Member-only story
Down on Virginia and La Loma
Long walks and Counting Crows songs opened a door to a secret Berkeley not many people knew.
When I arrived at U.C. Berkeley as a sociology student in 1994, my heart was newly broken.
I’d just been dumped after eight intense, magical months of a friendship so passionate it had turned sexual. I was leaving home for the first time, leaving my terminally ill mother and the sanctuary of my teenage bedroom in rural Northern California. I felt like a raw nerve.
My new home was the Cloyne Court Hotel, one of the biggest houses in Cal’s student-run co-op housing system. It’s a wood-shingled, three-story building that takes up most of a city block in the hills north of campus, bordered by Ridge Road, Hearst Avenue, Le Roy Avenue and La Loma Avenue. Its massive brown face looms over Ridge Road, its many windows winking as residents turn their lights on and off. In the back, on the Hearst Avenue side, is a large courtyard big enough for Cloyne’s 151 residents to hang out, drink beers, sing Indigo Girls songs around a bonfire or watch bands like Green Day perform on a rickety stage.
Not counting my parents and brother, I’d never lived with other people. I was assigned a roommate who mostly studied long hours in the library, leaving me often alone to make sense of my new…
