(Jinjin Sun/YH)

Alan Sage takes a look at the history and philosophy of the new ‘Radio House.’

A bike collective in the backyard, a refrigerator stacked with ingredients from dumpster diving, and an alternative music venue in the basement: The epitome of hipsterdom or a bastion of progressive ideology, depending on your take.

Perhaps these features explain the newfound fame of 216 Dwight Street, known this year as the Radio House due to its residents’ involvement with WYBC. 216 Dwight, along with 73 Edgewood, Partners Café (a primarily gay bar on Crown Street), and a few other locations, was a venue that hosted Modern Love, the famed indie dance party which has been unable to secure a venue for the current year (Its untimely end has shrouded its history in a sort of mystique, at least for freshmen like myself). These days the house hosts weekly concerts sponsored by Yale Radio, as well as sporadic parties, like the Pirate Party held last Saturday.

The house itself was built by New Haven’s first African-American dentist in the 1920s and was designed with a Caribbean twist, as a tribute to the dentist’s Barbados-born wife. But, 216 Dwight didn’t house Yale undergraduates until 2008, when David Muenzer, MC ’09, moved in. A number of others soon joined him, including the famed Cris Shirley, DC ’10, something of a legend in the house’s transformation.

Sounding like Arlo Guthrie narrating “Alice’s Restaurant,” Shirley told me the quirky story of how he attempted to have a trailer, found on Craigslist’s free section, moved into the backyard of 216 so he could live in it without paying rent. Sadly, moving it into the backyard proved impossible and the trailer became wedged between 216 and an adjacent house. Shirley was nearly sued by two landlords, and had to settle for living in the house and paying rent.

It was around this time that Shirley and his housemates began to get involved with freeganism, a movement espousing reliance on free (sometimes dumpster dived) food. Their transition to freeganism began with a free food calendar called “Low Hanging Fruit,” which listed events around New Haven with complimentary dining. They only later started dumpster diving outside Trader Joe’s, and supplementing the recovered groceries with grains purchased in bulk from Edge of the Woods, a health food store on Whalley Avenue. The average monthly cost of food for the entire house, which at the time hosted five undergraduates and an artist named Danielle Tarney, came to between ten and 20 dollars.

Shirley was awakened to anarchist sensibilities by some of the people he met at the Elm City Info Shop, a bookstore on 810 State Street. “I’m just turned off by machine politics,” Shirley said.

Shirley and former 216 resident Hans Schoenburg, MC ’10, are currently working on their own anarchist project, an online gift economy to be marketed as giftflow.org. The site operates as “an economy based on reputation,” as Shirley termed it, whereby people provide goods or services free of charge under the assumption that others will do the same for them.

The New Haven Bike Collective is also tied into Shirley’s legacy. Around the time Shirley was moving into 216 and Muenzer was moving out (the end of the ’08-’09 school year), the Collective was evicted from its previous space and looking for a home. Shirley, already involved in the Collective, offered the house’s basement to store the bikes. After moving bikes from the basement into the garage this past summer, the collective now operates in 216’s backyard every Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. It offers a sweet deal for anyone with looking for a new ride: Fix two bikes (the Collective receives bikes in need of repair from the police department or from donations) and keep one free. The idea is to “share in labor,” as current housemate Chloe Rossetti, JE ’11, phrased it.

Sadly, while the Bike Collective and dumpster diving traditions continue, Modern Love is now just an episode in 216 Dwight’s history. The party was held at a number of locations, which became unavailable for a variety of reasons. Partners stopped hosting it because of concerns about students under 21, while 216 Dwight was pressured by complaints from neighbors and frequent visits by the police. Nonetheless, the party certainly had its moments. Gregory Rubin, TC ’11, one of about seven responsible for organizing the party during the ’09-’10 school year, recalls an occasion when one DJ, Nicolas Niarchos, TC ’11, played solely Serbian folk music for the length of an entire Modern Love party. There was also a related party called “Massive Central,” held at another apartment, advertised under the guise of an “ironic fundraiser” to “save the rainforest.”

Six undergrads currently reside at 216 Dwight Street. All except Donald Bickmann, SY ’12, are affiliated with WYBC in some manner. Bickmann was invited to live at 216 by housemate Jesse Bradford, TD ’11, Program Director for WYBC and a friend of Bickmann’s from Deep Springs College, an exclusive all-male two-year college located at a ranch in the California desert. An awareness of the origins of what we use, taught at Deep Springs, is mirrored in the attitude of the 216 Dwight residents.

Through the website couchsurfing.com, the house also hosts couch surfers, travelers who seek the sole accommodation of a couch in the house of a stranger. When I visited to interview two of the housemates, Rossetti and Vladimir Chituc, TD ’12, I also had the opportunity to meet the current couch surfer, Kostas Sorg from Germany. He cited “destiny” as the force that had brought him to this unlikely house.

The two housemates I interviewed had vastly diverging opinions on the “counter-culture” label sometimes applied to the house. “I think people need to see us as what we are instead of labeling us, but I think comparatively speaking we are more counter-culture than the average Yale student,” Rossetti said. The word counter-culture had more negative connotations for Chituc, bringing to mind images of “angsty 16-year olds.” The two did agree, however, that they would prefer to be described as “progressive” or “liberal progressive.”

For anyone curious about 216 Dwight Street, the weekly concerts hosted by WYBC are held every Friday and, unlike Control Group shows, are open to anyone. I attended a WYBC concert at 216 last Friday, and singing songs that were half country, half folk, housemate Laurelin Kruse, ES ’12, brought to mind images of a burgeoning Joan Baez. The warmth emanating from the crowd made members of the audience feel like a part of the Dwight Street community, and certainly didn’t hamper the folksy ambiance. It seems 216 has become something of a forum for a group which celebrates, as Rossetti termed it, “open-minded culture.”