It may not have been beautiful, but it certainly was no mere hideout. A tilting walkway of cracked pavement led to three wooden steps and a long front porch in need of a sanding, some screening, and several new coats of paint. The entire house, once a nice, leafy shade of green, now looked a bit jaundiced. Limp, dying ferns drooped across the cement facing on both sides of the steps. On the right side of the house, a tire-track driveway led to a garage that appeared to be trembling on the lip of collapse. Opposite the house, on the other side of Morrison Street, an overgrown bluff dropped fifteen or twenty feet to the shore of Lake Monona. This structure and its neighbors, in fact the entire neighborhood, I supposed, had declined from an original middle-class respectability to the steady deterioration of student housing. In need of a small income, a widow or a single mother had rented a couple of rooms to graduate students—the area was too distant from the campus for undergraduates—and eventually thousands had followed, burrowing into the houses while they established food co-ops, homeopathic storefronts, acupuncture centers, bad ethnic restaurants, health food stores, and cafés with cute names.
