When a group of students choose to live together in a house off-campus, it is usually because they are already a tight-knit group of friends. However, the group of fourth-years inhabiting the beloved High Street Manor this year, as resident Nicolette Musachio ’19 said, “just fell into each other randomly.”
After two people dropped out of the house — for good reasons, its current residents asserted — there was a scramble to fill the house with five residents. The final roster ended up consisting of Musachio, Addi Gould, Sonia Chulaki, and Joseph Knopke and Bardan Sigdel all ’19.
Musachio explained their dynamic as a group growing closer from sharing a home. “We all knew each other but weren’t super close so it’s a good house dynamic because we’ve just sort of gotten to know each other together,” she said.
The residents chose this house specifically in part because Gould had lived there the summer after his second year and wanted to live in a house with a porch.
“We thought, you know, we wanted to live on High Street and having had this porch over the summer I knew that having a porch was a super great feel,” said Gould.
The porch, filled with a ramshackle assortment of furniture passed down from years of students who have lived in the house, is one of the more iconic features of the house.
One of the biggest bonding experiences for the housemates has been maintaining the house together. Since off-campus residents cannot rely on Facilities Management (FM) for upkeep, moving off campus is often a rude awakening to the realities of cleaning and pest control.
Photo by Mahira Faran
Another (unofficial) obligation of High Street residents is to throw parties. On Saturday, Sept. 22, the residents threw a party that accidentally became unique from any other Grinnell function in recent history when Sigdel was threatened by a high school student claiming to have a gun.
It all started when two “young-looking” boys who claimed to be visiting a first-year friend showed up to the Harris afterparty and attempted to commandeer the aux.
Sigdel said, “I see two guys … messing with the music system with aux cord one of them was pulling on it … and then the party suddenly stopped, the music stopped for one or two minutes and I thought it must have been them and it was. It was too crowded for me to actually go over and do anything but then the music started and then maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes later I was walking out the back door, right, and I see one of those guys and then I say ‘Hey man, don’t fuck with the music, I told you it’s not a party for you, you’re invited, you’re in the house, that’s fine, don’t fuck with the music.’”
According to Sigdel, the ostensibly high school-aged partygoer responded that he was “just trying to make your party lit.”
Sigdel said he kept telling the youth that he shouldn’t have messed with the music.
However, the turbulent interaction didn’t end there. “He said, ‘I can pull my gun, you’ll be dead, I can pull my Glock,’ and then I think he kept saying Glock 47 …” Sidgel said.
When asked if he was scared, Sigdel said, “I could tell [he didn’t have a gun].”
The night’s drama was not over with that. Gould noticed that someone had removed his poster from the wall. None of the residents could find the poster for the rest of the night or the entire next day, but when Gould posted about it on Facebook it showed up mysteriously, three hours later, on the dining room table.
Although their most recent party took some strange turns, the residents are still excited about inviting more people into their home. They look forward to 10/10, especially since this year’s fourth-year class are the last Grinnell students who experienced it before its conversion into Fall Fest. Hopefully, no fake Glocks or poster thieves are in attendance.
