"Off-campus housing has its ups and downs," Daily Tar Heel, 8/1/85
By PEGGIE PORTER
Last year a majority of students lived off campus. With University housing increasingly tight, people opted for their own rooms in apartments instead of sharing dorm rooms with two or even three other people. Some students were closed out of the lottery. Off campus, there are several places Jane Student can hang her day pack. She can live in her sorority house if she is in a sorority and there is room for her at the house. She can convince her parents to buy her a condo. She can get an apartment in Carrboro and watch trucks go by her window. Or, if Jane Student is very, very lucky, she may land a spot in one of Chapel Hill's group houses.
These houses are tucked behind other houses or right on the street. They are in "Student Neighborhoods" or they are on quiet back roads. McCauley Street has quite a few of them. Some of these student houses run on the boarding house system. Each resident rents her own room which she locks with a padlock as she leaves. Rules on kitchens and bathrooms vary. Other houses run on what used to be called a semi-communal system. That doesn't mean residents run around naked eating tofu all the time, although we know the type. Living there means you call your fellow residents "housemates" and fix dinner together occasionally.
Some of these houses have been around for a long, long time. Like the pink house. The pink house is an especially dilapidated, two story wood house. Its peeling paint is you guessed it a faded and extremely tacky pink. It has a nice side porch and an extraordinary back yard, which has been its salvation in these bug-infested, moldy warm months. The back yard is furnished with old school bus seats and a swing. There's a good chance you have been to at least one party at the pink house. Maybe everyone was dressed in vintage formats, maybe there was a slide show. You may have stood around the keg in the backyard and wondered how we stand living in a house where the back door is always open. Or why there is a large houselike sculpture in the front yard with two plaster figures climbing on it (because it's art).The pink house has been a student house for an undetermined number of years. Law students, art majors, photographers, piano players have lived there. In the winter they huddled around the fireplace, holding books but not reading. In spring they ate lunch around the outside table, drinking warm Goebels. There are a lot of reasons not to live in a house like this one. Residents are constantly answering the phone, for one thing. And God forbid you should be in a hurry and forget to take a message, because that will be the one message your housemate has been waiting for since Christmas. Dirty dishes are a problem, especially the nights you want to make lasagna for your boyfriend.
But the advantages usually outweigh the disadvantages. There is usually someone around the house to waste time with in the afternoon. There is always someone who can be coerced into playing cards late at night. You never have to buy pine cleaner or dill weed because there is lots of that stuff left over from the years and years of people never quite moving out.
Moving out has been sad and difficult. We've sold and given away a lot of the junk we liked to have around but can't take with us. We're going to rent an industrial strength vacuum cleaner, and when we're done you won't recognize the carpet. We've told former residents who are still in town to come over and say their goodbyes. We've even taken most of the art out of the yard.
And we hope that the spirit of the pink house will live on.
Peggie Porter is a senior from Charlotte and Kaleidoscope editor of the Tar Heel
(Editor's note: Talk about a crucial piece of Chez Pink history! Published shortly before Ian Williams first stepped foot on campus in the fall of '85 and stumbled onto his first off-campus party there, it documents the era immediately prior to when the house was inhabited by, in Ian's words, "a rowdy bunch of senior history majors who threw get-togethers where like-minded female English majors would sit around, sip wine and dance to the Smiths." And it proves once and for all that we were not the first residents to realize the Pink House was something special.)
