6 Old auditorium at 4 A look at the East High School is finally getting its new look.
other College Hill(s). What? You thought ours was the only one?
11 Snow day: There
was sun in the sky, snow on the ground, and kids on the hill.
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER Vol. 3 No. 3
COLLEGE HILL
• CROWN HEIGHTS • UPTOWN • SLEEPY HOLLOW
FEBRUARY 2010
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE THE
1904 FLOOD THAT SPARED THE HILL BUT SANK THE VALLEY PAGE 8
Scenes from a 1904 flood in Wichita. While the high ground of College Hill was left dry, the city’s urban core just below was so deluged, it was best navigated by boat.
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LETTERS
IN UPTOWN, WE USED TO READ ALL ABOUT IT.
PAPER OR PLASTIC? A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
(NOW? NOT SO MUCH) TO THE EDITOR: Hello College Hill Commoner, and my neighbors in Uptown, Crown Heights, Sleepy Hollow and East Front (I know they aren’t listed beneath the nameplate on the Commoner’s cover, but hopefully that will change). Oh, and hello College Hill, too. My title with the Uptown Neighborhood Association is Director of Communications. That means that I handle the Uptown Neighborhood News and arrange all the speakers that we invite to our meetings. We had the Mayor, the City Manager, the Fire Chief and other great speakers come to our meetings in 2009. Our February speaker will be Kevin Myles, President of the NAACP on the 4th or come and see Joyce from Great Plains Nature Center along with some native Wichita animals at our April 1 meeting. We meet at College Hill United Methodist Chruch at 7p.m. if you want to visit. We do exciting things all year long that you know about from our newsletter but for some reason very little of that makes it into the Commoner. Less and less as time passes. It seems to me that the “important” part of the area has become only College Hill and the few things they do each year. For example: Uptown made the agreement with Lies Trash service in July 2008 for $45 every 3 months but there was no story about it in the Commoner. Back then I believe [the editor] still lived in Uptown and was able to take advantage of it. Why is College Hill’s agreement such big news? I love your publication and you do a great job. Please include the neighborhoods that aren’t College Hill in your articles. Let’s see Sleepy Hollow, Crown Heights and Uptown featured more often. We have active neighborhoods and do some great things. Just look at The Year in Review! Eleven of the months featured College Hill and only one in another area. All the rest of us deserve some space in the Commoner too! LORI LAWRENCE Editor’s note: Thanks for the letter Lori, and for your good work in the Uptown Neighborhood News (readers that live outside of Uptown can find it in local shops). We’re going to take your advice and get back to our roots soon. We hope you will appreciate the irony that in this issue we are featuring a long-planned look at not just one College Hill neighborhood, but several. We promise we’ll get back to our regular, local coverage in the next issue. In the meantime, check out the story about East High. Or Jeff Roth’s piece about the flood waters of 1904 that likley lapped at your porch. And don’t miss columnist Dave Knadler, who is so good that we would publish his work even if he lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
S
o that iPad thing looks cool. But around here, we’re still saving up for the Segway. I was just thinking the other day about finding a solution for all that tedious walking I’ve been doing, and then I remembered that there is an app for that, too. It was invented a decade ago and I still haven’t taken one for a spin. I guess you can add that to the list of all the other useful things that I have yet to pick up at Best Buy, like a flat screen TV. Our newest model is still bigger than a bread box and the last one we hauled out to the garbage was finished in wood. Now I know that you think that you know where I am going with this. This is going to be another column from that crusty newsman character that I sometimes play, inveighing against technology and pining for the days when we all banged on typewriters and spit tobacco juice on the floor. You are only partially right. Truth is, in my first newsroom we were all clickity-clacking away on Apple computers (the cute ones that came in different colors). And there is not a day that goes by that I don’t wish that I could think of something clever enough to tweet. I’m certain that I am self involved enough to get on board with that whole Twitter thing, but I just don’t have the confidence. Mostly, it’s like this: Every time they come out with the new thing I want to raise my hand and say “Wait, I’m still not done with the old thing.” I never fully mastered the VCR, for example. I remain flummoxed by the fax machine. My texting skills are seriously wanting. And now this, the iPad, a sleek, truly space-age looking device that is going to put all of the organizational and research tools that I need right in the palm of my hand. Great. What am I supposed to do with all these clipboards? BARRY OWENS EDITOR
WRITE THE EDITOR:
We welcome your letters. No subject is out of bounds, so long as it is local. Letters should not exceed 300 words and may be edited for clarity and length.
E-MAIL US: editor@collegehillcommoner.com WRITE US: 337 N. Holyoke, Wichita, KS, 67208 CALL US: 689-8474 ADVERTISE: jessica@collegehillcommoner.com, or 689-8474 THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER VOLUME 3 ISSUE 3 FEBRUARY 2010
PUBLISHER
J ESSICA F REY O WENS
EDITOR
B ARRY
OWENS
CONTRIBUTORS
D AVE K NADLER , J EFF R OTH , PARKER R OTH
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER
Published monthly by The College Hill Commoner 337 N. Holyoke Wichita, K.S. 67208 316-689-8474 editor@collegehillcommoner.com www.collegehillcommoner.com
OP-ED
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
3
It’s a wretched month, but have a heart
I
’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. To me it is an awkward, unlovely holiday, falling in the middle of the most unlovely month of the year. On the afternoon of Feb. 14, I’m usually one of those guys standing in line at the grocery store with a cheap bouquet and some stale chocolates in a heart-shaped box. I don’t make eye contact with the other guys in the line. DAVE KNADLER We always tell ourselves we’ll do better next year, but we never do. For most of us, it’s not that we don’t have a romantic bone in our bodies. It’s not that we don’t love our wives or our girlfriends. It’s just that the middle of February never seems an optimal time for extravagant gestures of affection, especially when they’re robbed of spontaneity by the damp weight of tradition. If February were a day, it would be Monday. There’s a reason it’s the shortest month. Tarting it up with a lesser holiday does not make it better. Still, V-Day cometh. And unless
you’d rather live alone, it’s probably like the handy bag dispensers at every wise to play along. Besides, I guess it entrance (hint, hint). Most of all I like never hurts to tell someone you love the neighborhood surrounding it: neat, them, no matter the time of year. quiet and not at all pretentious. Every (Unless that person is a drunken neighborhood in this city should have such a park. stranger, say, or a sadisTo The Donut Whole. tic boss.) To my wife T., If February were who is neither: Love Any place that is locally a day, it would owned and sells fresh you, dear. I do. Candy be Monday. and flowers to follow, donuts under the benevoThere’s a reason lent gaze of an enormous fresh from Dillons. You know what? As it’s the shortest white rooster – well, that’s long as I’m doling out month. Tarting it my kind of place. I love the valentines, let me disquirky interior, and the fact up with a lesser pense a few more. Hand that customers in the front me that sack of cards, holiday does not of the building never seem make it better. to be eating donuts. I love the cheap ones that don’t fold, 49 cents a dozen, that finally, a discriminatwith the horrible puns ing man can buy a donut and the cherubic boys with bacon on it. I keep and girls mooning over each other in meaning to get up at 3 a.m. to try the ways that seem slightly creepy. I’ll just 24-hour drive-thru, but haven’t yet. pass out a few now. (Disclosure: I have To Lincoln Heights Village. In a no way of knowing whether the busi- perfect world, this is what all shopping nesses I mention advertise with the centers would be: compact, local and Commoner. I do know they never give useful. You’ve got Watermark Books, me free stuff. So trust me, it’s not a fac- Jeanne’s Cafe, the Village Barbershop. tor.): You’ve got a nice assortment of little To College Hill Park. I like the retail stores, like Heads Shoes, that rolling openness, the venerable trees, don’t require a map to navigate. And the gently curving sidewalks. I like the you’ve got it all within walking discracked tennis courts (it keeps the ten- tance. What else does a person need? If nis snobs from hanging around too this were a new idea, they’d be writing long), and the little limestone bridge. I articles about it in national magazines.
Too bad it’s been around about 60 years. To Monica’s Bundt Cake. I still marvel that fate has brought me so near the bundt-cake capital of the universe. I am a lucky man indeed. In all my travels, I’ve never run across another store devoted exclusively to worldclass bundt cake. No doubt they’re out there, somewhere. But I don’t want to hear about it. To all the churches in greater College Hill. There are quite a few. I don’t attend church regularly, but I appreciate the elegance of the architecture, the limestone and brick in which they are wrought – materials God Himself might specify. More than that, I appreciate the good works these churches do, and the solidity they lend to the place I live. For good neighbors, I’ll take a church over a nightclub any day. OK, I have a few more things on the list, but that’s enough love for one column. To go on would be artificially sweet and sappy – just like the holiday itself. Passing out hearts willy-nilly: It’s not prudent. It’s inflationary. And it’s one more reason to be glad Valentine’s Day only comes once a year. Writer Dave Knadler lives in Crown Heights.
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THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
THE OTHER COLLEGE HILL(S)
From Ohio to Poughkeepsie, golf course to graveyard, we are not alone.
A lithograph of Providence, Rhode Island, depicting its 18th century College Hill neighborhood. It was one of the first neighborhoods to carry the name, but certainly not the last.
PROVIDENCE PRESERVATION SOCIETY
BY BARRY OWENS Ever Google yourself and make the unsettling discovery that you are not who you thought that you were? For example, this writer is not the humble editor of a neighborhood newspaper in Wichita, Kan. No. According to the first several search results, Barry Owens is an Irish Gaelic football star with the Teemore Shamrocks club. (And one of the best fullbacks in all of Ireland, he’ll have you know.) So it is with our own College Hill. Type that into the seaerch engine of your choice sometime and watch where it takes you. To College Hill, Atlanta. Colorado. North Carolina. Rhode Island. Ohio. Pennsylvania. To a golf course in Poughkeepsie, NY. To churches. To apartments. To condos. To an assisted living center. To a coffee shop. To a TV show. To a Honda dealer. There is an “official College Hill” Facebook page. But it’s not about us. Finally it appears, a Wichita bed & breakfast called College Hill Bed & Breakfast. Alas. It is located in Sleepy Hollow. (Not to be confused with the College Hill Bed & Breakfast located in
ALOHA So, get this. If you land a job as president of the University of Hawaii, not only do you get a starting salary of $550,000, you get to live rent free on the island in this 1902 Queen Anne style home called “College Hill.” Stay in school, kids.
Bloomsburg, P.A.). The list goes on. There is an international business communications consultating firm with offices in London, Manchester, Munich, San Francisco and Boston. There is a student run newspaper at Sussex County Community College. There are cemetaries in Missouri, Mississippi,
Illinois, and Kentucky. There are three other elementary schools, and at least one, College Hill Fundamental Academy, claims also to be the “home of the cougars!” There are multiple libraries and liquor stores, a drug store in Texarkana, Ark., and in Fredericksburg, Pa.., a poultry processing plant.
It is not until page 20 of the Google search that Wichita’s College Hill proper appears in the form of a link to our neighborhood association Web site, collegehillwichita.org. It is followed shortly thereafter by collegehilltopeka.com. Certainly, it’s no mystery why so many places share the name College Hill. On this and the following page we will highlight a few such places in further detail. “The phrase College Hill suggests, at least to us, a bounded community, with a purpose to create and disseminate knowledge,” says the editor of an online literary quarterly called College Hill Review. The review is not attached to a college, but published from a residential area of Boston called College Hill, “mostly by realtors,” the editor says. But most College Hills, indeed, are home to a university. “Within easy walking distance of W.S.U.,” a College Hill Association Web site proclaims. That would be Washington State University.
COFFEE KLATCH Yes, there is a College Hill Coffee in Winfield. But did you know that this College Hill Coffee Co. in Cincinnati is so popular that it has been immortalized in a syndicated comic strip called The Dinette Set? (Did you know there is a comic called The Dinette Set?)
POPULATION: ZERO Out on “College Hill Road” between Fort Green and Bowling Green, Ky., you’ll find the remnants of “College Hill,” a ghost town that was a century ago home to strawberry and citrus pickers. Here we see what is left of the general store.
SEEING RED The College Hill Fire Engine House, in Valparaiso, Indiana, circa 1898. The image was first published by “Headlight Engraving Company,” an imprint that published a series on the American frontier as seen from the headlight of a passing train.
A sign for a College Hill Community Center in Haywood, Tenn.
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THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
THE OTHER COLLEGE HILL(S)
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK In 2004 the BET network launched College Hill, a reality series that follows the lives of university students. The name is not geographical. The series has hopped the globe from Atlanta, to Virginia to the Virgin Islands.
CLUCK, CLUCK The workers at College Hill Poultry, Inc., in Fredricksburg, Pa., are a productive bunch. The plant’s literature boasts that it processes up to 25,000 birds a day. Most end up on dinner tables back east. In Providence, even.
OH, SHOOT Here’s a charming little online boutique: College Hill Arsenal, where it is possible to purchase muskets, bayonets and other authentic antique weaponry from the Civil War era “as well as odd & exceptional handguns.”
ROCK ON What do Deep Purple, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Ben Harper and Elton John all have in common? College Hill Productions, a New Zealand owned live sound reinforcement company. Book them for your next barbecue.
REAL TOPEKA PEOPLE Topeka’s College Hill sounds remarkable similar to our own. It’s an old, established neighborhood built on a elevation 40-feet higher than the nearby downtown. But this one actually houses a university—Washburn.
CHOO, CHOO It’s long gone now, but at the turn of the last century in Cincinnati, it was possible to steam out of town on the College Hill Railroad line, with stops at Dayton and Hamilton. It gave way to a trolley line before finally shutting down in ‘38.
WELL SAID There is a group of well spoken folks down in Claremore, Okla., who get together regularly to practice their speech making. It’s called the College Hill Toastmasters club. Got something to say? Join them Tuesdays at 7pm.
GET AWAY FROM IT ALL College Hill Bed & Breakfast is a charming little get away only minutes from Old Town, Wesley Hospital, and MacDonald Golf Course. In Sleepy Hollow, 3308 Country Club, it’s also only minutes outside of College Hill.
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THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
Performing arts students at East High School rehearse a number from “Nights of Glee,” which opens Feb. 4 at the school. The show will be in the west auditorium. The east auditorium, typically used for orchestra and band performances, is undergoing renovation. PHOTOS: BARRY OWENS
Renovations Begin at East High Auditorium BY BARRY OWENS “I’m told that it is all going to be stained to match the color of the original wood,” Derrick Gronewold, director of theater at East High School was saying the other day as he felt the grain of the freshly installed wooden sound room in back of the East High School auditorium. He stepped inside and mapped out where he envisioned the controls. “Sound on one side, lights on the other, and all the cables drop down through here and connect to the backstage area,” he said. Then he gestured out into the empty auditorium, over the tops of the ancient wooden chairs that will be ripped out and replaced this summer. “Great view of the stage,” he said. After years of planning and decades of neglect, renovations are
finally under way in the auditorium, which is as old as the school (1923). Even the piano backstage is original. The auditorium is getting an update as part of the $370 million bond issue that voters passed in the fall of 2008. Work on the auditorium, which will get new, padded seating, updated sound equipment and a new ceiling, began last month. The renovation is expected to be completed over the summer. While the new seats will be padded, the classic look of the auditorium will be preserved. “If it’s a full house and you are standing on the stage looking out it will look the same as it did before,” Gronewold said. “Except that people will be comfortable and there will be smiles on their faces.”
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THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
7
HISTORY
8
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
Above left: Mirthful residents make light of interrupted rail service and advertise the “Frisco Special,” the only way out of town. Above right: Oarsmen paddle past the Scottish Rite Temple. WICHITA PUBLIC LIBRARY
WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
The 1904 flood, when the locals fished from the front porch and dined in canoes. BY JEFF A. ROTH
E
arly Wichita was laid out on the rich alluvial valley left by an ancestral Arkansas River. The valley floor was further sculpted by the big river’s tributaries: the Cowskin, the Big Slough, the Little Arkansas and Chisholm Creek (named for Jesse Chisholm and his trading post to the north). One by one these water courses have been tamed, putting an end to the town’s recurrent floods. College Hill was situated above the menacing waters, but its early residents were still inconvenienced by the occasional deluge. Contemporary Wichitans speak of the flood of ’98 when on Halloween Night the Cowskin Creek overflowed its banks and flooded fashionable neighborhoods on the city’s west side. A century ago Wichitans would speak of the flood of ’77. In 1877, however, there wasn’t much of a town yet and losses were mostly confined to garden plots and fields, a few homes and wood frame businesses. Wichita’s flood of 1904 was another matter. By then the urban core was crowded with substantial commercial buildings. Close by neighborhoods, lying in the flatlands, were directly in the path of overflowing waters. Hill residents of Fairmount and College Hill watched the rains gather early that July, particularly north and east of town. On the morning of Thursday July 7, 1904
That would be College Hill resident A.A. Hyde (at right) motoring along the watery way. Few, if any, other Wichita residents at the time were ferried around in a chauffeur-driven Olds.
WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
some left uptown to venture downtown to see the roiling waters of the Arkansas River for themselves. In the delightful little book, The Wichita Reader, A Collection of Writings about a Prairie Town, published by the Wichita Eagle and Beacon in 1992 and edited by Craig Miner, one of its excerpts relates the adventure of two such curiosity seekers. College Hill resident Victor Murdock, second generation editor of the Wichita Eagle, popular US Congressman from 1903 to 1914, and namesake of Victor Place in College Hill, along with
his father-in-law E.T. Allen, ventured down on the morning of the 7th to the see Arkansas River in its rush to the Gulf. Little did they know that while their backs were turned Chisholm Creek, normally a docile winding creek from the north, was overflowing its banks with swift flowing water, cutting them off from home. First its powerful force took out the bridge at Douglas Avenue, and then at 11 a.m. it took out the Central Avenue Bridge. The normal approaches for returning home were gone. The creek became a flowing lake two miles wide on
either side of Hydraulic. At the height of the event it measured 4 feet deep at Douglas and Washington. The two stranded hill toppers pondered the fate of the milk cow, horse and chickens on Murdock’s two acres back home (on the southwest corner of Rutan and English). At noon they started walking the Frisco tracks eastward, hoping that the railroad bridge over Chisholm Creek was still intact. By good fortune constituent and canoeist Isaac West happened by and offered the Congressman and his fatherin-law a lift, “…and that gentleman, after the most careful seamanship, landed them safely, after an hour’s rowing, on the Fairmount side of the swollen creek.” Eagle July 7, 1904. Murdock and Allen hiked to the high ground of the cemetery where they found a stranded College Hill streetcar on Hillside (the tracks on Douglas Avenue having been washed away with the bridge). They hitched a ride home. That evening, the motorman and conductor were put up for the night “in the mansion” of College Hill resident and City Alderman James W. Burton at 115 S. Rutan (moved away for today’s Hillcrest Apartments). Contemporary accounts of the flood record human adversity and inconvenience, and thankfully very little tragedy. It was a close call, however, for “chubby” Chester Grace, a 4 year old toddler who wandered from the back porch of his home at 320 N. Wabash (no longer extant). Hidden beneath the murky water CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER â?š FEBRUARY 2010
HISTORY
9
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
was an open door to a cellar which swallowed him up. Somehow he had the tenacity to bob, float and crawl to safety up the cellar steps. “Frank Ford, who was near, says that it made his blood run cold as he saw the brave little boy, scarcely strong enough to pull his body along, come creeping out of the water.� Eagle July 7, 1904. Although the rains finally ended, the high waters took days to recede. Photographers fanned out to record Wichita’s response to the phenomenal amount of water passing through town. From many of the surviving photographs it appears that the citizens of Wichita looked upon the event as a nuisance at worst, a lark at best. Some of the photos are featured online at wichitaphotos.org, others are in the archived collections at the Wichita Public Library and the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Many show the townsfolk with a “take it in stride� attitude that seemed to prevail after the sun came out. Wichita, normally semi-arid in July, found itself with a town-wide water park playground. There are scenes of men, women and children frolicking in the flowing water. Conveyances for those who preferred to stay dry included bicycles, buggies, delivery hacks, and lumber wagons. There were flat boats with Venetian-style oarsmen carrying genteel and bonneted cargo. Boys in canoes were common. For those without a canoe, a wash tub would do. Fishing from a porch was a common diversion for homeowners and hotel guests alike. In one photograph a gentleman is docked outside a hotel restaurant dining in a dingy. The local sense of humor is evident in a photo of a mule drawn railroad handcart being pulled along the Douglas Avenue trolley tracks, its crowded passengers holding signs in parody reading “U.S. Mail� and “Frisco Special Only Through Train Today.� The waning days of the flood became a social event for those with cabin fever. A long line of horse drawn buggies was seen trotting in a promenade down Main Street. Even the prominent Mr.
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Residents ply the waters by buggy, bicycle and boat. Flat boats, with Venetian-stye oarsman were not uncommon sights during the floods. Nor were boys floating past in wash tubs.
WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
Aerial view of the East High School campus, showing Chisholm Creek (the tree line) and the new canal, dredged by the â&#x20AC;&#x153;land boatâ&#x20AC;? steamer pictured below. The canal prevented future flooding.
WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
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A.A. Hyde ventured down from College Hill, inspecting his Yucca Company building and muddy Douglas Avenue from his curved dash Olds, chauffeur driven of course. The flood of 1904 wreaked havoc on the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infrastructure and the homes and businesses in the thickly settled bottom lands. After sobering up from their archetype River Festival the citizens demanded that something be done. It would be many years before the Big Slough would be chopped, channeled and molded into todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Big Ditch, alleviating the flooding repeatedly caused by the Arkansas River. Before that project, however, another channel project was approved â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the dredging of the â&#x20AC;&#x2122;04 floodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s culprit, Chisholm Creek, from the stockyards in the north to the creekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s confluence with the Arkansas River in the south. That project involved building a steam powered dredge boat at 21st Street and the creek, damming the creek downstream to allow the dredge to float, and watching the â&#x20AC;&#x153;land boatâ&#x20AC;? chew a line straight south, ignoring the creekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural meanderings. As it chugged and clawed past homes and fields, it seemed like an apparition to the locals: â&#x20AC;&#x153;About the strangest sight that was ever offered in this town can now be seen on the McKnight farm. The big boat house with the shovel is sailing through an open field.â&#x20AC;? Eagle July 7, 1907 The canal was finished that September when the last dirt at the end of the long straight line was removed nd the new canal took over the creekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ancient legacy of carrying the areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s water. Chisholm Creek was filled in and schools and neighborhoods built above it. Evidence remains, however, of â&#x20AC;&#x153;old Chisholm Creekâ&#x20AC;? in the McKnight Addition west of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Canal Route.â&#x20AC;? Careful observers traveling I135 south, taking the off ramp west to Downtown, can spot a tree-lined curved green-space to the west. There lies the tamed old creek bed of Chisholm Creek, never to overflowâ&#x20AC;Śor entertain, again.
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THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
THE COLLEGE HILL COMMONER ❚ FEBRUARY 2010
Snow Day Photos by BARRY OWENS
One day’s bad weather is the next day’s good time. So it was last month as a winter storm on a Friday gave way to a sunny Saturday, perfect for digging out and building snow forts stocked with snow balls, sculpting snow men, and to send toboggans (and their cargo) tumbling down the hill.
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