The Pink House was like an underground United Nations. Chapel Hill's aspiring artists, musicians, poets, DJ's, activists, actors, writers, nudists, flutists, knuckleheads, and couch-surfers, all living together in (relative) harmony, united by their common bohemianism. Life inside the Pink House often consisted of weird shit happening at all hours, every day, it rarely stopped. And there's something about that place that won't allow the vibe to ever fully dissipate. / PinkHouseForever.org
The original Breadman's building was demolished to make way for Pink House next-door neighbor Larry "911 speed-dialer" Short's latest venture, Shortbread Apartments. The towering condos that replaced the Lost City are visible in the background of this photo.
Breadman's was located here until it moved across Rosemary Street in 1992, into the building where it remains today, formerly home to a Western Sizzlin' steakhouse. For a time around this period, Mark Chilton lived in a house tucked behind the new Breadman's parking lot.
After lunch with C-line at Breadman's, Sept. 6, 2009.
On the night of Nov. 3, two-term Chapel Hill town council member Mark Kleinschmidt was elected mayor of Chapel Hill in a hard-fought race, becoming the first openly gay and youngest mayor in the town's history. I may have seen a sign for his opponent in Larry Short's front yard, but that might just be wishful thinking.
Mark threw his victory party at the R&R Grill (aka Papagayo's), and it was packed with Chapel Hill's liberal political establishment. As an official Kleinschmidt campaign donor to the tune of $20, Mani was there to witness her investment paying off, and got to hang with her former FTI co-workers who came out in force to congratulate their director.
At one point, I was sandwiched in conversation between Donna Bell, who was calling out election results from the Board of Elections website, and a tall, dark stranger in a ten-gallon hat and black leather jacket who was talking about what Chapel Hill used to be like circa 1970. He turned out to be...Randy Jones, the original cowboy from the Village People!
Former Morehead scholar at UNC, graduate of Enloe High in Raleigh, who knew? And the only member of the group to ever really live in Greenwich Village (from 1975 to this day). He happened to be in the neighborhood, and dropped by to celebrate Mark's historic win. Not just a pretty face, his book Macho Man: The Disco Era and Gay America's "Coming Out" is a behind-the-scenes account of the emergence of gay culture in the 70s. It tells the real story of disco's black and gay roots, and how the music changed America.
Anyway, Mark joined two-term incumbent mayor of Carrboro Mark Chilton (who was re-elected to a third term the same night) in an elite club, besides N.C. mayors named Mark - mayors who can say they attended Pink House parties back in the day, and still managed to get elected to public office. Congrats, guys!
Joe was one of our neighbors and could often be spotted walking down North Street. He lived around the corner from us at 6 Cobb Terrace, on a cool little street just a stone's throw away from downtown but set back from the world in a hidden corner of Chapel Hill. On Monday nights when Town Council meetings were held, he passed by like clockwork to walk the short distance to Town Hall and back home.
Joe on North Street in front of the Pink House, Spring 1992.
He was also one of my political mentors. During the fall of '91, the first semester I lived in the Pink House, I saw Joe a lot during the course of Mark Chilton's campaign for Town Council, and his own successful Council re-election.
Throughout the early nineties, Joe would occasionally stop by to shoot the breeze if we were hanging out on a porch. He sent us some of his famous postcards when he was out of town on his travels. He even came to a couple of early Pink House parties, before the days when they blew up beyond control.
In late October of 2007, Joe died of complications from diabetes in Chapel Hill. He was 66 and greatly missed by his family and friends.
I remember we only got to see each other for like 5 seconds when you were down here in May, so that's probably the last time we spoke. The store looks much more together now that it did when you saw it, but at least you got the general impression.
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Speaking of people you did see while you were down here, I saw Jasme outside this bar called Brothers Pizza (well, they actually just changed its name to Silent Sam's) about two months ago, telling me she was going to go play her guitar on the street and try to make enough money to come back and buy a slice. She's performed a couple of times at the new Franklin Street Starbucks, and from what I've heard, she's gotten really good.
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So Mark Chilton passed the bar. Or I think he passed the bar. I know for a fact that the last time I saw him we were both in a bar. It was this spot called Hell, in the former Troll's location, now operated by the owners of the Lizard and Snake, and sort of like Henry's, only with pool tables and more downscale. I believe he said he found a job in Raleigh doing labor-related law.
Business at our store is going good, but wait until we get the inflatable furniture in there. Or the scratch-and-sniff clothing. I'm not kidding.
N'Gai says hello. Did I tell you he was my new roommate? Jenny moved out at the beginning of August, and started her new job in Greensboro last week.
If I was Woody Woodpecker, I would say, "Guess who!" If I was Woodsy Owl, I would say, "Hoot Hoot!" But guess what? I'm not either of those two wacky birds. I'm just your buddy Erik, here chillin' in Chapel Hill, missing you and hoping everything's going well for ya in San Jose. I assume you found a good place to stay and you're not living on somebody's bathroom floor. Well, I guess you never know with miscreant members of that Golden Fleece organization.
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How's work? Say hello to Susan for me the next time you see her. We talked for a while when I called looking for you in Washington. Tell her I recently caught a bad case of boogie fever, so I went out and bought eight bona fide disco CD's.
I too am working full time these days. I got a job at FGI, the market research firm/advertising agency on the corner of Franklin and Church Streets, where the Cradle used to be. They started me in the phone center, down in the basement, working inbound and outbound phones on a variety of different projects for $8/hr. Could be worse - at least I get overtime pay. These past two weeks I've worked 50-60 hours a week.
My furniture business was a gigantic success. Thank you again very much for your generous contribution to Erik's Used Junk Corporation, I mean, Salvage Engineering Firm.
I finally sold your table and chairs after storing them at a variety of different places around town, and showing them to numerous skeptical customers. ("You want how much for these? Someone paid how much for these new?") But I knew we had some quality stuff, so I held on to them. One of Derek Shadid's housemates ended up as the buyer, so he's the one who's now eating meals at your table. Good karma prevails.
Let's see, what else is happening. Chilly was described in the paper today as having made an "eloquent speech" urging the town council to rezone the University's Horace Williams Airport tract so that any major UNC development/construction there could only go ahead with input from the town. The final vote was 5-4 against rezoning, so I bet he was bummed. I will try and call him tomorrow.
Rashmi was visiting from N.Y. last weekend. On Friday, Jenny and I had dinner at Pyewacket with her, James, and Stuart Hathaway, who I remember somehow from the Campus Y. Dana got engaged to Erika. It happened about six weeks ago. N'Gai returned home safely from Japan, and Thailand, and wherever the hell else he's been for five months. He's in New York, but he's coming back to Chapel Hill in January and applying to UNC for graduate school in music. Guess he's been playing his flute quite a bit lately.
Pedigo is doing well, as far as I can tell. He's enjoying the comfort of living in this new luxurious home in Durham where he's staying, right overlooking Duke Park. But he's all psyched up about applying to work for Morgan Stanley or some other mega-company and going to live in Boston. He called me the other night, so I really should call him back. That's the downside to working overtime - it's Wednesday, and it's the first night this week I've been able to sit down and call people on the phone, or write long overdue letters like this one.
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I miss you and hope everything is turning out positive for you on the West Coast. Write back whenever you can - keeping up correspondence with a slack motherfucker like me should be a breeze.
(Editor's note from 2013 - recently on Facebook, Susan Comfort noted that Mark Chilton and myself were schooled by our time in SEAC (Students Engaged in Acronym Construction) to think up catchy names for some of our future political projects - for example, Musicians Organized for Voter Education (MOVE). She was right, and to prove it here's the list I came up with while trying to brainstorm what to call a sister organization to MOVE that could register more voters when Jesse Helms was next up for re-election, in 1996).
Democrats Organized for Voter Education (DOVE)
Stop Helms - Organize Voter Education (SHOVE)
Liberals Organized for Voter Education against Helms (LOVE a Helms)
Student Coalition for Voter Registration
Democratic Youth in Action
People for a Progressive North Carolina
Coalition for a Progressive North Carolina
Progressive United North Carolina (PUNC)
Congressional Club - Not!
Progressive Congressional Club
Revolutionary Citizens Coalition
Young People's Liberation Army
Voter Education Revolves around Youth (VERY) Project
Radical Revolutionary Liberation Power Movement
Coalition Against More Power to Helms (CAMP)-NC
Progressives Organize - We'll Educate Rednecks (POWER)
I drove back down to Chapel Hill. Got here around the end of June. First of all, the house was a mess. Looked like a fucking band of gypsies had been living here! Next, I found out there were several vacant rooms in the Pink House that needed to be filled with people, pronto, otherwise I would have been up to my eyeballs in debt from having had to pay close to nine hundred dollars in rent myself.
So that's the sort of things that have been occupying my time for the past few weeks. Mark, I have not yet gotten involved with any voter registration campaign...in fact, I haven't even been in touch with Kate Lowenstein since I've been back in town. I think I'll call her tomorrow. Caroline, you would never guess who I saw tonight...Alec Guettel! He was drinking beer with me and about twenty other National SEAC people in the Forest Theatre. He's been living in New York and working with SEAC, but this summer marks the end of his involvement for right now. Isn't that sad to think about, in a way? Seeing him brought back lots of old memories of what it was like for all of us, you, me and Mark, when we were just becoming involved with SEAC our freshman year. There's a National Council meeting going on this week, and many people are in town for it. Many of them are also sleeping in our living room downstairs, right now.
Joe Herzenberg called me on the phone today, and I ran into my friend Termain Kyles outside the TEP house this evening, and Deidre, of all people, came by this morning with my housemate Lydia to wake me up, and SEAC people like Eric Odell, Ernesto Guzman, and Todd Thomas were dropping by the house, all of whom I haven't seen in a couple months.
Ernesto & Todd, Spring '92
Last night I heard Uzoma Nwosu (you know Uzi, right?) on air doing his hip-hop/dance show on WXYC, so I called him up at the station and we're going to get together this week. Plus, on this past Tuesday night Lydia and I went to the Cradle to see Arrested Development, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Me Phi Me perform. Finis Dunaway was there, among a cast of hundreds. Preston and Richard are around, working at the Varsity, haunting Franklin Street and Papagayo's. We've discovered a swimming pool that's at Northampton Terraces, just two apartment complexes behind North Street. It's the new Pink House pool...we go there to swim every day. See, these are all just some of the things that make me happy to be in Chapel Hill again.
Twenty years after we both spent countless hours helping to organize Threshold in our first semester at UNC, C-line and I sat down to reminisce and remember about SEAC's early days. We thought about touching down at the Forest Theatre, where Threshold concluded in an emotional ceremony on Sunday, October 29, 1989. But it was otherwise occupied by the Paperhand Puppet Intervention, performing one of their annual late summer shows. So we traveled a few hundred yards down the road, and ended up at the curved stone bench behind Gimghoul Castle that overlooks the far edge of Battle Park.
At the first SEAC organizing meeting of the fall semester '89 (in Hamilton 100), Jimmy Langman convinced us all that Threshold was going to spark a national movement, and Ericka Kurz gave a fiery, impassioned speech wearing a cool black leather jacket. Besides Jimmy and Ericka, SEAC O.G.'s who were running the show included Alec Guettal, Blan Holman, and Don Whittier. They were all juniors, seniors, even recent grads, but nobody past their early twenties. Still, as C-line put it, "They seemed so old. And we said, tell us what you need us to do!"
The nuts and bolts work of actually organizing a nationwide conference in the pre-internet era was a little less romantic. Working alongside dedicated souls like Lisa Abbott, Chris van Daalen, Celeste Joye, Yu-Yee Wu, Raj Krishnasami, Mark Chilton, Quaker Kappel, Ruby Sinreich, Dave Ball, and a bunch of other SEAC'ers, we prepared mass mailings, entered hundreds of pre-registered attendees' names into ancient Mac computers, lined up crash pad arrangements with hundreds of UNC students, and using a primitive device known as the landline telephone, called up folks who wanted more info to convince them to make the trek to Chapel Hill. And my favorite part, sitting around in endless meeting circles on the second floor of the Campus Y, arguing over one minor detail or another until the WHOLE GROUP reached a consensus.
Threshold ad from Oct. '89 issue of Music Monitor.
The conference succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Over 1,700 folks showed up from around the country, representing 43 states and 225 schools. It was the largest gathering of student activists since the heyday of SDS in the late 60s. And it launched SEAC as a national student and youth-led environmental movement.
On a personal level, my involvement with SEAC convinced me I wanted to be an organizer, and laid the foundation for all my political work that's followed. I became good friends with C-line, and our adventures have continued ever since. I worked on my first winning political campaign thanks to SEAC, when we helped elect Mark Chilton to the Chapel Hill Town Council two years later. And if I hadn't bonded with fellow SEAC'er Raj K., we wouldn't have agreed to live together (along with Clint Curtis) in the spring of '91, which started our search for off-campus housing that eventually led to the Pink House.
To contribute memories or photos of the Pink House, whether you once lived there, just passed through, or punched a hole in the wall at a party, no matter the era, leave a comment or e-mail us: pinkhouseforever@gmail.com.
I did "live" in the Pink House briefly when Scott and i dated. I remember the fridge that spoiled Jay's milk and he ruined some mac and cheese. I remember many parties. I remember two girls that shared a room downstairs and that toboggan wearing guy (erik?) who read every book known to mankind. I remember that jay's room was tiny. Scott had his own room then. I remember dinners to watch Ren and Stimpy and the Simpsons.
Ain't no party like a Pink House party...I miss Mona Lisa and dropping by just to see what was going on. If nothing else, you could probably catch an episode of Ren and Stimpy. Good times, people.
- Caroline Philson, 2009
A nominee for worst houseguest ever is whoever stole my $100 pair of Ray-Bans. Those were the most expensive pair of sunglasses I ever owned. I used to keep them on the shelf in my room that was the first thing you saw if the door was open. And one day, they were just gone. Other contenders include whoever stole the toilet tank cover, and one of our couch cushions, both at the same party in '95 or '96.
- Jay Murray, 2009
One thing that sticks with me is going through the phone bill each month - 6 people marking their calls. I think Erik used to total it up, and then it became my job when he moved out. There was always some random call that no one would claim!
- Mel Keister (Lanham), 2009
The Pink House experience...I remember the insane mix of characters and personalities...the endless procession of random fiends droppin' by to chill on our couches and unadulterated fun we had...never a dull moment...great times!
- Steve William, 2009
I remember being at the Pink House, but I don't ever remember going there or leaving. It's like it was a place that existed only in my mind.
- Matthew Dan Stewart, 2009
I lived in the house for only six months or so, including one flat-out glorious summer, imported by the inimitable Mr. Murray. Before moving in, I hung out there forever. Then rented the upstairs room (formerly Scott's? Mel's?) across from Erik's, when it opened up at the last minute. Actually hit the road and moved to LA two days before the shootings over on Henderson Street (in January '95).
- Trent McDevitt, 2009
Maybe I'll be back someday, knock on the old Pink House door. That is, of course, if they haven't torn it down.
I was so innocent before I moved into that house...
- Karen Hurka, 2009
Visitor Log
Good music, good people, good parties...a really good gathering of people who were looking for something more. There was new music, people from different backgrounds...a lot of the groovy, hip experience that I got out of my time in Chapel Hill. And lots of interesting conversations. That's what I remember most about Pink House parties – the great conversations.
- Mike Thomas, 2009
Early in '95, Chris Palmatier had bought an 8-track, probably on credit, because bill collectors were constantly calling and looking for him. He had his studio set up in the dining room, on the kitchen counter, and every morning, when I would get up and stumble downstairs looking for some breakfast, I'd have to step over a drum set in the kitchen. By 10 am, Chris would have some band starting their practice session in the living room.
- Allen Sellars, 2009
What's up this is Dawad from the old school Jungle Juice Crew! The blog is excellent, I was going through all the stories and memories were just snapping back in my head. I remember being upstairs taking whippet shots for the first time ever, out of this world, those were free and liberal times when ideas were flowing and action was only a step away.
- Dawad Norville, 2009
The Pink House pictures really brought me back to a very magical time in my life. And to memories of some of the best parties I've ever been to. I don't want to wax too nostalgic but I do think that was a special time and community of people in Chapel Hill in the early-mid '90s.
I was hanging out with (an unnamed Pink House resident) once when we were on campus at UNC, and we stumbled upon some Republican literature. So (the unnamed resident) said, "Oh look, some paper to keep the recycling program going!" And picked up the stack and tossed it into the paper recycling bin. I have always found that hilarious!
January 15, 2013. Photo courtesy of David Sutton.
After lunch with C-line at Breadman's, Sept. 6, 2009.
