Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave in three houses with fourteen other people and eat dinner together every night? Here's the low-down, insiders perspective on Ant Hill Cooperative, community landmark and Google Favorite Place here in Rochester NY.
Ant Hill was originally conceived by a physics grad student from Berkeley, homesick for the good old co'op back in sunny California. He was sitting around the table with a bunch of his long-haired friends, and said, “You know what, cooperatives are better than hot-spiced beer.” The friends said, “Yes! Huzzah!” and pounded their fists on the table. The group then began several agonizing months of going to meetings and searching for properties, finally creating their happy community just in time to move out. (I wasn't there, but according to the cartoon on our website, that's how it happened.)
Let's start with the most amazing place in Ant-Hill: the pantry. Enormous shelves are loaded with buckets of every imaginable foodstuff, from dried mangoes and pineapples to flour and rice. My personal favorite is the five-gallon bucket of chocolate chips (which would last us through several years of cookie-baking if people didn't keep SNACKING on it.) Two refrigerators get loaded up every week with vegetables from the public market, and a freezer downstairs has cuts of meat from a happy-animal farm in Ithaca. Each person pays only $160 per month for food: an unheard-of bargain for the solo shopper. “If the zombie apocalypse arrives, Ant Hill will be a step ahead of everyone else,” we like to joke. We have supplies.
Next: the attic. It's like the fantasy of every kid who ever dreamed of building his own tree house, on steroids. Seats salvaged from a defunct movie theater ring the walls, and a hammock of rainbow rope dangles from the ceiling. There's even a projector for watching full-screen movies. On a less PG note, a full-sized cardboard cutout of Pamela Anderson stands guard over a bar stocked with various liquors. Occasionally we invite punk bands or folk musicians to give performances, and the whole house rocks with dancing friends.
We have a bike repair shop in our basement, a mural of dancing ants in our stairwell, a garden that grows our vegetables for the summer— and did I mention the hot tub in the backyard? How, may you ask, does a group of impoverished students, low-income workers, and retirees own such a luxurious item? The same way we own all our other cool stuff: collectively. That's why cooperative corporations like Ant Hill, Inc. are the answer to rising food and gas prices. When you're willing to share your stuff, you get more stuff. It's as simple as that.
Comments