“Animal House on Acid” is a memoir by Beverly Potter, a neighbor of the "most notorious housing unit on the face of the Earth." Barrington Hall, a large student-run co-op on the Southside of the University a few blocks off of Telegraph Avenue, was Berkeley's last outpost of the '60s. Barringtonians, as they called themselves, held fast to the culture of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll long after it had ceased to be fashionable, and clung to the sanctity of individual expression-even to the point of covering up not only illegal but genuinely harmful acts with a cloak of silence, known as "Onngh Yonngh", which stated: Those who know, don't tell' those who tell, don't know.
Inside Barrington Hall, youth rebellion never grew old, because each year it was replenished with a new crop of eighteen-year-olds, sorry to have missed the '60s and glad to find a small chunk of it still alive just down the street from People's Park on Dwight Way. Barrington became a victim of its own mythology: with a house culture dedicated to outrage, it eventually outraged all, even its natural allies.
Established as a co-op in the 1930s, by 1980 Barrington had become a continuing disaster for the USCA [University Students Coop Association]. Known internationally for live punk rock, LSD parties called "wine dinners" featuring acid-spiked wine punch, open drug use, heroin use and overdoses, crashers and haven for under-age runaways, activism and anarchy, raucous parties, kids going off the four-story roof, along with disputes with neighbors and investigations by the City Council. Barrington sapped the patience of everyone involved. Finally, after a neighbor group took Barrington to arbitration, and three City investigations, and PACT - Parents and Children Together attempts to control the raucous behavior, Potter filed a lawsuit. Then the death threats rained down upon her.
Barrington Hall was boarded up in March 1990 - 24 years ago. Yet, it's spirit and romance lives on. Today, in July 2014, there is a large memorial poster in the window of Rasputin Music on Telegraph Avenue honoring Barrington Hall, calling it a "petri dish of early San Francisco Bay Area Punk Rock."
