 8: Gene would take it and hang it up with the clothespin
21:49
Speaker 8: and say, "Okay, that's 25 cents.
21:52
Speaker 8: Next one, 50 cents."
21:55
Speaker 8: Money.
21:57
Speaker 8: I didn't understand what it was about, exactly.
21:59
Speaker 9: The structure that Charlie and the guys contemplated for us
22:07
Speaker 9: was going to be the fanciest to date.
22:11
Speaker 9: Two stories.
22:14
Speaker 9: It was in the hillside, and they excavated into the hill.
22:15
Speaker 9: A little ways through, they discovered the joys of dynamite.
22:18
Speaker 9: And back in those days, believe it or not,
22:22
Speaker 9: you could go into a hardware store and buy a case of dynamite.
22:25
Speaker 9: No questions asked.
22:29
Speaker 8: It could be that I wanted to build into that hill
22:31
Speaker 8: just so I'd have a chance to use some dynamite.
22:35
Speaker 8: That was cool.
22:41
Speaker 8: One of the freedoms we no longer have in this country.
22:42
Speaker 11: Altericio got into it and a devilish gleam
22:49
Speaker 11: would come into his eyes when he touched the wires.
22:52
Speaker 11: He and Curly filmed the blasts.
22:55
Speaker 11: Curly liked to act out crazy ideas and film them.
22:57
Speaker 11: One day he bought an old cop's uniform in a junk store.
23:00
Speaker 11: He dressed up in it, drove a bunch of us into town,
23:04
Speaker 11: pushed Lord and Clyde up against a wall,
23:07
Speaker 11: and was frisking them while Altericio filmed the whole thing.
23:10
Speaker 11: Back at Drop City, Curly made a dummy,
23:14
Speaker 11: dressed it up in a uniform, hooked up some blasting powder,
23:17
Speaker 11: and filmed the spectacle as he blew it up.
23:21
Speaker 8: Somebody thought something was going on.
23:27
Speaker 8: Here's this crazy guy with a gun.
23:31
Speaker 8: So here comes the real cops.
23:35
Speaker 8: And I just waved at him and told him we were making a film.
23:39
Speaker 8: Be on your way.
23:43
Gene Bernofsky: Charlie gave me his camera.
23:45
Gene Bernofsky: So I went around with a camera to document what we were doing
23:48
Gene Bernofsky: and our happiness and satisfaction in the different kinds of things that we were inventing in a building.
23:54
Speaker 11: People were able to work when you wanted to.
24:09
Speaker 11: Nobody was a boss.
24:12
Speaker 11: Everything was done democratically.
24:13
Speaker 11: Nobody had a great skill level, so everybody just figured out things as they went along.
24:15
Speaker 11: You know, you hit a construction problem.
24:19
Speaker 11: How in the world are we going to do this?
24:23
Speaker 11: And then, you know, you just figure out how to do it.
24:24
Speaker 11: But the idea was that society should be organized with people sharing and helping each other to survive.
24:27
Speaker 11: And that the ideas of Draft City were applicable to the larger society.
24:34
Speaker 9: We had grown up in the late 40s and 50s, and that was the leave it to beaver, the mom stays home.
24:39
Speaker 9: That was the example we had.
24:48
Speaker 9: For being such an out there, on the cutting edge community,
24:50
Speaker 9: the gender division was remarkably traditional.
24:55
Speaker 9: I'll just say that.
24:59
Speaker 9: I never saw a guy wash a dish.
25:00
Speaker 9: Joe and I both had children in diapers,
25:03
Speaker 9: so we spent a good deal of our time doing laundry.
25:06
Speaker 9: Jill came a little bit later.
25:12
Speaker 9: She was the only one of the women that didn't have kids yet,
25:14
Speaker 9: so she was much more into this,
25:19
Speaker 9: why aren't you guys cooking the meals?
25:21
Speaker 12: It was important to me,
25:24
Speaker 12: and I think probably for a lot of people,
25:26
Speaker 12: getting away from the environment they considered traditional
25:28
Speaker 12: and the families they considered traditional
25:32
Speaker 12: and having new ways of relating to people.
25:34
Speaker 12: Lots of forward-looking thought,
25:37
Speaker 12: but as far as women's participation,
25:39
Speaker 12: The visions for the buildings and the goals of the place had a lot to do with the men.
25:42
Speaker 12: When we first came, there were three families with children, two guys and us, a couple.
25:49
Speaker 12: So even as a small group, there were a lot of different worlds.
25:58
JoAnn Bernofsky: All of us had parents who had jobs they didn't like.
26:02
JoAnn Bernofsky: And they had made these sacrifices to have their families.
26:07
JoAnn Bernofsky: And we were all aware of how frustrating and stilting
26:11
JoAnn Bernofsky: that choice was for our parents.
26:16
JoAnn Bernofsky: And we were all determined not to make those choices ourselves.
26:19
JoAnn Bernofsky: And so how to live a different kind of life was sort of a quest.
26:23
Gene Bernofsky: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
26:30
Gene Bernofsky: My parents were rank and file members of the American Communist Party.
26:38
Gene Bernofsky: My mom believed strongly in a better world for ordinary people and did her best to achieve that.
26:47
Gene Bernofsky: My dad was also an expert in Marxist theory. He had a PhD in philosophy and made a living as a small
26:55
Gene Bernofsky: the store owner.
27:07
Gene Bernofsky: When the Soviet Union denounced Stalin
27:10
Gene Bernofsky: for the brutal dictator he was,
27:13
Gene Bernofsky: my mother, suspicious of being fed
27:18
Gene Bernofsky: many, many lies and voice reviews,
27:23
Gene Bernofsky: and they purged her from the party.
27:26
Gene Bernofsky: And so we were trying to live
27:32
Gene Bernofsky: live without any rules and without any particular guidelines.
27:34
Speaker 9: It was a very interesting, diverse group of people.
27:47
Speaker 9: Jo, I have to say, really was the drop lady.
27:51
Speaker 9: She personified the whole spirit of the place.
27:54
Speaker 9: When she was younger, she was incredibly sensual and beautiful.
27:58
Speaker 9: Gene, how can you not enjoy him?
28:03
Speaker 9: What a sense of humor, what a lot of fun.
28:05
Speaker 9: And Clark, real dry sense of humor.
28:08
Speaker 9: Lots of interesting ideas going around.
28:11
Speaker 9: John Curl was one of the nicest people,
28:15
Speaker 9: very grounded and easygoing and mellow.
28:18
Speaker 9: And Richard I would talk with a lot.
28:23
Speaker 9: We would just pass the evenings in the dome.
28:25
Speaker 9: The television set was in the Brnovsky Dome,
28:29
Speaker 9: so we got to go watch Star Trek every Friday night.
28:33
Speaker 10: Drop City is a tribe family, man, woman, child, living, determined to live.
28:39
Speaker 10: It's impossible to define Drop City.
28:47
Speaker 10: It fell out of a window in Kansas five years ago
28:49
Speaker 10: with a mattress and a balloon full of water.
28:53
Speaker 10: Now there are 20 droppers in his many visions.
28:56
Speaker 10: Drop City is a fucked up mess.
29:00
Speaker 10: Drop City is completely open and completely free.
29:02
Speaker 10: Ten domes under the sky dome.
29:07
Speaker 10: The people of Trinidad call us Dump City.
29:10
Speaker 10: They know where it's at.
29:13
Speaker 10: They call droppers when they want garbage picked up.
29:14
Speaker 10: It delights them to watch us rummaging around in the schmutz.
29:17
Speaker 10: It delights us, too.
29:22
Speaker 10: An incredible number of people can live off the garbage heap of the U.S.
29:24
Speaker 10: Think what can be done with L.A., New York, San Francisco, Des Moines, Dallas.
29:30
Speaker 10: The most beautiful place in Drop City is the dump.
29:36
Clark Richert: Steve Bayer showed up one day, jumped out of his car, and ran over to our theater dome structure, which was not covered yet, and started climbing up the dome.
29:50
Clark Richert: Which frightened me because while it was a geodesic dome, it was not actually structurally sound.
30:01
Clark Richert: Because each of the members were two boards put end to end, and they wouldn't be strong until they had the final covering put over it.
30:07
Steve Baer: My name is Steve Baer. I'm first and foremost an inventor, trying to figure out how to make buildings that heat and cool themselves, how to heat water without having to
burn anything using the sun. Just innumerable aspects, usually having to do with, well, with life and the things we need, or we think we need to get by.
30:16
Gene Bernofsky: Steve would speak about villages and places in Africa where people had no shelters and in Mexico where people had no shelters.
30:41
Gene Bernofsky: But all they would need is an axe and they could go to auto junkyards all over the world.
30:51
Gene Bernofsky: And there were all the parts and pieces you needed to build a really stable, beautiful shelter for yourself.
30:58
Gene Bernofsky: And we loved him for that.
31:06
Steve Baer: I was playing around with new ideas and geometry and playing with new kinds of structures.
31:08
Steve Baer: I made things with car tops, not wishing to invest because I didn't really know what I was doing.
31:15
Speaker 14: We're down here in El Morro, the El Morro Salvage.
31:23
Speaker 14: This is the original salvage yard that the hippies came in.
31:26
Speaker 14: They cut the tops out of cars when they first came.
31:29
Speaker 14: I was just a young boy then.
31:31
Speaker 14: I remember telling my dad, I said, what are they going to do with those?
31:32
Speaker 14: He said, I don't know.
31:35
Speaker 14: They're going to build a house somehow.
31:36
Speaker 14: We had no idea what they were doing.
31:38
Speaker 14: They just got axes, they chopped the top of the cars off.
31:41
Speaker 14: Then they'd take them home and tin snip them
31:44
Speaker 14: and nail them up on their building.
31:46
Speaker 14: The building happened to be whatever color the car was.
31:48
Speaker 14: That's why the buildings were so colorful.
31:50
Speaker 10: Luke Kuhl is the king of the junk heap,
31:54
Speaker 10: teaching droppers and the world how to use things.
31:58
Speaker 10: Jump up on top of the car with an ax and chop them out,
32:02
Speaker 10: all around the edges, just like a can opener.
32:05
Speaker 10: Stomp, pop out the back glass, use it for a window,
32:09
Speaker 10: slip off the mirrors, use them for a solar cooker,
32:14
Speaker 10: pull out the insulation, use it, use it,
32:19
Speaker 10: make a honeycomb sandwich out of beer cans and plywood.
32:22
Speaker 10: Fantastic strength, use it.
32:27
Speaker 10: Luke Cool caused a major change in my life.
32:30
Speaker 10: Before, I had always scrounged out of necessity.
32:34
Speaker 10: Now it's a matter of choice.
32:38
Speaker 10: How in God's holy name did the American ideal
32:40
Speaker 10: get to be festoonmobiles, hostess Twinkies,
32:43
Speaker 10: Coca-Cola and Cracker Box houses,
32:47
Speaker 10: while our brothers and the rest of the world
32:50
Speaker 10: don't even have food and shelter?
32:52
Speaker 10: In any junkyard in the country,
32:55
Speaker 10: you can get car tops from 15 to 40 cents a piece.
32:57
Speaker 10: Sometimes the junk men even give them to you
33:02
Speaker 10: just to watch the crazy hippies
33:05
Speaker 10: bust their asses, chopping them out.
33:07
Speaker 10: You can build yourself the farthest out environment
33:09
Speaker 10: you can imagine living in the USA.
33:13
Steve Baer: I was just looking at the problem
33:21
Steve Baer: of how do you enclose spaces
33:22
Steve Baer: that are separate from each other
33:25
Steve Baer: but that fit together
33:27
Steve Baer: and that can be made into different forms
33:28
Steve Baer: using simple parts. And that led me to crystallography and to the study of Zona Hedra and found
33:32
Clark Richert: things that to me seem astonishing. Our first bare building at Drop City we called the car top.
33:40
Clark Richert: That dome only cost seven dollars. I myself lived in that dome for three years, but I'm sometimes
33:49
Clark Richert: corrected by Richard Callaway that that dome cost more than seven dollars. He always tells me that
33:55
Clark Richert: that I forgot, screws cost another $7,
34:01
Clark Richert: so actually the building cost $14.
34:03
Speaker 15: This is the same shape as the car top dome
34:12
Speaker 15: at Drop City and the original, or it's the car top zone.
34:15
Speaker 15: They call it the car top dome, but it is a zone.
34:19
Speaker 15: It's the shape of a garnet crystal.
34:22
Speaker 15: Some of the panels got stretched,
34:24
Speaker 15: So it's kind of an expanded dome.
34:28
Speaker 15: If they were all like this,
34:31
Speaker 15: this would come down and be much more symmetrical.
34:34
Speaker 11: The dome that Jill and I were living in
34:39
Speaker 11: had a south-facing slope of a hill,
34:41
Speaker 11: which was perfect for solar panels.
34:44
Speaker 11: So Steve's idea was to get river rocks.
34:47
Steve Baer: It took advantage of the buoyancy of warmed air
34:50
Steve Baer: to power the cycle that took the warmth through the rocks,
34:54
Steve Baer: store the heat in the rocks,
34:59
Steve Baer: and then curl could open a little door.
35:01
Steve Baer: It was the first convective air loop
35:04
Steve Baer: rock storage system that worked, that I know of.
35:06
Steve Baer: This is still a darn good way to use the sun.
35:10
Steve Baer: Nothing wears out.
35:12
Speaker 14: Car mirrors, they welded on a deal
35:14
Speaker 14: and they made the sun reflect,
35:16
Speaker 14: and I thought it was modern art
35:18
Speaker 14: and it was something he was making to cook with.
35:19
Steve Baer: In the dome cookbook I talked about a joint that didn't fit and they just bolted it in
35:25
Steve Baer: place.
35:30
Steve Baer: That was really wonderful because what's the point of it all?
35:31
Steve Baer: Is the point of it some kind of perfection or is the point of it the results?
35:34
Speaker 7: The interesting thing about Trinidad was that there were no building codes or anything.
35:39
Speaker 7: You could just basically do what you wanted.
35:44
Speaker 7: that created a certain amount of lawlessness,
35:47
Speaker 7: and we had no structure to handle that.
35:49
Gene Bernofsky: The complex dome was like three soap bubbles together.
35:54
Gene Bernofsky: Three domes, Steve engineered all covered,
35:57
Gene Bernofsky: must have been hundreds of car tops in that structure.
36:02
Gene Bernofsky: I think Steve called it a triple fused
36:06
Gene Bernofsky: rhomboicaso dodecahedron.
36:13
Gene Bernofsky: And if you know what that is, you can clue me in sometime.
36:16
Gene Bernofsky: Each individual dome was 30 feet in diameter.
36:21
Gene Bernofsky: So inside it was just huge.
36:24
Gene Bernofsky: It was beautiful.
36:27
Gene Bernofsky: And Steve had built solar collectors
36:28
Gene Bernofsky: from the back windows of cars.
36:33
Gene Bernofsky: Steve had enslaved us to kick out of the back of cars.
36:37
Steve Baer: It was a joy to experiment.
36:43
Steve Baer: But I don't recommend using car tops.
36:46
Steve Baer: They're crummy and they're just a pain in the butt
36:49
Steve Baer: to work with all the tar that's on the bottom of the button.
36:51
Steve Baer: It is fun to destroy a car though.
36:55
Steve Baer: What the heck, it is.
36:58
Steve Baer: It gets, it just, it's satisfying for a few minutes.
37:00
Steve Baer: I do have to admit that.
37:04
Speaker 10: I'd given up everything for this,
37:06
Speaker 10: You know, absolutely frightening labor.
37:12
Speaker 10: My hands were just pulps from punching holes in car tops.
37:16
Speaker 10: And my wife at that time was really unhappy
37:21
Speaker 10: that we'd left a really beautiful house in Fort Worth
37:25
Speaker 10: and here we were out in the middle of nowhere.
37:28
Speaker 10: It took me some time to understand
37:32
Speaker 10: that I hadn't made the worst mistake in my life.
37:36
Speaker 11: Little by little, the car top panels for the new kitchen complex took shape.
37:43
Speaker 11: We were also laying electrical wires and plumbing underground.
37:48
Speaker 11: We decided that we'd had enough of outhouses and were going to come into the 20th century with flush toilets.
37:52
Speaker 11: Everything went well and fit perfectly until the last panel at the very top of the last dome of the complex.
37:58
Speaker 11: We shook it and banged it, but to no effect.
38:05
Speaker 11: After dark, we gave up, with the panel half in and half out.
38:08
Speaker 11: I came out of my dome early the next morning, and it snowed during the night,
38:13
Speaker 11: and there was a thin layer of flakes blowing on the desert sand.
38:17
Speaker 11: Bear and a few others were standing on the hill.
38:21
Speaker 11: They seemed in awe.
38:25
Speaker 11: The last panel had somehow slipped into place by itself, and the structure was perfect.
38:27
Speaker 16: I used to teach the school across the street from where they had their buildings and had
39:07
Speaker 16: a couple of children in my class.
39:13
Speaker 16: Teachers had to make home visits, so I did get to go into one of them and when I went in
39:15
Speaker 16: and said, "Geez, this is, you know, different."
39:21
Speaker 16: And then they would come to the school too to visit.
39:24
Speaker 16: They spoke their thoughts to us at the meetings.
39:26
Speaker 16: A little different, but we enjoyed learning from them, you might say, too.
39:31
Speaker 17: I thought it was great, because they were scavengers, and to anybody who's in an agricultural
39:38
Speaker 17: economy, you know that you have to make do with what you've got.
39:44
Speaker 17: You've got to make a part for a machine if it breaks.
39:47
Speaker 17: And these guys had turned this, in a way, into an art form, where they were making a living
39:50
Speaker 17: out of all the stuff that everybody else never looked at twice or never thought had any value.
39:56
Speaker 18: Well, when Drop City came to town, I was in my fourth, fifth year with the Trinidad Police
40:04
Speaker 18: Department. So we ran out there to look things over, considering that what's out there is going
40:09
Speaker 18: to come to town sooner or later for shopping or whatever. And it was amazing the way these people
40:13
Speaker 18: were putting these domes together. We weren't used to contemporary art here. You know, we didn't even
40:18
Speaker 18: have graffiti at the time here.
40:24
Speaker 10: Trinidad's a wonderful place.
40:29
Speaker 10: It's small and weird.
40:31
Speaker 10: Dr. Beiber made Trinidad, Colorado
40:34
Speaker 10: into the sex change capital of the world.
40:37
Speaker 18: Now it's gender change, and the doctor involved
40:39
Speaker 18: was a very good friend of mine, Dr. Stanley Beiber.
40:42
Speaker 18: I had several sheriffs call me and say,
40:45
Speaker 18: "I'm booking this individual,
40:47
Speaker 18: and I don't know whether to book it as a male or a female."
40:49
Speaker 18: So I says, you call Dr. Biber, it's a percentage thing.
40:52
Speaker 18: If that individual that you're booking and incarcerating is 60% one or the other, male or female, you book it as such.
40:56
Speaker 18: That way you're all right. You have a good legal standing.
41:03
Speaker 18: I don't care where you go, you tell them where you're from. We're from Trinidad.
41:07
Speaker 18: Oh, the sexist thing's capital of the world. I said, yeah, I used to be a woman.
41:10
Speaker 18: And that shuts them up right away.
41:15
Clark Richert: I always thought we had fairly good relations with the townspeople.
41:18
Clark Richert: they often came to Drop City to visit.
41:21
Clark Richert: So this was a favorite Sunday afternoon drive.
41:24
Clark Richert: And occasionally they would tour the buildings,
41:28
Clark Richert: which we would allow within parameters.
41:31
Clark Richert: At a certain point, it became necessary to limit visiting hours.
41:34
Clark Richert: So we had visiting hours, times they could come,
41:38
Clark Richert: and times that they couldn't come.
41:40
Speaker 19: I think I was about 17 when I met Clark.
41:43
Speaker 19: We lived in the trailer court that was just outside of Trinidad.
41:47
Speaker 19: So on the weekends or whenever, I could actually hike down there.
41:51
Speaker 19: And I didn't have a really happy childhood.
41:56
Speaker 19: One day I came home from school and the trailer was gone and they had moved.
42:00
Speaker 19: That's when I ended up staying there.
42:03
Speaker 19: So Clark would drive me to school.
42:07
JoAnn Bernofsky: By word of mouth, by stuff in the underground press,
42:10
JoAnn Bernofsky: that whole thing of road trips,
42:14
JoAnn Bernofsky: Job City was one of the stops.
42:15
JoAnn Bernofsky: It was a given that anyone could stay there.
42:18
JoAnn Bernofsky: And wonderful to share what we had created.
42:21
JoAnn Bernofsky: And we sort of had this theory that if somebody wanted to come,
42:26
JoAnn Bernofsky: we never told anyone that they weren't the right person.
42:29
Gene Bernofsky: My friend Nick Sand from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn
42:39
Gene Bernofsky: came by in his truck.
42:43
Gene Bernofsky: And inside was a mobile LSD manufacturing chemistry laboratory.
42:45
Gene Bernofsky: I don't know exactly what was going on,
42:54
Gene Bernofsky: but it seemed like Mick was driving around the country taking orders.
42:57
Speaker 8: Supposedly had seven pounds of acid with him,
43:04
Speaker 8: and he wanted to get us all hooked up.
43:09
Speaker 8: and he was gonna be the master of ceremonies.
43:12
Speaker 8: And he had this kind of a gown.
43:16
Speaker 8: And nobody wanted to take acid.
43:20
Speaker 8: Or at least I didn't.
43:23
Gene Bernofsky: One day, he came into the dome
43:26
Gene Bernofsky: with a piece of glassware with some crystalline looking crud.
43:30
Gene Bernofsky: It looked like dirt.
43:35
Gene Bernofsky: And Nick was heating it up, heating it up
43:37
Gene Bernofsky: so it would start to form a smoke, he had a fire under it.
43:40
Gene Bernofsky: And then he'd shove this piece of glassware into our mouths
43:45
Gene Bernofsky: and he'd say, "Breathe in."
43:49
Gene Bernofsky: "Breathe in, what are you talking about?
43:50
Gene Bernofsky: What is this?"
43:53
Gene Bernofsky: Nick said, "This is DMT."
43:54
Gene Bernofsky: That stood for something like dimethyltryptamine.
43:58
Gene Bernofsky: I said, "Nick, I'm not smoking any of this.
44:03
Gene Bernofsky: I'm not going on any kind of two week long acid trip."
44:06
Gene Bernofsky: And Nick said, "This is D.M.T.
44:09
Gene Bernofsky: "Warnowski, this'll put you out of your mind
44:13
Gene Bernofsky: "instantaneously for only 15 minutes."
44:17
Gene Bernofsky: Oh, only 15 minutes?
44:21
Gene Bernofsky: Okay, so several of us droppers inhaled some of the smoke
44:23
Gene Bernofsky: and sure enough, another universe opened up
44:29
Gene Bernofsky: before our very life forces
44:33
Gene Bernofsky: And thank God it only lasted for 15 minutes,
44:35
Gene Bernofsky: and then we were able to go back to work.
44:40
Speaker 8: Maybe all those guys were taking acid, but me.
44:43
Speaker 8: Could be.
44:49
Speaker 8: Maybe that's why I was depressed.
44:51
Gene Bernofsky: The actual fact is, the use of drugs
44:56
Gene Bernofsky: in Drop City was minimal, but unfortunately,
45:00
Gene Bernofsky: Drop acid, drop out became such a widely pervaded motto that people came to believe that Drop City was the place to be in order to do that.
45:03
Gene Bernofsky: The biggest drug for us was living in the country, having the beautiful view of Fisher's Peak,
45:21
Gene Bernofsky: getting up in the morning and breathing the beautiful, clean air, having things to do with
45:29
Gene Bernofsky: our hands.
45:39
Gene Bernofsky: We were building things and making things.
45:40
Gene Bernofsky: That was really the drug for us.
45:42
Speaker 15: Now they would probably be called a green community, way before the term green was used.
45:52
Speaker 15: They were modest in their needs.
45:59
Speaker 15: They made do with very little money, and they did wonderful things.
46:01
Speaker 15: I had inherited some money.
46:08
Speaker 15: It wasn't a lot, but at some point, I can't remember what the project was or what they
46:10
Speaker 15: wanted to do, but I gave them some stock.
46:16
Speaker 17: They had water from the Pipeline Association, and I would be taking the payments for the
46:21
Speaker 17: pipeline.
46:27
Speaker 17: They would come in, always on time, to pay their bills.
46:28
Speaker 17: And sometimes they would come in and they'd say, "Can you cash this check?"
46:31
Speaker 17: they'd give me a, I think it was from Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and they'd have
46:36
Speaker 17: a $1,000 check to pay their $15 water bill.
46:39
Speaker 17: I can't cash that check.
46:44
Speaker 17: Go to the bank and cash it and come back and pay your water bill.
46:46
Speaker 17: But it was that kind of naivete, that kind of naturalness.
46:51
Clark Richert: We got a letter from Buckminster Fuller Foundation.
46:55
Clark Richert: informing us that we had won his 1966 Dye Maxine Award
46:59
Clark Richert: for our poetically economic architecture.
47:05
Clark Richert: And we were probably, after receiving that letter,
47:09
Clark Richert: in the check for $500, which was quite a bit of money back in 1966.
47:11
Speaker 10: A dome gave you exactly as much space as you needed,
47:18
Speaker 10: and no more, no less.
47:23
Speaker 10: It was a perfect living unit as far as I was concerned.
47:25
Speaker 10: We were trying to live totally minimally.
47:30
Speaker 10: It was practically a vow of poverty.
47:33
JoAnn Bernofsky: All the domes were basically built.
47:37
JoAnn Bernofsky: There must have been a lot of conversation about,
47:40
JoAnn Bernofsky: "Hey, we're putting all this stuff into Drop City.
47:42
JoAnn Bernofsky: Gene and Joe own it.
47:45
JoAnn Bernofsky: This is not right. We should all own it."
47:47
JoAnn Bernofsky: And the land was put into Drop City Incorporated.
47:49
JoAnn Bernofsky: There was no hesitation about doing that.
47:53
JoAnn Bernofsky: Because we really didn't have a strong sense of ownership of mine and yours.
47:57
JoAnn Bernofsky: All of our clothing was kept communally in a huge structure.
48:04
JoAnn Bernofsky: There were these shelves and shelves of everybody's clothes,
48:09
JoAnn Bernofsky: and you could just go and pick whatever you wanted to wear.
48:12
JoAnn Bernofsky: We ate communally.
48:16
JoAnn Bernofsky: Everybody who came shared their money with the whole group.
48:18
JoAnn Bernofsky: And it wasn't done in a dogmatic way.
48:22
JoAnn Bernofsky: It was just the culture of Drop City.
48:26
Clark Richert: One of our sources of income was our performances.
48:31
Clark Richert: And we traveled around the country.
48:35
Clark Richert: Four or five droppers would talk about Drop City and show films.
48:38
Clark Richert: And we would bring along our spinning painting, the ultimate painting.
48:43
Clark Richert: One of the performances, in my mind, was one of the most significant, was part of Robert
48:48
Clark Richert: Rauschenberg and Billy Kluber's EAT show, which was at the Museum of Modern Art and the
48:53
Clark Richert: Brooklyn Museum.
48:59
Clark Richert: We put a dome in the Brooklyn Museum.
49:00
Speaker 12: I worked some, actually, in the town, working for Head Start.
49:04
Speaker 12: I made things with other women.
49:09
Speaker 12: We actually got to have this visitor base and you could sell things, you know what I mean.
49:12
Speaker 12: Scarves, a little bit of jewelry.
49:19
Speaker 12: We gave lectures about the domes, about living in the way we were living.
49:21
Gene Bernofsky: We just found a pretty bleak six acres that nothing could grow on.
49:34
Gene Bernofsky: I think it was on shell.
49:40
Gene Bernofsky: Tried at one time to grow vegetables,
49:42
Gene Bernofsky: couldn't grow on the shell.
49:45
Speaker 10: We fed everybody for $75 a month.
49:46
Speaker 10: We did get food stamps.
49:51
Speaker 10: We did get into horrible conflicts
49:53
Speaker 10: with the welfare department.
49:57
Speaker 10: One of them shouted at us at one point,
49:59
Speaker 10: you have no right to be poor.
50:02
Speaker 10: But then I grew to love food stamps, free food.
50:06
Speaker 10: And not only that, but every penny that we took from the government was one less penny that went to Vietnam.
50:09
Speaker 10: Before we got food stamps, it was commodities.
50:17
Speaker 10: And commodity meat, the dogs won't even eat it.
50:19
Speaker 10: It comes out in this big jelly mass.
50:24
Speaker 10: But they gave you peanut butter and cheese and butter and flour and cornmeal.
50:27
Speaker 10: You know, a lot of good stuff.
50:35
Speaker 9: Grocery shopping was a logistical nightmare, but we got big quantities.
50:37
Speaker 9: I think we ate pretty well.
50:42
Speaker 9: We had rice and beans, but not all the time.
50:44
Speaker 9: I did a lot of the trips into town because I was the only one of the women that could drive a stick shift car.
50:48
Speaker 9: The red pickup truck was stick shift, so I got to go back and forth to town a lot,
50:54
Speaker 9: which I really didn't mind. It was a change of scenery.
50:58
JoAnn Bernofsky: There was a huge drive to do a couple of things among some of the guys.
51:06
JoAnn Bernofsky: To be known, to be famous, to be recognized as important,
51:15
JoAnn Bernofsky: and also to make a living off of what we had done.
51:21
JoAnn Bernofsky: To use that as a medium of exchange to get money so we weren't so poor.
51:26
Speaker 10: One of the fascinating things about the writing about Drop City
51:33
Speaker 10: is that I discovered pretty quickly that I could trade it for green pieces of paper, for money.
51:38
Speaker 10: And I started writing for Architectural Digest and Art in America and Art News and all those things.
51:45
Speaker 10: I don't know if you've seen the Art in America with hovering spacecraft.
51:54
Speaker 10: That's really a cool one.
51:59
Speaker 10: I got like a dollar a word for that one.
52:01
Speaker 10: Anyway, it all went into the communal thought,
52:05
Speaker 10: and we ate a little better that week.
52:08
Gene Bernofsky: All of this attention that he wanted to bring in,
52:14
Gene Bernofsky: and he pursued it,
52:18
Gene Bernofsky: was exactly the kind of attention
52:20
Gene Bernofsky: that we were running from to begin with.
52:23
Gene Bernofsky: So, there was definitely a conflict there.
52:28
Gene Bernofsky: Peter was unable to grasp.
52:31
Speaker 12: We became a media event to some degree.
52:36
Speaker 12: I didn't identify myself as a hippie per se.
52:40
Speaker 12: I looked the part, so he became this kind of fishbowl.
52:45
Speaker 9: It wasn't all lightness and good feelings.
52:51
Speaker 9: There were power struggles, a group that small.
52:55
Speaker 8: Here's one guy that I wish I never had to see again.
52:58
Speaker 8: Couple of chicks that don't like me,
53:03
Speaker 8: another guy that I just don't like him.
53:05
Speaker 8: On my left is my friend that I've
53:08
Speaker 8: been seeing too much of lately.
53:12
Speaker 8: Wouldn't you be depressed if you had to go through that every day?
53:15
Speaker 9: Peter and Charlie really had problems with each other,
53:21
Speaker 9: and it kind of came to a head.
53:25
Speaker 9: They had a fist fight, which was so upsetting.
53:26
Speaker 9: They picked up two by fours.
53:30
Speaker 9: They were going to hit each other.
53:31
Speaker 9: I mean, they had weapons.
53:33
Speaker 9: For us especially, it was the beginning of the end.
53:36
Speaker 11: The idea of the Joy Festival came up,
53:40
Speaker 11: and despite Jean and Joanne's opposition,
53:43
Speaker 11: we decided to go ahead with it.
53:47
Speaker 11: To survive, it felt like Drop City really needed to be out there,
53:49
Speaker 11: and this was a good way to get it out there.
53:54
Speaker 8: Time magazine was supposed to come or did they come? I can't remember.
53:56
Speaker 8: I remember that I wanted to get out of there before the Joy Festival.
54:01
Speaker 8: That was going to be like inviting every hippie that we could find.
54:06
Speaker 8: To come do what?
54:15
Speaker 10: The idea was to bring the people together and talk about serious communal issues.
54:18
Speaker 10: We sent out invitations, and everyone, I guess,
54:25
Speaker 10: who got an invitation sent out 20 or 30.
54:28
Speaker 10: Before we knew it, they were everywhere.
54:32
Speaker 10: There were drugs everywhere.
54:36
Speaker 10: There were drunks everywhere.
54:38
Speaker 10: It was-- it was disgusting.
54:42
Speaker 10: I managed to have a good time.
54:46
Speaker 11: That was the summer of love.
54:49
Speaker 11: And thousands of people, young people,
54:52
Speaker 11: were coming from all over the country to go to San Francisco.
54:54
Speaker 11: And a large number of them heard about Drop City.
54:57
Speaker 11: And the Joy Festival was a crazy great event
55:00
Speaker 11: in the middle of the desert there.
55:04
Speaker 10: 1967 was when the people who lived in Hate Ashbury,
55:08
Speaker 10: the people who actually lived there, had a funeral for Hitton.
55:13
Speaker 10: They were totally fed up with it for exactly the same reason
55:18
Speaker 10: that we were, that the flood of indigent transients
55:24
Speaker 10: just became impossible to deal with.
55:29
JoAnn Bernofsky: It was so alien to my experience of the heart of Drop City
55:33
JoAnn Bernofsky: that after that, I didn't want to be there anymore.
55:41
JoAnn Bernofsky: I had a baby there.
55:44
JoAnn Bernofsky: I helped build it.
55:46
JoAnn Bernofsky: I took care of it.
55:48
JoAnn Bernofsky: It wasn't my home anymore after that.
55:50
Gene Bernofsky: Joe and I and our baby, May, left.
55:53
Gene Bernofsky: We got in our car.
55:56
Gene Bernofsky: With our hearts broken, really, I did not want to leave,
55:57
Gene Bernofsky: but I could no longer stay in a place that was now
56:01
Gene Bernofsky: everything I hoped to leave and to escape from.
56:06
Clark Richert: I didn't agree with them in their negative interpretation
56:14
Clark Richert: of Drop City at the time.
56:17
Clark Richert: And I did feel it was going to hurt Drop City if they left.
56:20
Clark Richert: There was a continual change from day one in the dynamics.
56:24
Clark Richert: So there's always new people arriving, people leaving, and building going on.
56:28
Clark Richert: So it was an environment of constant change, which I mainly interpreted very positively.
56:36
Clark Richert: And I would say for the first year after the Brunovskys left,
56:45
Clark Richert: that I saw everything as positive growth.
56:51
Speaker 20: There's like two feet of creek rocks in this room,
56:58
Speaker 20: and that collects heat during the day.
57:02
Speaker 20: And then it transmits the heat in the nighttime into the dome.
57:04
Speaker 20: So sometimes I felt it was almost like a saxophone or something
57:11
Speaker 20: I'm going around opening, closing doors,
57:14
Speaker 20: different times of the day.
57:17
Speaker 20: As the sun comes over this way,
57:18
Speaker 20: I close the east doors and open the west doors.
57:20
Speaker 20: And you know, you get to play it, you know,
57:23
Speaker 20: like an instrument.
57:26
Speaker 20: Well, we are in the community of Libre in Colorado.
57:32
Speaker 20: And this was the community that I started
57:38
Speaker 20: with friends in 1968.
57:41
Speaker 20: which was majorly inspired by Drop City.
57:44
Speaker 20: We were building a gallery in New York,
57:51
Speaker 20: and in fact, it was the first gallery in Soho.
57:54
Speaker 20: One of our sculptor friends that was showing at the gallery
57:58
Speaker 20: was a student of Bucky Fuller, Bernie Kirschenbaum,
58:02
Speaker 20: and he had actually in the gallery a show of domes.
58:06
Speaker 21: There were so many amazing things happening.
58:12
Speaker 21: Art and technology collaborations were beginning.
58:14
Speaker 21: The community-based spaces like park plays.
58:18
Speaker 21: So Drop City was something that Dean had heard about.
58:24
Speaker 21: Two of the original people in Drop City
58:27
Speaker 21: came to New York and met him.
58:29
Speaker 20: The gallery was becoming less alternative
58:32
Speaker 20: and more mainstream, kind of commercial,
58:36
Speaker 20: let's get famous, and there was a feeling
58:40
Speaker 20: huge revolution in the world that we can change it, that we can have a different style. And so
58:42
Speaker 20: I came out to Colorado with Linda Fleming, who was my wife at the time. Every single weekend
58:50
Speaker 20: for that year we went in and stayed at Drop City, so we had a lot to do with it.
58:59
Speaker 21: They were really engaged in what was going on in the world around them, and not just the war and
59:06
Speaker 21: and the protests of the war, which we were all completely
59:10
Speaker 21: overwhelmed with, but really interested in what was
59:12
Speaker 21: happening in science and what was happening in other parts
59:14
Speaker 21: of the world.
59:17
Speaker 21: It was after the summer of their demise, where they had so
59:19
Speaker 21: many people coming.
59:23
Speaker 21: There was a lot of discord.
59:26
Speaker 20: We were a little hesitant to join them because these guys
59:28
Speaker 20: were basically asking too much.
59:32
Speaker 20: And what they were asking for was true, real equality and sharing.
59:36
Speaker 20: And they had this rule that if you came and you want to stay there,
59:44
Speaker 20: you put your keys and your money and your clothing on the table,
59:48
Speaker 20: and anybody that was there wanted it, they'd take that and have it.
59:52
Speaker 20: You don't drive away in your car. It happened regularly.
59:57
Speaker 20: I said, I'm not ready for that much communal.
01:00:00
Speaker 21: Dean and I devised this plan.
01:00:06
Speaker 21: When I think about it now, I think of the hubris of it.
01:00:10
Speaker 21: It's pretty extraordinary.
01:00:13
Speaker 21: We thought it would be this incredible gift.
01:00:15
Speaker 20: We got a little crazy.
01:00:19
Speaker 20: We painted the tractor and a couple of cars.
01:00:21
Speaker 20: We show up on Saturday with buckets of paint
01:00:24
Speaker 20: and just start going at it.
01:00:27
Speaker 21: I began to hear from people, how dare we do this to their town.
01:00:31
Speaker 21: But we did.
01:00:39
Speaker 21: And I thought they were really beautiful.
01:00:39
Speaker 20: But in the process of painting them, we really learned what domes are made of.
01:00:41
Speaker 10: As a result of Drop City, communes started springing up all over the place.
01:00:47
Speaker 10: There was Drop City South, which also called itself Monera Nueva.
01:00:53
Speaker 10: The Lama Foundation started, Buffalo started,
01:00:58
Speaker 10: the hog farm started, they were just all over the place.
01:01:03
Speaker 20: I don't think it would have been so free or so unencumbered
01:01:07
Speaker 20: if it hadn't been for Drop City's example of just do it.
01:01:12
Speaker 20: Just put the stuff up, you know, and live in it.
01:01:17
Clark Richert: I think ours might have been the only Drop City marriage.
01:01:24
Clark Richert: The event was attended by all the Drop City people,
01:01:28
Clark Richert: but also by the Libre people,
01:01:30
Clark Richert: being Linda Fleming and Peter Rabbit.
01:01:33
Speaker 19: One of the ladies gave me, I think it was a beach dress,
01:01:35
Speaker 19: but it was white.
01:01:39
Speaker 19: It was perfect, and it didn't show my tummy.
01:01:40
Speaker 19: And they made a veil for me.
01:01:43
Speaker 19: Just cut up a dress and put a blue bow on top of it.
01:01:46
Speaker 19: And Dean and Linda Fleming brought their fancy car,
01:01:52
Speaker 19: their antique car for us to ride in.
01:01:57
Speaker 19: So it turned out to be really a great wedding.
01:02:00
Speaker 19: Once I became pregnant, Clark became very protective
01:02:07
Speaker 19: and he didn't think I was getting enough protein.
01:02:12
Speaker 19: I mean, if you have 20 or 30 people there,
01:02:15
Speaker 19: There's not going to be meat and potatoes and vegetables every night.
01:02:18
Speaker 19: We would even go into town and he'd buy bologna so I could have meat.
01:02:23
Speaker 19: I think that's one of the reasons we ended up leaving.
01:02:29
Clark Richert: I still regard myself as a Drop City resident when we were living in Boulder.
01:02:33
Clark Richert: My departure from Drop City was rather gradual, and I didn't know I had departed.
01:02:38
Clark Richert: until a couple years later it seemed like we were not going back.
01:02:45
Speaker 22: The top curator for young artists in the country was named Walter Hopps.
01:02:54
Speaker 22: And he was head of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
01:02:59
Speaker 22: I made an appointment and I said, "Do you know where I can go,
01:03:02
Speaker 22: where I can have friends for me, friends for my kid, and I can paint?"
01:03:05
Speaker 22: And he said to me, "You should go to Drop City."
01:03:09
Speaker 7: One of our big events during the day was the mail.
01:03:14
Speaker 7: So there was a little card that was sent.
01:03:16
Speaker 7: Turns out to be Jalal.
01:03:20
Speaker 7: It says, I'm a painter.
01:03:20
Speaker 7: I'm looking for a place where I can stay.
01:03:22
Speaker 7: I've heard about Drop City.
01:03:24
Speaker 7: Can you help me out?
01:03:26
Speaker 7: So I write back, sure.
01:03:28
Speaker 7: And I pick her up at the Trinidad train station with Alex.
01:03:33
Speaker 23: I was seven years old when we first moved there.
01:03:43
Speaker 23: So as a kid, you know, you're running around and you're touching everything.
01:03:46
Speaker 23: And it's like the cold metal of the car top and the tar.
01:03:49
Speaker 23: And it was, the ground was like shale and rocks.
01:03:52
Speaker 23: It was very rough.
01:03:55
Speaker 23: And the floors were plywood.
01:03:56
Speaker 23: And I fell down a lot.
01:03:59
Speaker 23: I mean, it was like bruises and bumps and stubbing toes and stepping on nails.
01:04:00
Speaker 23: But I became this really little tough kid.
01:04:04
Speaker 22: The building had stopped.
01:04:08
Speaker 22: There wasn't work going on.
01:04:09
Speaker 22: The theater dome had the skin on it,
01:04:12
Speaker 22: and there was another dome called the Wadman Dome,
01:04:14
Speaker 22: and that just had the structure,
01:04:17
Speaker 22: but nobody was working on anything,
01:04:19
Speaker 22: and it was hard to find what the momentum was.
01:04:22
Speaker 22: It wasn't a good place to paint.
01:04:25
Speaker 22: My cooking was more important in the community,
01:04:27
Speaker 22: so I wasn't very happy about that.
01:04:30
Speaker 24: Dear Monica and family,
01:04:46
Speaker 24: Greetings from cold Colorado.
01:04:48
Speaker 24: It's been a long time since I've heard from you or written.
01:04:50
Speaker 24: I've got to give a lecture on alternative lifestyles from a woman's point of view
01:04:54
Speaker 24: next week at the University of Southern Colorado to some sociology classes.
01:04:58
Speaker 24: I hope I do okay and don't get stage fright.
01:05:03
Speaker 24: I'm not going on the lecture tour to the Midwest and the East, however.
01:05:07
Speaker 24: I helped to write an article on vernacular architecture,
01:05:12
Speaker 24: which will be in a book published in London next month.
01:05:15
Speaker 24: Well, I'm 23 now, and still the youngest girl here.
01:05:19
Speaker 24: If you have any of Robbie's old clothes,
01:05:24
Speaker 24: Lump, age five, could sure use them.
01:05:27
Speaker 24: All his pants have been patched so much that will never last the winter.
01:05:31
Speaker 24: Also, any of the kids' shoes you might have around that are too small would really make these kids happy.
01:05:35
Speaker 24: We've been very short on money.
01:05:41
Speaker 24: The only shoes Lump owns are some old tennis shoes.
01:05:43
Speaker 24: Well, I guess that's about it for now.
01:05:47
Speaker 24: All my love and hard smiles.
01:05:51
Speaker 24: Michelle.
01:05:53
Speaker 23: I remember people parking their cars on the side of the road and just watching us.
01:05:58
Speaker 23: And Lump and I used to run up and bang on the windows,
01:06:04
Speaker 23: spare quarters, spare dime, got any gum, got any candy?
01:06:07
Speaker 23: And people would say things like, you really live there?
01:06:10
Speaker 23: You live in those things?
01:06:13
Speaker 23: My God, what are you doing?
01:06:14
Speaker 23: Are they treating you okay?
01:06:15
Speaker 7: A lot of the artistic energy just drained away.
01:06:17
Speaker 7: Then everything else sort of became harder and harder.
01:06:21
Speaker 7: It was like no money.
01:06:24
Speaker 7: We were starving.
01:06:26
Speaker 7: So we would take the rabbit droppings,
01:06:27
Speaker 7: paint them with shellac and cones,
01:06:30
Speaker 7: make beads out of them,
01:06:32
Speaker 7: and then sell them to the tourists.
01:06:34
Speaker 22: They would ask for the moldy cheese,
01:06:38
Speaker 22: and we'd buy it at 10 cents a block,
01:06:40
Speaker 22: and come back and cut the mold off.
01:06:42
Speaker 22: We would go into the butchers,
01:06:44
Speaker 22: knock on the window and say, "Do you have any scraps?"
01:06:48
Speaker 22: They'd pick scraps up off the floor
01:06:51
Speaker 22: that were covered with sawdust,
01:06:52
Speaker 22: and we would eat that.
01:06:54
Speaker 22: We would cut the meat off, cook the fat with wheat shorts,
01:06:56
Speaker 22: and give that to the dogs.
01:07:00
Speaker 22: We were literally living off what society was throwing away.
01:07:02
Speaker 22: And it was January.
01:07:06
Speaker 22: And I was pretty miserable.
01:07:08
Speaker 18: It's pretty cold here in the winter.
01:07:10
Speaker 18: And that property, I know, is in the open,
01:07:12
Speaker 18: and that wind whips through there like you wouldn't believe.
01:07:14
Speaker 18: So our Department of Social Services were very concerned,
01:07:17
Speaker 18: rightfully so, about the kids and the mothers.
01:07:21
Speaker 18: Well, concerned about everybody out there and their health.
01:07:23
Speaker 12: Somewhere along the line, I think most people decided,
01:07:26
Speaker 12: "Wait a minute, this isn't really livable."
01:07:29
Speaker 12: Not just the dryness of the land and the scarcity of water,
01:07:32
Speaker 12: but the fact that all kinds of people are coming through,
01:07:37
Speaker 12: like, "Oh, did those speed freaks who were staying up in that dome
01:07:41
Speaker 12: take all the eggs, or why is all this tobacco in the pancake batter?"
01:07:45
Speaker 23: It was one of those beautiful Colorado days when it's going to rain
01:07:53
Speaker 23: The clouds were like gray-purple.
01:07:56
Speaker 23: It was very ominous and the wind was blowing.
01:07:58
Speaker 23: Michelle withdrew.
01:08:00
Speaker 23: She had been staying in her dome for days on end and nobody was seeing her.
01:08:02
Speaker 23: And she came out and me and Lump said, hey, Michelle, where are you going?
01:08:06
Speaker 23: And she said, crazy.
01:08:09
Speaker 23: And we thought that, you know, kids are very concrete.
01:08:11
Speaker 23: We didn't understand.
01:08:14
Speaker 22: Michelle looked like Kansas.
01:08:16
Speaker 22: She looked like corn and wheat.
01:08:18
Speaker 22: Her parents put her in a mental hospital, told her she was crazy because she didn't want
01:08:21
Speaker 22: want to live a regular straight life.
01:08:26
Speaker 24: February 17, 1969.
01:08:32
Speaker 24: Dear Mom, there are communes all over now.
01:08:37
Speaker 24: In the last six months, Drop City has been offered land in New York, Oregon, California, and Utah.
01:08:41
Speaker 24: And we plan to travel to check these offers out next summer.
01:08:47
Speaker 24: I was up at Libre, a commune north of here.
01:08:52
Speaker 24: They have beautiful domes on their 200 acres.
01:08:55
Speaker 24: They really live rich up there.
01:08:58
Speaker 24: Each of their domes cost at least $2,000.
01:09:01
Speaker 24: And Dean has just been commissioned to do a sculpture.
01:09:04
Speaker 24: You can read about him in the last issue of Time magazine.
01:09:07
Speaker 24: The news just came on of all the college riots.
01:09:12
Speaker 24: It kind of worries me.
01:09:15
Speaker 24: I hear so many people talking about revolution.
01:09:18
Speaker 24: A lot of people are getting mad.
01:09:21
Speaker 24: There is so much injustice in the courts and corruption within the establishment.
01:09:24
Speaker 24: What I'm curious about is how much straight middle class people like you and your fellow types are aware of what's happening.
01:09:30
Speaker 24: Well, enough about that stuff.
01:09:38
Speaker 24: It was so wonderful to get the check.
01:09:42
Speaker 24: I bought $12 worth of groceries.
01:09:45
Speaker 24: I love you both so very much.
01:09:50
Speaker 24: Your flower child, Michelle.
01:09:53
Speaker 22: It was the last Sunday in April,
01:10:01
Speaker 22: and I was cooking, and again, it was chicken soup,
01:10:04
Speaker 22: because we could get chicken.
01:10:06
Speaker 22: Michelle came in, and she said,
01:10:08
Speaker 22: something's going to happen tonight.
01:10:12
Speaker 22: I think Michelle's death may have accelerated it.
01:10:35
Speaker 22: But whether or not she had died, the change of Drop City was underway.
01:10:40
Speaker 11: It became a place where we were getting isolated, getting cut off.
01:10:47
Speaker 11: We were no longer at the cutting edge. The world was going on to many other things.
01:10:52
Speaker 11: We wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be a part of it. You know, I had to move on.
01:10:59
Speaker 7: It was sort of like abandoning ship. It was sort of fun. It just took off.
01:11:05
Speaker 7: That was it.
01:11:10
Speaker 18: They just left.
01:11:11
Speaker 18: Just left everything sitting there.
01:11:13
Speaker 18: And that opened the door for deserters from the military,
01:11:14
Speaker 18: runaway kids, people with warrants for their arrest throughout the country.
01:11:18
Speaker 18: It kept us pretty busy out there.
01:11:23
Speaker 18: And this is what I just liked about the droppers leaving us with a mess out here.
01:11:25
Speaker 18: You know, we had to deal with it.
01:11:30
Speaker 18: They were gone.
01:11:31
Speaker 10: Since the library was so close, we kept careful tabs on Drop City,
01:11:33
Speaker 10: what was going on down there.
01:11:37
Speaker 10: And then there was a murder after that,
01:11:39
Speaker 10: because the bikers came in after the suicide.
01:11:42
JoAnn Bernofsky: Around 1972, we got a letter from somebody
01:11:48
JoAnn Bernofsky: who was living there saying that the place was a mess
01:11:52
JoAnn Bernofsky: and that they needed help.
01:11:57
JoAnn Bernofsky: And eventually, there were problems with the law,
01:12:00
JoAnn Bernofsky: and everybody left, and it was empty.
01:12:04
JoAnn Bernofsky: So Jean and I were living in Boulder, Colorado.
01:12:07
JoAnn Bernofsky: We went down to Drop City with Mae,
01:12:11
JoAnn Bernofsky: and it was astonishing how decrepit it was
01:12:14
JoAnn Bernofsky: and how ugly it had become.
01:12:19
JoAnn Bernofsky: And we came back with a sense of mission
01:12:21
JoAnn Bernofsky: that we were gonna fix Drop City up again.
01:12:24
JoAnn Bernofsky: But nobody really wanted to help.
01:12:28
JoAnn Bernofsky: Nobody wanted to be involved from the original group.
01:12:31
JoAnn Bernofsky: And so we sold Drop City pretty cheap to this guy who lived nearby.
01:12:53
JoAnn Bernofsky: But that whole process of asking for it back, the schism that happened between the group,
01:12:57
JoAnn Bernofsky: pretty much ended some of those friendships and definitely ended Drop City.
01:13:07
Speaker 25: My interest in photography as a tool is its structure and I got that from studying architecture
01:13:28
Speaker 25: and through that link I began to work with Lloyd Kahn on photographing nomadic architecture
01:13:35
Speaker 25: or you might say alternative contemporary poverty made handmade structures to live in.
01:13:42
Speaker 25: And we decided to do a tour of the American West where a lot of this material was concentrated,
01:13:51
Speaker 25: particularly throughout communes.
01:13:57
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): As we were heading up to Libre, which was in the mountains in Colorado,
01:14:00
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): we stopped by Drop City.
01:14:04
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And I'd heard about Drop City and seen pictures of it,
01:14:06
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): but never been there before.
01:14:08
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And it was kind of a bleak day and it was abandoned.
01:14:11
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And it was a photographer's delight, really.
01:14:15
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): No one was there.
01:14:18
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And then we published the pictures in shelter.
01:14:19
Speaker 25: As Lloyd writes in the book here,
01:14:23
Speaker 25: it's become a dome ghost town.
01:14:25
Speaker 25: It reminded me just ever so slightly of the gold rush.
01:14:27
Speaker 25: It's the same kind of exodus from the east
01:14:33
Speaker 25: looking for something new.
01:14:36
Speaker 25: But the old days was money, and in this period of time, it was like the true life, I would say.
01:14:38
Speaker 25: It was really looking for the true life.
01:14:43
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): People got inspired to do things and to know about practicality, economy, aesthetics.
01:14:45
Speaker 25: You could buy a used car for 60 bucks, and you could live really economically,
01:14:56
Speaker 25: whereas today it's darn near impossible.
01:15:02
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): The idea of building a little community out of scrap was an interesting one.
01:15:06
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): Plus they had interesting geometry there.
01:15:11
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): They had Steve Baer's designs.
01:15:13
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And it was exciting to create these mathematical spaces.
01:15:16
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): The first time I heard of Steve Baer was when I had all these things that I wanted to communicate with people,
01:15:20
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): but I didn't know how to make a book.
01:15:26
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): And I saw this book for $1 called the Dome Cookbook,
01:15:27
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): just done on a typewriter with drawings and muddy looking photographs and i thought i could do a book
01:15:31
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): like this this was before the whole earth catalog and this obviously influenced the first whole earth
01:15:38
Lloyd Kahn (prob.): catalog and he went in and made corrections in hand and to me this was really an exciting book
01:15:43
Speaker 25: this was the complex and then somebody comes along and writes two complex i think it's a really honest
01:15:52
Speaker 25: description because I think this kind of lifestyle really proved to be too complex for people.
01:15:59
Speaker 25: When we got there in 1972, you could just sense this kind of a hangover. There's a stench of a
01:16:06
Speaker 25: hangover of a darn good idea. They couldn't hold it together. We're sort of hardwired for that
01:16:14
Speaker 9: tribal kind of existence because it dissipates all of that emotional baggage.
01:16:25
Speaker 9: It's easier to cope with when you've got an extended family or a tribe to count on.
01:16:32
Speaker 9: I think we all had a sense that it was unusual and different and that it was special.
01:16:38
Speaker 17: They were like a breath of fresh air into this area which is relatively conservative.
01:16:45
Speaker 17: The people that I remember from Drop City and the essence of the community was joy and pleasure
01:16:51
Speaker 17: and happiness and freedom.
01:16:57
Speaker 17: They lived it very well, without disturbing anybody, without encroaching on anybody else's
01:16:59
Speaker 17: rights or property or anything else.
01:17:05
Speaker 17: We never were able to contact anybody with the idea of doing anything to preserve it, to
01:17:10
Speaker 17: hold on to part of it.
01:17:16
Speaker 17: So it just kept deteriorating, deteriorating, and then the neighbor bought the place and
01:17:18
Speaker 17: turned into a parking lot for his semis.
01:17:23
Clark Richert: This was actually a community before Drop City was built, and we paid attention to the
01:17:32
Clark Richert: kind of the relics of the previous community.
01:17:40
Clark Richert: And I think we respected that there was a community there
01:17:43
Clark Richert: before.
01:17:48
Clark Richert: And I feel like this is an unconscious utilization
01:17:50
Clark Richert: of the space.
01:17:55
Clark Richert: This area in general is really like a time machine for me,
01:17:58
Clark Richert: which I think is a big part of the tragedy of time
01:18:02
Clark Richert: I experience here.
01:18:05
Clark Richert: People often ask me, "Why did Drop City fail?"
01:18:08
Clark Richert: And that question always bothers me
01:18:13
Clark Richert: because for me, Drop City was one of the very best
01:18:15
Clark Richert: experiences of my life.
01:18:18