The World We Made from Junked Cars

You are driving north on Interstate Twenty-Five out of Trinidad, Colorado. The Sangre de Cristos are stacked up to the west, and the high plains flatten east toward Kansas. Somewhere just off this corridor, on a scrubby seven-acre goat pasture, one of the strangest experiments in American life quietly began in nineteen sixty, and just as quietly collapsed within the decade, leaving behind nothing but a ghost town made of domes.

Four young artists drove down from Kansas and Colorado that spring: Gene Bernofsky, his wife JoAnn, Richard Kallweit, and Clark Richert. They pooled four hundred and fifty dollars, bought the land, and called what they were building Drop City, a name borrowed from their earlier practice of dropping painted rocks and objects off rooftops into city streets, making art out of the unguarded moment. Richert had heard Buckminster Fuller lecture at the University of Colorado and came away electrified by the geometry of geodesic domes.

The question was how to build them for nothing. The answer came from a junkyard. A builder named Steve Baer arrived from New Mexico with a cleaner geometry, zonohedra, crystalline multi-faced forms that nested together more efficiently than standard geodesic spheres, and a brilliant observation: a salvage yard would let them chop the curved steel roofs off junked cars for as little as ten cents apiece.

Those panels fit perfectly over the dome frames. The Droppers worked through the summer with two-by-fours, bottle caps, and car steel, raising structures forty feet wide and twenty-two feet tall. By nineteen sixty-seven, Buckminster Fuller himself gave the commune his Dymaxion Award, honoring what he called their poetically economic structural accomplishments.

For a few years the place glittered. Underground films were shot inside the domes. A theater dome, one of the first three-hundred-sixty-degree projection spaces outside a planetarium, rose on the property.

Baer's innovations would eventually spin off into Zomeworks Corporation in New Mexico, a solar energy company that outlasted the commune by decades. But the Joy Festival of June nineteen sixty-seven brought hundreds of uninvited visitors, and the fragile equilibrium cracked. Founders began leaving.

Clark Richert departed in nineteen sixty-eight when his pregnant wife needed reliable food and medical care. The commune's own account of its failure was remarkably honest. As Richert put it, the biggest problem was simply that they did not make enough money.

By the late nineteen seventies Drop City was empty, the world's first geodesic ghost town. The domes were vandalized, then torched. A truck repair yard eventually flattened the last of them.

But the influence spread far. Dozens of rural communes planted themselves across the American West in Drop City's image over the following decade, each one reaching for the same dream: that a handful of people with salvaged materials and a good idea could build a world from scratch.