Forever free and open to all people
Angular, unearthly, demented, like gawky igloos in a kaleidoscope
By the end of the decade, the community had mostly moved on. Five years into to the grand experiment, Drop City had, perhaps, been a victim of its own successes – though none of those its founders had set out to accomplish. A militant group moved in a year prior, eagerly taking advantage of the "forever free and open to all people" clause its creators included in its deed.
The armed group largely kept to themselves and eventually vacated the premises, only to supplanted by the Hell’s Angels. The biker gang paid no mind when other residents officially removed the "forever free” language. Eventually, however, they too left, recognizing that the party had ended. By 1968, several of its earliest residents moved to nearby Boulder, starting the Criss-Cross art collective.
The initial settlement was also a product of its founders’ artistic ambitions. In 1961, art University of Kansas art students Gene Bernofsky and Clark Richert coined “Drop Art” while tossing painted rocks off the roof their loft. The two-man artistic movement predated Timothy Leary’s "turn on, tune in, drop out" by a full decade – and Drop City itself beat the iconic phrase to the punch by a full year. After the good doctor uttered it, however, it would forever by linked to the community in the minds of the burgeoning counterculture.
In May 1965, Richert, Gene and Jo Bernofsky and Richard Kallweit purchased six acres of land four miles north of Trinidad, Colorado from a local goat farmer for $450. “Drop City is built on the garbage dump of a dying town of 10,000 strung-out coal miners,’’ resident Peter “Rabbit” Douthit would write in his 1971 book named for the community.
“Our long-term vision was that Drop City would function as a ‘seed’ for future communities that would sprout around the world,’’ Richert described the project decades after the last of its dying embers lost their glow.
Having recently attended a lecture by the renowned architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, Richert suggested the group build geodesic domes for shelter. Fortuitously spotting a nearby structure being used as a greenhouse, they gathered measurements and constructed a model from drinking straws.
Lumber was collected from a derelict railroad bridge for the structure, while the panels were built from sheet metal ripped off the roofs of cars, purchased from a nearby junk yard for $0.05-$0.10 a pop. Tar paper and chicken wire was used liberally, and Jo Bernofsky hit upon the idea of covering the structures in thousands of bottle caps for added protection.
“Angular, unearthly, demented, like gawky igloos in a kaleidoscope,” poet William Hedgepeth wrote after visiting the structures. “Yellow blue green red pink purple: brazen things just lying there, coldly geodesic, looming on the little rise way out here in Southern Colorado wasteland."
The grand ambitions of making art free of capitalistic demands meant the residents made little in the way of money. Clothes, food and cars were shared freely among the Droppers. A healthy windfall arrived in 1967 however, when Drop City won a surprise award from the man who had unknowingly planted the seeds for its structures.
"Gentlemen,” Fuller wrote, “I take great pleasure in informing you that you have won the 'Dymaxion Award' for 1967, for your remarkable initiative, spirit, and poetically economic structural accomplishments. Faithfully yours, R. Buckminster Fuller.”
It was the first – and, to date, only – time Fuller had given the $500 award.
A popular destination for the 60s counterculture, Leary, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison were all rumored have paid the community a visit — though no documentation exists. A 74-year-old Fuller did, however, pay a visit, getting shut eye in Drop City’s Pillowdome. In June 1967, the Joy Festival found hundreds descending on the area, in a mass movement that alienated many of the community’s dozen or so residents.
“The avant-garde has a long tradition of being co-opted by mainstream culture. It happens to all of the important art movements,’’ Richert told The Denver Post decades later. “It appears to be inevitable: Forms of idealism eventually reach a large audience and become diluted and corrupted in the process.’’
By 1973, what was left of the community had completely dissolved. Five years later, its four founders sold the site to a nearby cattle rancher, using the money to create a Criss-Cross publication and fund an art show of their works in Brooklyn. The highlight, “The Ultimate Painting,” spun to reveal patterns when struck with a strobe light. The work has long since been lost. The last of the remaining structures, meanwhile, were disassembled in the 90s, after a truck repair yard purchased the site.
Sources:
Ruins of Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, August 1995 The Baffler Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010)
They built this city with alternative ideals http://archive.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/07/18/they_built_this_city_with_alternative_ideals/
Drop City and the Utopian Communities https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2147&context=faculty_scholarship