Living with Pink Cloud

By Allison Roberts
Cal Monthly, November 2003

My very own free speech movement came in 1973, when I moved into Barrington Hall. It was the spring of my sophomore year at Berkeley. I was just moving across campus to Barrington, but it was a world apart from the Northside living I had experienced, first at Stern Hall dorm and then at Ridge Project co-op. Those were civil places, popular with the quantitative types for their proximity to engineering and math classes. Really, they were a little too civil--or too quiet, anyway.

At Barrington Hall, the buzz never let up. You could make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (thanks to the 24-7 snack table) and strange, intense conversation at any hour. The pursuit of truth and beauty and food never stopped. It was a place of cosmic concepts and frequent dancing on tables (no wonder they were always a little grimy).

This was the place where humanities types belonged. Students at Barrington didn't just read and write poetry--they lived it. They painted murals, they danced, they played the piano loudly, they sang, they partied with style. It was life as performance art. It was the kind of place where a guy named "California" felt free to wear Indian print dresses and where the bulletin board of residents' photos included a full-moon shot.

It was also the kind of place where a resident crasher, named Pink Cloud, was a valued part of the decor (and nearly a permanent fixture--he stayed for about a decade).

Yes, there were some serious students in rigorous scientific disciplines, but they had to have some sort of artsy or revolutionary streak to feel at home.

Counterculture had long been served here. Way back in 1960, Barrington Hall residents were reportedly a vocal part of the crowd that protested outside a San Francisco meeting of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. By the time I got there, the political spirit of the late '60s had been overtaken by the campaign for more sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Barrington residents soldiered valiantly on all three fronts, especially at the orchestrated bacchanals known as "wine dinners."

But, mostly, we talked and talked and talked. All that talking led to friendships that now, 30 years later, have proven the most enduring of my life.

I am grateful that I came to the Barrington free-for-all when I did. I was lucky to be there before the hard drugs moved in, before all common sense moved out. Before residents argued, straight-faced, that the right of hundreds of people to party should not be abridged by the complaints of several dozen neighbors who couldn't sleep. Before the hall adopted the mind-tangling motto, "Those who know, don't tell, and those who tell, don't know"--which captured something of the insular illogic that fueled the Barrington community's disregard for its neighbors and, ultimately, its demise.

Finally, lawsuits and other legal hassles threatened the resources of the entire co-op system, leaving the USCA council little choice but to close the building as a residence hall in 1989.

Of course, there was resistance and righteous squatting and evictions. (It wouldn't have been Barrington without them.) Today the building is leased out and run as a private rooming house. It is, by all accounts, as quiet and orderly and civil as any student housing on the Northside.

I'm glad I made it to the party when I did. I'm still talking about it.

Alison Roberts '75 is a staff writer for the Sacramento Bee.