Saturday, May 16, 2015
What Happens If You Build a Utopia and No One Shows Up?
The New York Times details the story of Michael Colby and Donald Graves, who tried to build a modern Utopia in Central Pennsylvania. Things didn't exactly go according to plan:
The 25 buildings that dot the landscape are mostly dormant, save for Zephram’s house and Johannes’s house. The two have been living separately, so to speak, for a decade, individual housing being an unlooked-for boon when their commune went to pieces and they ceased to be a couple.
They’ve sold most of their antique tools, save for a handful, which they’ve added to the collection of furniture, housewares, paintings, textiles and other Pennsylvania Dutch relics they’ve amassed over the years. The two have turned the whole lot — thousands of artifacts — into a museum, filling the cavernous barn where they spent their first winter with exhibits.
They’ve written a memoir, tragicomic, of course, and are looking for a publisher.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2015/05/what-happens-if-you-build-a-utopia-and-no-one-shows-up.html