Allison Montroy
amontroy@mustangdaily.net
They won’t waste time to tell you the building isn’t a hippie commune. It’s not a fraternity or a brothel, and though nudity isn’t strictly opposed, there aren’t orgies here.
To these 19 residents, the precarious pistachio-colored building, leaning between Santa Barbara and Leff streets in San Luis Obispo is just “home.”
And by living there, they become part of the “Establishment,” a San Luis Obispo landmark and a curious piece of history whose slanted walls and creaky wooden floors have been witness to many stories of this sleepy town since the 1800s.
The Establishment, one of the town’s “intentional communities,” or cooperative living communities since the 1960s, originated as a hotel on Monterey Street.
After the building was rolled on logs in the late century to its current location (just a hop and a skip away from the train station) it has led an interesting and varied lifestyle. It’s been rumored that Jack Kerouac slept many nights in a front room of the then-called Colonial Hotel, and the place may have been home to a brothel for a number of years — but that’s all in the past.
Cal Poly alumna and house manager Kate MacVicar said what makes today’s Establishment (she affectionately calls it the “Stab”) unique is that the living style teaches residents to live in a community setting — not always an easy task.
“How do you learn to live with 18 other people who are different than you, who come from different places, and have different opinions?” MacVicar said. “It’s that common want to be part of a community.”
It’s not unusual to step over one of the pet cats while walking around the two-story house, or spot a turtle while in the vegetable garden on the side yard. And while not many of the residents drive cars, the Establishment has no shortage of bikes decorating the property.
Students, professionals, artists and even a Cal Poly lecturer call the Establishment home. While each tenant (known as “stabbies”) has a personal bedroom and individual food shelves in the kitchen, the group shares three bathrooms (each with a different theme). They create big “family” dinners, teach each other different skills, play games, garden, bike and even dumpster dive for donuts together.
Biological sciences junior Joey Walsh said he finds the Establishment interesting.
“I don’t think to call them hippies, but they are unique individuals,” he explained. “I pass their place sometimes, because I live nearby, and at one point they were working on this big tricycle thing … It looked like a chariot. It’s a bizarre experience whenever I go there.”
“Spontaneity is huge here,” said MacVicar, who has lived there for two years. “It’s kind of like growing up again with a bunch of siblings. We’re such a family.”
MacVicar said living in the Establishment is more than just having a place to sleep and eat, but it also “stretches the boundaries” of the college lifestyle and “offers space for students to live with others and flourish in a community.”
“I’ve learned that my way isn’t always the right way, there are different ways to live your life and different understandings of how other people live their lives,” she said. “You have to have a thick skin here, and be able to deal with day-to-day things. Like if someone hurts your feelings, you just have to get over it.”
Because when there’s a whole mess of people cooking a grand meal for one of their themed dinner parties (a favorite for MacVicar) in the Establishment’s small kitchen, working together is a necessity.
The den is emptied of furniture, tables line one wall to the other and chairs crowd to squeeze friends together as the cooks dance around the kitchen, lifting dishes over each other and tossing food across countertops in a display of fluidity reminiscent of a practiced ballet routine.
“You get to see this crazy, loud, boisterous, whole different social situation,” MacVicar said. “You know that saying, ‘love grows in a kitchen?’ Yeah. It’s here. It’s called the kitchen dance.”
Cal Poly alumnus Bryce Swetek (known as the Establishment’s “house baby”) will soon be leaving his home of more than three years and said it’s the people there he will miss most.
“This place, it’s for people interested in not being alone and having someone to talk to,” Swetek said.
Who lives at the Establishment is decided democratically between the housemates, as each new tenant must be voted into the house.
Both Swetek and MacVicar said many people assume the Establishment is full of “hippies” who aren’t clean and are incredibly rowdy — an assumption they feel stems from “older days” at the Stab and the house’s annual Halloween party.
Walsh, who has gone to two of the parties, called the Halloween festivities “crazy.”
“I remember one year the theme was ‘heaven and hell,’ and you walked into one room and it was all white and a DJ was dressed like Jesus, and you walked into another room and it was all red and there was crazy music, and the bathroom was called purgatory,” Walsh said. “Everywhere was crazy.”
But Swetek said the Halloween event is an outlier.
“That party is the only time anyone here acts even remotely like a frat house,” Swetek said.
When they’re not celebrating Halloween, MacVicar said residents at the Stab are laid-back, grounded people.
“You have to have the intent of living in a community to make it work, because we’re just a super unique situation,” MacVicar said. “People here have so much to offer and someplace to share it. I love seeing how 19 people can become a family. This is bigger than just a place to live, we are a part of history.”