Pink House back in business

Groundhog Day seemed as good a time as any to check on the rental property time almost forgot. Except Bill Murray was nowhere in sight, and it wasn't snowing on North Street. And in the clearest sign that the hours were indeed marching on, the for rent sign had vanished! Yet the place was still deserted.

Further investigation revealed the house has been rented for next year, with a May-to-May lease signed by as-of-yet-unknown occupants. Looks like Larry Short's McMansion plans will have to wait awhile. I'd be shocked if the new crew didn't include some DTH staffers excited about the prospect of a 30-second commute to their reporting jobs. Starting in the fall, the paper will be operating out of the building next door at 151 E. Rosemary Street.

The Chi's took quite a bath while it sat vacant for two whole years, which probably translates to slapping the new residents with a sharp rent hike in May 2011. But as of this moment, the place is still available, "for a short term lease only."

So if deep-pocketed alums have any unfinished biz with 130 North Street, now's the time. Like, Ben Folds Five needing some studio space with authentic crash pad flavor to record a reunion album. Or Ian deciding he wants more re-shoots for the movie. This offer is only good until April 20, 2010. An appropriate date (4/20) to mark the end of a peculiar chapter in Pink House history.

Broken mirror in back yard, Dec. 3, 2009. Photo by Further Musings.

Pink House For Rent...Again!

In a twelve-year rewind, the Chi's have once more (at least temporarily) abandoned their ill-timed plan to sell the Pink House to a deep-pocketed single family, and instead put the place back up for rent.


It's been renovated again, and now features amenities like carpeting on the stairs and hardwood floors nearly everywhere else. When I visited recently, courtesy of the contractors who had just finished re-painting inside and out (covering the Mona Lisa with yet another coat of white), the place was sparkling. But there was clearly still work to be done, because the downstairs bathroom looked as grungy as ever. Leaning over the tub to take a picture, I half expected spider crickets to come swarming out of the air vent.

The current asking price on a Pink House rental? Thirty-two hun a month, or roughly twice what I remember our crew last paying when I moved out fifteen years ago. After figuring in inflation, that's nonetheless a steep rate for a five bedroom (or 4 1/2, taking Jay's room into account) student crash-pad. And since today's kids are less likely to want to share bathrooms than the Gen-X'ers who came before them, and even Chapel Hill's sorority girls who deal a little coke on the side have lately fallen on hard times, maybe it's no wonder the place is still available (as of 9/20/09) six weeks after I first saw the for rent sign.

UPDATE 10/25/09 – As Fall Break 2009 for UNC students drew to a close, I drove down North Street on my way to the Franklin Street post office. Lo and behold, no renters yet.

UPDATE 11/26/09 – The day before Thanksgiving, and I finally got the memo that Hell closed down nearly a year ago. While checking out the debris piled at the top of the outside stairs (including Hell's soft pretzel cabinet), evidence the space is still being excavated, I looked up through the chain link fence and saw a bicyclist zoom through the deserted parking lot of the Phi Mu sorority house. Curious, I noticed the rider was headed for the Pink House. Could it be rented? There did seem to be a couple of trucks parked in the back yard.

No, it was only the blogger next door on his way home. I introduced myself and explained I used to know the old couple who previously lived in his house. He was remarkably cool for being accosted at dusk outside his own crib by a quasi-cyber stalker, and said the place is still sans residents. And he thought Sylvia's initial rental asking price this go-round had actually been $3600, thirty-two was at a discount.

R.I.P. Laverne (1994-2009)

I adopted Laverne on May 14, 1994. She was about four months old. Although I adored her, I shouldn't have gotten her while I was living at the house, since none of our housemates were into the idea (plus Sylvia's whole "no pets" rule!).

One time, she got onto the roof. Terrifying experience! I think a couple of us came back from the video store, and that slum-lord guy across the street was outside saying there's a dog on the roof. I had just moved into the pink room upstairs with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, and didn't know about the loose screen window that could be flipped open. Laverne had been waiting for me in the room.

Anywho, she went out the window, where the roof was over the porch, but then made her way to the very slanted part of the attic area. She was trying to grip the roof, but you could hear her nails scraping the roof tile as she slipped. So of course, I ran up the stairs, popped out on the roof and climbed over to her. Pretty tricky carrying a dog off a roof!

We euthanized Laverne in May because she was having kidney failure. Broke my heart. It was almost 15 years to the day of her adoption.

- Mel Keister (Lanham), 9/18/09

The view from next door...

Next door lived a very nice old couple (the Sommerfelds), whose bedroom faced my upstairs room. I was constantly afraid the techno, disco, jazz, hip hop, house, funk, and all the rest of the records I played until late hours of the night were going to give them seizures. This wasn't the little blue house where Phi Mu's sorority mother lived, but the white house on the opposite side. The Sommerfelds kept a beautiful backyard garden. Like ours, it stretched all the way back to the chain link fence that separated North Street properties from Rosemary Street parking lots.

The Sommerfelds both passed away several years ago, and now there's a young married couple who live in their house. He and his wife are huge gardeners, so they've kept the backyard garden thriving. And the guy, when he's not attending grad school at UNC, keeps a blog. Since June of 2008 he's watched the Pink House sit vacant, grumbled at Sylvia's failure to maintain the place, and occasionally written about it.

Like in this post:

"This afternoon, under the warm sunlight of these first days of another Chapel Hill spring, I cut behind the empty pink house next door on my way home..."

- Further Musings, "The Beauty of Spring"

Mona Lisa's Ghost

In June of 2008, current owner Bernard Chi, son of our original landlady Sylvia Chi, put the Pink House up for sale. It had withstood eleven more years of rentals since being renovated in 1997. The asking price was $625,000, reduced to $612,500 by the fall after no takers materialized. With the local real estate market finally feeling the trickle-down effects from the national recession, it was a tough time to be marketing a rundown, modestly-sized former rental property that had been well lived in by students for most of its 70 year existence (the house was built in 1936).

Visiting the property on a recent afternoon, days after the first snowfall in Chapel Hill in four years, I found the Pink House empty, with a real estate agent's lockbox on the door, but no for sale sign out front. I was struck by how little some things had changed, at least on the outside. From the ancient porch light fixture, to the stonework still crumbling in the exact same places it was when I moved out in 1994, to the battered mailbox with one hook still broken from a long-ago Pink House party.

It was like stepping back in time, except that I have occasionally been by the place over the years. The last time was probably in 2004 or so, when I met some of the nice Christian girls living there and they proudly showed me the hideous mural of the Old Well they’d painted on the living room wall.

Although the back parking lot is currently still rented out to students, and it was the dead of winter, I thought I saw signs of growth stirring, as if the back yard was struggling to reclaim its former state of nature. And maybe it was the afternoon sun reflecting off the window pane, or just wishful thinking, but I swear that once I looked hard enough, I could still see the Mona Lisa in the front room...

smiling beneath all that white paint.

A sort of charisma only a Pink House would have

After Sylvia had a string of good luck with docile tenants like the Mormon missionaries and nice Christian gals (late 90s – early 00s), the place got passed on to a gaggle of sorority girls who re-inaugurated the Pink House party tradition during their residence from Fall '04 – Spring '05. The next year, a bunch of guys with a "weird stinch" moved in, thereby reviving the slob tradition. They, in turn, handed the house over to a group of girls who decided on the place partially because of its infamy. In their year there, they tangled with the police while throwing parties, and otherwise did the most to carry on the Pink House legacy of any post-'97 crew. How do we know all this? Well, I found some deleted blog entries dated Fall '06, which brought the house's recent history to light.

Shanny (the author, a DTH staffer at the time) deserves props for being the first resident to start a blog solely devoted to the Pink House. Even though she later deleted the whole thing. Luckily, the internet has a long memory.

From The Pink House of Chapel Hill:

"The Pink House was built a long, long time ago and has served as a home to many groups of UNC students and those who just never wanted to leave Chapel Hill. Groups have associated their college years with this house, and the current residents have not forgotten the legacy of this place.

I have to admit, I actually had never been to the Pink House and had hardly heard about it before we moved in here. Around February, Jess, Maile, Lindsay, Tara and I were looking for a house to move into together for the next school year. So Jess saw a picture of the Pink House hanging on the office door of Dunlap Lilley Rentals. We contact Mr. Jim Lilley and ask him if it's available. "I don't know," he responded. "Go ask the guys living there."

So, we knock on the door and ask the dudes to show us around. It's a typical college pad, complete with beer cans and a weird stinch (they were guys). They told us the fireplace didn't work, the plumbing and the floor in the downstairs bathroom were really bad, the repairs weren't getting done, and the energy bills and rent were really high. But then they told us that the place was famous. It had a sort of charisma that only a Pink House would have. It was old, and many people have lived there and many memories were made there. Ben Folds lived there. There was a movie made about the place, we were told. Wow. I think that - and the fact that it was pink and big - had us sold.

We moved into the Pink House this summer. Well, we moved our belongings into the house this summer and subletted while we were all away at internships and other summer places. Now, we're all back together. School has started, we've already lost two football games, I have a paper due in a week that I have no idea about, we've called our landlord to fix repairs more than 10 times, and we are finally throwing our first Pink House party!"

- "the pink ... what?", by Shanny (aka Shannan Bowen)

They evicted the raccoons!

N'Gai stopped through to see me yesterday. He bought a cargo van last month. Says he's putting together plans to launch a magazine this summer targeting black college students around the state.

Ohmigod, he cut his dreads off! They're totally gone. Completely. He looks just like he did when I first met him, back before he first moved into the Pink House.

I also had an encounter earlier this week with the maintenance guy who works with Jim Lilley, the property manager hired by Sylvia Chi to care for the Pink House. He walked into the store, checked it all out, got a membership, rented some movies, and was running his mouth to me the whole while. Very talkative character.

He told me all about how they renovated the place after Jay and the remains of our crew moved out. They put in a new heat pump, ran power lines from the garage to the back of the house and installed a washer/dryer unit in the kitchen closets, put in a dishwasher, replaced the refrigerator and range, cleaned out the entire basement, put in fluorescent lighting down there, redid both bathrooms, and redid all the heating ducts.

And explained what the problem was with the fucking heat. All the ducts that led up from the furnace had interior valves that were closed. I couldn't believe it. I lived for three years in a house with fucked up heat. Oh, and they evicted the raccoons who used to live in the chimney.

Then he rented She-Devils On Wheels, told me how it reminded him of growing up as one of the leaders of a biker gang in Miami in the early seventies, and started spinning tales about drunken biker parties from back in the day. Right on!

Sad to see the Pink House go, but everything has its cycle

What's the deal with the (718) area code? Are you living in Brooklyn now? And which other Pink House alums are up in New York?

I really only saw Jess for about 10 minutes, but the paintings she showed me some photos of looked really good, like she's definitely matured as an artist. She said she had stuff up in several galleries.

...

Business at the store is definitely picking up, but I won't be satisfied until it's booming. We just hit 500 video memberships this week. More of our tapes are renting on a regular basis. We finally got our adult section out on the shelf. We're trying to get a Lost City catalog produced so we can drum up some mail order business.

And the underground lounge we're running (the 333 Lounge) is going strong. This past Saturday we had 75 heads roll through from 11 pm - 4 am (actually this particular event was still kicking at 5 am) who paid to get in ($3 each). That was the highest amount we've done at the door yet. It would be really cool if you end up coming down this fall on a weekend when we're running one, so you can check out the rebirth of Club Zen before we get shut down by the Chapel Hill fuzz on some wack pretense.

Ok, enough about the nuts and bolts of my shady plans to become a wealthy high-roller and destroy the entire foundations of capitalism from within.

What I need to do is send you a copy of this article that Ian Williams wrote as his "farewell column" for the Independent, where he was writing a bi-monthly column that was pretty good. It was all about his finally leaving Chapel Hill, and about the Pink House simultaneously reverting to a renovated rental property suitable for lease to sorority chicks. Seems the Pink House was the very first place Ian went to an off-campus party when he arrived in town as a freshman back in 1985, so it held a special place in his heart that made it all the more fitting for it to end up as the last place he'd live before finally leaving town. You'll like this article, I'm sure.

...

I told you that N'Gai moved in with me, right? Oh my god, I just remembered him telling me that he now works with Shyam Patel, who just got a job doing graphic design alongside him at the Chapel Hill Newspaper. Crazy. I haven't talked with Shyam in like eight months, but I guess he's still in town. Incidentally, Jay had the Pink House's final number switched over to his new house, on the corner of Pritchard and Carr streets (his friend Gerald's place).

...

Yeah, it was sad to see the Pink House go, but everything has its cycle. Denizens like the ones we knew will move in again sometime in the future. Anyway, it was time I stopped feeling like I could flow through the Pink House every time I was downtown or bored and wanting to get into some trouble. Not that I've really been doing that sort of thing lately, mind you.

The only really fucked up things about the house's demise is that (a) they ripped out every shred of vegetation in the entire back yard, all the way back to the chain link fence, and put down gravel so the new dumbasses wouldn't have to park their freaking cars on the street, god forbid, and (b) some miscreant painters that Jim Lilley (Sylvia's current property manager) hired to do touch-up work and paint the ceilings goddamn painted over the Mona Lisa.

We initially figured it was the crew of spaced out UNC students and their girlfriends who Jim Lilley brought in to paint the majority of the house, inside and out, and who were in there painting for two weeks, taking breaks every day to smoke bowls on the roof outside your old room. Then one of them came through the Lost City the other week and when I asked him why they'd done it and under whose orders it was done, he acted totally freaked out, and swore up and down that they hadn't done it, that Jim specifically told them not to paint over it, since it was one of only two murals by the artist left inside houses in Chapel Hill, and it must have been the other painters who came in after them.

This tragic occurrence serves as the focal point for Ian's article, where he concludes it was such a typical thing to have happened - in Chapel Hill, anything (or anyone) that stays around too long gets painted over.

When are you coming down in the fall? If you want to crash, you're welcome to sleep on our futon. Let us know...

- e-mail to Lydia

So sad that we lost the house

Thanks for the nice long letter. I called you at the "Lost City" but they said you were away, goofing off somewhere.

It's so sad that we lost the house. When Jay was up here a few weeks ago we went to a concert in central park and there were about 10 ex-pink house denizens gathered together, all now living in New York. Anyway, it's definitely better for the place this way. It really does need to be renovated, or bulldozed. What does Sylvia expect the house to look like after five years? Did she think it would renovate itself while she was away?

Your store sounds really cool, Erik. Tell Lem I said hello. How's his little girl doing? Give my congrats to Jenny for surviving law school. I can't believe that you ran into Jess. What did her paintings look like? I'm dying to know.

- e-mail from Lydia

Consequences of the Pink House implosion

So hope everything in your life is on a positive track. I was thinking about you this week for several reasons. One, as of August 1st, "our" chapter in the history of the Pink House will have closed. Those knuckleheads couldn't keep the place in good enough shape to get the lease renewed for next year, so it's c-ya. Sylvia Chi is going to have the house renovated (good luck) and then try to rent it out to a single family. You know Larry Short is about to cum all over his pants with joy.

Anyway, this development has several consequences. First off, N'Gai, who moved back into the Pink House last summer, and was living in your old room (you knew that, I think), is moving in with me at my swanky suburban pad.

Jenny, of course, is moving to Greensboro where she'll be working at a job with a corporate law firm. I think Jenny and I are both kind of like, well, let's see what happens with the relationship after we put some space between us.

Until then, I'm ready to be a bachelor again. N'Gai, already being a bachelor, is more than psyched to start things swinging. Nightlife is picking up in town lately, too, especially because I'm throwing lounge nights once a week at the record & video store that Lem and I opened in April. It's like the second coming of Club Zen, and we're in charge! Word.

Did I tell you about having opened a store, Lost City Music & Video? Lem and I are partners, and Uzi is sort of our third partner because he's selling records there. You knew Uzi, right? The phone number there is (919) 933-LOST. We rent weird videos, sell underground hip-hop, house & techno vinyl & CD's, carry funky clothes, accessories and underground comic books, and display art.

It's great, because it's not only the funkiest, coolest looking place in town during the daytime (I'm serious, we're totally rocking it!), but the space is flexible enough to completely convert into a laid back, chill little dimly lit lounge where we have live hip-hop MC's and underground electronic and house DJ's come to perform until 3 or 4 in the morning, on alternating Thursdays and Saturdays. We charge a $3 cover, and lately turnout has been a solid 60-75 heads, which is about all the place can frigging hold!

O.k., more consequences of the Pink House implosion. Jay Murray is being forced to move out. He's hating it. He is moving in with a friend of his named Gerald, who lives in some undisclosed location "off Airport Road."

Ian Williams is finally leaving Chapel Hill! Talk about the end of an era. I guess he finally got tired of trying to live the undergraduate social life while working at being a serious writer. He is a good writer, and I genuinely like him as a person. He's just very cynical and needs to find a more positive vibe. He's moving to San Fran, where I'm sure he'll find a thirty-something bohemian social scene that he'll feel right at home in and be much happier. As long as he can also find some guys to play basketball with him.

I went over there the other day looking for N'Gai, and lo and behold, not only was nobody home who lived there, but who was standing in the hallway gabbing on the phone? Jess Deltac. She was just passing through town and stopped in to see who was around. She showed me her portfolio, and it was clear that she's been hard at work on some amazing art. I was like, whoa! Talk about a six year time warp. That's how long it's been, can you believe it? It was exactly six years ago this week that you guys must have gotten back to Chapel Hill and moved into the place. Wow.

- e-mail to Lydia

It will be the shit!

How goes it, homey. Did you and yer Dad kick back and go out hunting for Boston babes on Thursday, or what? You would have enjoyed Babyhead, but this week's dance party promises to be three times as hype. Zoiks! Listen, enclosed is your copy of the lease. Give me a call when you get this, o.k.? Hopefully I'll talk wid you in the next couple of days, but you never know. This is Monday morning - I'm going to New Hampshire tonight and coming back tomorrow night. Then I'm planning to come up to Boston on Thursday morning – or maybe Wednesday night, to hang out with Erica. If you want to come to R.I. with me on Thursday then we'll hook up.

And what about the D-man? Is he back home yet, or what? Well, bitch, having just talked to you on the phone I guess I know the answers to all the above questions, but what the hell.

Man, this housing thing is gonna be so fly. Far fucking-out fly, that's how fly, plus def, dope and braggadocious. It will be the shit! Been talking with all the hippies I know up here who live in communal houses with friends at schools like Brown, Yale, Middlebury, etc., and asking them how they handle the food arrangements. How would you feel about everybody cooking a big vegetarian meal of their choice one day a week, with everybody taking turns going shopping once a week (on the day that no one cooks, maybe Sunday?) for the whole batch of ingredients each person would need to make their stuff? Just one possible way of doing it. Brothers gonna work it out!

For yer info: In Chapel Hill, I have a CD player, bookshelves, single loft, VCR, color TV, ugly striped couch, small table, computer with printer, and a comfortable desk chair. I will be bringing a desk and bureau with me from Rhode Island. The small table, couch, VCR and TV all will probably find homes elsewhere in the house - everything else I'm planning to put in the room.

Lollapalooza this Friday in Massachusetts and I'm most anticipatory. Do not feed the alligators, for they will bite you. Peace!

- letter to Clint

(Note from 2009 - Following our infamous cross-country road trip with Dana and Preston, Clint was teaching tennis that summer at Curry College, just outside of Boston. We got to hang out a little, since I was up in Rhode Island all summer, spending many of my weekends chasing a girl who lived in a run-down apartment building near Kenmore Square that had rooftop access and an amazing view of the city.

Thinking my frantic spring quest to find off-campus housing for the fall had come up short, I was ecstatic when Sylvia Chi called me in mid-July to let me know the Pink House was ours if I could wrangle up enough roommates to fill it. She had previously told me that at least two other groups of prospective tenants were ahead of us on the waiting list, and either they both flaked out or she decided we were the most responsible crew of the bunch. Little did Sylvia know.

Clint, myself, and Raj had already agreed to live together, and commitments from Lydia, Jess and Shyam materialized after a marathon round of interstate phone calls to every head I could think of who didn't already have their housing plans nailed down. All the pieces fell into place, and Raj and Lydia were the first ones to move in on August 1st.)