Sunnyside: The Landscape of an American Party School in Morgantown, West Virginia

Abstract

Sunnyside: The Landscape of an American Party School in Morgantown, West Virginia Pamela Curtin Introduction You can’t take away the memories!” Janna Kuett, an undergraduate at West Virginia University (WVU), wrote on Twitter on April 4, 2013, the day Mutt’s Sunnyside Place, a favorite student hangout in Morgantown, was demolished.1 Students expressed this sentiment in articles and op-eds in WVU’s newspaper, with alumni responding with similar frustration.2 Mutt’s, a simple three-story frame house converted into a tavern, sold in 2012 for $825,000, a price that reflected not the value of the building, but the value of the land.3 Replacing Mutt’s and its thirty-eight neighboring structures, mostly single-family homes dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, was University Place, an eight-story multiuse apartment complex. According to developers, University Place would “revitalize an unattractive dilapidated area into a beautiful, safe and affordable place for students, faculty, staff, and citizens to live, work, and shop.”4 This “area” is Sunnyside, a 130-acre neighborhood bordering West Virginia University’s Downtown Campus. As development has reshaped the neighborhood, it raises questions not only about Sunnyside’s future, but also its past. Sunnyside has become a contested place in Morgantown. While today it is known for student housing, Sunnyside was originally established for industrial workers and their families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transition from a working-class neighborhood to a student-centered space has been chronicled in Ronald Lewis’s Aspiring to Greatness and a 2015 article in West Virginia History, along with a number of local newspaper and magazine articles.5 These works have laid an excellent foundation for Sunnyside’s historical narrative, one that is framed by the broader fields of urbanization, deindustrialization, public history, and the history of higher education. [End Page 1] The University Place project is part of a movement to revitalize Sunnyside, which was designated a “blighted” neighborhood in 2003.6 Local developers, often in partnership with WVU, have undertaken housing projects that have added millions of dollars in property value and diversified amenities for students; simultaneously, these projects have contributed to a housing surplus in Morgantown, which contrasts housing shortages found in other college towns.7 Nonprofits like the Campus Neighborhoods Revitalization Corporation, formed in 2002 and known colloquially as “Sunnyside Up,” have partnered with the City of Morgantown and WVU to improve infrastructure, reconfigure streets, and address housing, amenities, traffic, and parking issues.8 While many acknowledge the positive aspects of these redevelopments, a number of students and alumni wonder how Sunnyside’s student culture will change. These concerned sentiments reflect what urban historian Alison Isenberg calls a “collective, community-wide sense of loss” amid neighborhood redevelopment.9 Click for larger view View full resolution Redevelopment has changed the landscape of Sunnyside. Large multiuse apartment complexes like University Place (on left) contrast historic houses converted into rental spaces for students (on right). Photograph by Pamela Curtin, 2016. This study explores Sunnyside as a cultural landscape, analyzing students’ connections to the neighborhood and their relationships with WVU administrators and citizens of Morgantown. The cultural landscape approach recognizes that the neighborhood’s physical spaces, ranging from old houses to new high-rises, are imbued with personal and collective meanings. Together, these meanings create a unique sense of place that impacts and is impacted by current redevelopment.10 The memories of Sunnyside’s unique [End Page 2] student community, contrasting with the “official” records of a university, have what historian John Thelin calls “an enduring, powerful impact on how Americans think about colleges as historic, special places.”11 This study focuses on the time period when Sunnyside became a student neighborhood, the 1960s to 1990s, while also integrating the perspectives of some contemporary students. Newspapers like WVU’s Daily Athenaeum along with university records inform discussions of student housing, off-campus activities, and WVU’s public image in light of student behaviors in Sunnyside. This study traces the local housing crisis in the 1960s, the development of Sunnyside’s “party culture” and notorious reputation, and the so-called “Sunnyside problem,” which frames discussions of the neighborhood’s physical and cultural...