Pine Street residents returned from Spring Break to find a hole where a house had been. By the Fall semester, a new senior prototype house, 231 Pine St., will fill the spot.
While this new senior housing pick is sure to be sought-after, it serves as a reminder to many long-time area residents that streets like Home, Brainard and Lawn are now and will continue to be predominantly filled with students, unlike in the past.
When Joan Hedrick first moved to Home Avenue 36 years ago, the street was a mix of Sicilian families, University professors, and long-time New Englanders. Today, Hedrick is one of the block’s only non-student residents.
“[The neighborhood is] nowhere near what it used to be,” Hedrick said.
Hedrick and her family moved to Home in 1972, when she was teaching in the American Studies and English departments at the University. Although she now teaches at Trinity College, she remains on Home and is president of the Association of Wesleyan Area Residents (AWARE).
“[Fountain Ave] had a lot of hippies,” Hedrick said. “[Home] was very diverse. The street was filled with families and children. We would put all of the kids in a playpen and play volleyball until it got dark.”
But big changes were just around the corner. After women were admitted in 1970, the University’s enrollment grew quickly, and a housing crunch followed. The University began buying up homes in the neighborhood to ease the pressure.
Some neighbors were not thrilled at the prospect of sharing their streets, as an article in the Sept. 24, 1971 issue of The Argus reported.
One Middletown couple even took their frustration to the City Planning and Zoning Commission, citing in their complaint an unsightly “Volkswagen bus with a tent on top of it” parked in a driveway and “the absence of screens from the windows, thereby enabling things to fly in and out.”
Not all residents were bothered by the new student presence, however.
“I have a picture with one of my daughters making ice cream with some students across the street,” Hedrick said.
Her daughters also loved spying on their new next-door neighbor, a student with a “theatrical flair” who would emerge from his house in a cape.
“They just thought he was fabulous,” she said.
University buy-ups continued, Hedrick siad, and by the 1980s, the area had tipped toward student housing. By the late 1990s, Home Avenue was almost completely a student street.
“They would look at us like, ’Why are you on our campus?’” Hedrick said. “We had a sports team living next door to us one year. There were keg parties every weekend, [with] behavior too outrageous to print.”
Hedrick and her family considered moving away, and they were not alone. The student takeover of the neighborhood sent some professors packing—while 52 percent of faculty lived within easy walking distance of campus in the 1960s, by 2000 it was only 19 percent. Hedrick, however, decided to stay.
“Rather then abandon the neighborhood, I decided I would stay and try to turn things around,” she said.
She and several other neighbors founded AWARE in 1999, with the goal of changing student behavior and developing a long-term plan for the neighborhood.
Thanks to cooperation from Residential Life and former President Doug Bennett and his wife Midge, Hedrick feels that many of AWARE’s goals have been accomplished, though she still hopes to strengthen the residential character of the neighborhood.
“We’ve met with Michael Roth, and he seemed to understand our goals,” she said.
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