Las Urbanistas

BURKESVILLE, Ky. — Below the Wolf Creek Dam, which holds back the biggest manmade lake east of the Mississippi, residents joke that they are not worried about a breach but sleep in life jackets, just in case.

Above the dam, they jest that since the Army Corps of Engineers labeled the structure “high risk” in January and lowered the water in Lake Cumberland to 40 feet below its summer level, residents now have some of the best “mud front” property in the country.

A nervous sense of humor has taken hold in this area, famed for its trout fishing and million-dollar houseboats, as worries grow about the dam, a mile-long concrete and earthen behemoth that is leaking and showing signs of age.

“That’s a lot of water,” said Keith Riddle, the mayor and barber here, about the trillion gallons of water 10 miles upstream sitting behind the dam, enough to cover the state of Kentucky to a depth of three inches. Mr. Riddle described the town’s four-hour evacuation plan, the sirens being installed in the area and the several thousand weather radios being distributed to warn residents of an emergency.

In Nashville, about 280 miles down the Cumberland River, state and federal officials this month began holding weekly public meetings to quell fears after the corps said a worst-case rupture of the dam could inundate that city’s downtown, causing more than $2 billion in damage.

Upstream, local operators of power, sewage and water treatment plants are warning of potential regional blackouts and service stoppages because many of their intake pipes running to the lake are now nearly above water. Tourism officials are bracing for the economic impact of the lowered lake on a $150 million boating, fishing and vacation industry that draws more than five million visitors annually.

“All we’re doing is trying to keep the boats afloat,” said Arlie Baker, 69, standing near his boating club’s ramp, one of the 40 of 48 on the lake left high and dry.

The situation is yet another unforeseen consequence of Hurricane Katrina. Corps officials said that while the aging dam’s problems went back 40 years, the corps’ determination of acceptable risk had changed because of lessons learned from the levee failures in New Orleans. Alarm was also heightened after outside engineers concluded that the risk of failure was much higher than the corps had originally stated.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Bill Peoples, a spokesman for the corps office in Nashville that runs the Wolf Creek Dam. Mr. Peoples said the dam was one of about 610 the corps oversaw, many of which were completed in the 1940s and 50s and were engineered to last about 50 years. Five other dams are ranked at the highest alert level, he said.

Completed by the corps in 1952, Wolf Creek Dam has deteriorated as water has seeped beneath the dam through the porous limestone eroding its foundation.

Mr. Peoples said it would take $309 million and about seven years to install a thick concrete wall in the earthen section of the dam, fill holes with grout and control erosion under the dam.

Though Lake Cumberland is renowned for its striper, bass, walleye and crappie fishing, it is the trout anglers who are most worried about the effect of the falling water level on fishing. Each year, the federal trout hatchery just below the dam produces more than a million trout, with about 825,000 making up the primary source for Kentucky lakes and streams and the rest going to Cherokee tribal lands in North Carolina and waters in northern Georgia.

If it rains too much, dam officials will have to keep releasing water to hold levels steady, which would change the temperature and oxygen levels downstream and could devastate the hatchery’s fish.

“Really, in our wildest dreams, we never thought it would get like this,” said David Hicks, the commodore of the Somerset Boat Club, as he surveyed the muck surrounding stranded storage lockers and picnic tables that sat atop a small marooned dock.

Jeff Cress at Lee’s Ford Marina said the rumors about the dam’s problems might actually be the biggest threat to the economy of the region.

“You have people up in Cincinnati thinking this lake is drained,” Mr. Cress said, alluding to the legions of Ohio vacationers who have regularly visited the lake. Local officials have emphasized that even at its current level, the lake was still one of the biggest in the state.

Seated with friends in a log cabin several miles downriver from the dam, Willis McClure said he was asked by dam officials to collect the phone numbers of residents who lived nearest the dam. As Mr. McClure’s friends joked that he took the job to ensure his name was at the top of the list, he explained that having lived next to the dam all his life, he was confident in its strength.

Others were less so.

“I’ve had residents calling with their cars already packed because they thought the dam was going to break any day,” said Mr. Riddle, the Burkesville mayor.

Though worried about the cost of repairs, Shannon Thompson, a regular boater here, said local residents, many of whom live on remote farms accessed by roads that frequently washed out, were used to coping with the elements.

“Around here,” Mr. Thompson said, “the typical response to “see you tomorrow” is “Lord willing and if the creek don’t rise.”

Correction: March 7, 2007

A grouping of pictures on Sunday with an article about fears for the safety of the Wolf Creek Dam on Lake Cumberland in South Central Kentucky carried an erroneous credit for the photograph of Willis McClure, who lives near the dam. The photographer was Alan Poizner for The New York Times, not Josh Anderson of The Times.

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, March 4, 2007

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Never in her 80 years has Flora “Flo” Nilson felt so exposed.

After spending most of her adult life buffing up the image of nudists, the owner of Orange County’s only nudist resort and one of the longest-running such refuges in the West is calling it quits.

“It’s time to move on,” Nilson said. “For 53 years, it was quite a religious experience, chasing sunshine and health. Now it’s over, and it’s not easy.”

For nearly three-quarters of a century, Mystic Oaks, formerly known as McConville, has nestled among towering oak, sycamore and pine trees off winding Ortega Highway between San Juan Capistrano and Lake Elsinore. Accessible only by an unmarked dirt road behind a padlocked gate, it is 2,500 feet up in the Cleveland National Forest.

For generations, nudists have gathered here year-round, playing tennis, shuffleboard and volleyball; hiking; sunning and lounging around the pool. Hundreds have roughed it overnight in tiny, rustic cabins with no electricity.

The nudist camp, a peaceful, uninhibited setting, enabled the few hundred dues-paying members to relax with nature au naturel. Nudists paid annual fees of $400 to $600.

But lately things have changed, Nilson said. “Most members were happy with our rustic retreat, but newer members wanted to change it into a country club-type setting. People don’t enjoy camping out like they used to. They want all the amenities.”

But after a long-drawn-out divorce, Nilson had no deep pockets with which to upgrade the site. Declining financial circumstances, coupled with dropping membership, caused her to give up the 129-acre property. The sale is pending.

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In 1933, nudist camps were becoming popular in the United States. Psychotherapist Hobart Glassey, his wife, Lura, and a former New York grocer, Peter Joseph McConville, leased a piece of forested land they called Elysia. The next year, they bought 330 acres three miles uphill from the initial site and named it Olympic Fields.

Here, astride the border of Riverside and Orange counties, the founders battled neighbors and county officials. Peeping Toms and trespassers climbed the gate. Sometimes, 100 members fought off raids by sheriff’s deputies bent on breaking up their naked volleyball games and barbecues, according to Times articles of the era.

A 1934, a 35-minute movie called “Elysia, Valley of the Nudes,” was filmed in the naturists’ paradise. Hobart Glassey appeared in it and was listed as a producer. The film was about a reporter named Mac who was sent to cover the habits of “primitive” people. Mac came to understand the camp and its benefits when he disrobed and joined in activities including baseball, leap-frog and horseshoes.

By 1935, a financial rift had destroyed the partnership. The Glasseys, considered by some to be the founders of Western nudism, moved to Los Angeles County, creating a new nudist club in La Tuna Canyon in Sun Valley called Fraternity Elysia.

McConville stayed at Olympic Fields. He built a modest brick recreation hall in 1938, where members enjoyed community dances, potlucks, dominoes and card games.

“Their dream,” according to a camp newsletter charting the early days of the nudist camp, “was to assist people by providing a place where the pressures of our artificial civilization might be removed.”

In 1938, McConville allowed Hollywood to use the resort for a second film, “Unashamed,” starring Rae Kidd and Robert Stanley. The heroine entices her workaholic boss to a nudist camp in hopes of winning his heart, while members of the resort cavort in the buff. McConville plays the gatekeeper.

“Both 1930s movies are packed away now,” Nilson said. “But we often showed them to members in the recreation hall.”

In April 1945, McConville helped to fight a bill by state Assemblyman Ralph Dills (D-Gardena) that would have outlawed public nudism. McConville and other members — fully dressed — drove to Sacramento to show the Assembly Crime and Corrections Committee they were just like other people. “Their faces aren’t marked by debauchery or depravity,” The Times reported.

Dills’ bill was defeated in committee, 7 to 2.

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In 1952, Nilson’s husband, Wally, a printer, made an intriguing proposal. “My husband had come home with a nudist magazine, tossed it down and said, ‘How would you like to try something different?’ ” she said.

They went for a weekend visit.

“I was nervous at first but found it so uplifting, the most natural thing in the world,” Nilson said. “My mother, who was from Sweden, always said: ‘If you haven’t seen what God has shaped, let them stand and gape.’ “

In 1954, McConville, then 74 and ailing, sold the retreat to the Nilsons. They paid $7 an acre and renamed it in his honor.

“Naming it McConville made it sound like a little village, which it was,” Nilson said. “McConville was a single man who [still] lived in a trailer on the grounds. I made him three meals a day, with spinach, which doctors said would help cure his cancer.”

It didn’t. He died in 1959 at 78.

After the Nilsons purchased the property, they boosted membership by putting in a pool, a bathhouse and tennis courts.

But sometimes nature seemed to conspire against them. Their first year, Nilson recalls, fire left the surrounding area as bare as the nudists. Women had to duck for cover when firetrucks rumbled through the property.

“One firefighter stared so hard, he almost fell from the back of the truck,” Nilson recalled with a laugh.

The mountain hamlet was a getaway for about 100 families, along with some couples and singles looking to escape from the pressures of urban life. “The park attracted a variety of people, from construction workers to attorneys,” Nilson said.

Some members had attended as children, she said. Others visited with friends and liked it so much that they joined. “There were rarely ever more than 200 people here at a time,” she said.

People liked to keep their membership a secret, knowing that their way of life could make colleagues or clients squirm. By shedding their clothing, Nilson said, they also shed such traits as pretense and fear.

The Nilsons managed the camp and reared three children there, driving them up and down the mountain to school in Lake Elsinore, seven miles each way.

But life in paradise wasn’t idyllic.

Wally and Flo Nilson divorced in 1981, and she ran the club herself. In 1996, McConville was divided in the property settlement.

“I got about 129 acres … and spent years fighting off developers,” Nilson said. Her former husband’s portion is covered with houses today.

In 2000, Nilson renamed her land Mystic Oaks, changing it from a traditional all-nude park to “optional clothing” to attract younger families. “We wanted to make people feel more at ease in the beginning,” she said.

But, over the last several years, fun- and sun-seekers stopped attending weekend events because they were too busy or were unwilling to drive on the twisting mountain road.

Nilson blames the club’s demise on “lazy people who want to be waited on.” She acknowledged that people changed but the club didn’t: It remained a simple, no-frills outdoor camp.

Last week, Nilson — still a veteran nudist, weather permitting — was bundled up in a sweater and slacks as she hiked around her property for the last time. She recently moved to Sun City in Riverside County. Mystic Oaks is closed — as is the biggest chapter in her life.

AFTER Heidi and William Wood moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Unity Village last fall, they baked cookies and knocked on the doors of every neighbor in this 33-unit development.

They encountered young professionals like themselves who had looked for a well-managed building and reasonable market-rate rents in one of New England’s hot small cities. They also met Somali immigrants and single mothers. There were also adults so down on their luck that they had spent time in the shelter up the street.

 

The couple, who are college graduates, and their neighbors reflect the economic, cultural and racial diversity that distinguishes not only Unity Village, which opened six years ago, but also the Bayside neighborhood, which is one of Portland’s oldest, is still its poorest and is becoming its most unusual.

The neighborhood, which sits on a bluff behind City Hall and overlooks Back Cove and Interstate 295, is stirring again after decades of neglect that turned it from a prosperous area of middle-class merchants in the 19th and early 20th centuries to a place where city workers parked during the day and society’s forgotten dwelled in the evening’s shadows.

Now it is possible on the same Bayside block to eat a $100 meal at one of the city’s fine seafood restaurants or get one free at a soup kitchen that feeds 500 people daily. Residents here sleep in historic 19th-century homes, some worth $300,000 or more — still a relative bargain in a city where houses with water views can easily cost $600,000 or more — while transients can get a free bed at overnight shelters, one for men and the other for women.

On Bayside’s south end are worn convenience stores with metal grates on the windows selling cigarettes and beer. On the north end is a new 47,000-square-foot Whole Foods Market.

To some longtime residents, the neighborhood’s transformation over the last decade has been anticipated, but it is nevertheless striking.

“This was the horrendously ugly part of town,” said Ron Spinella, an artist and gallery owner who is chairman of the Bayside Neighborhood Association and has lived in the community since 1996.

“The scrap yards are here,” he said. “Buildings weren’t being used. Houses were empty. But we also had more vacant and unused property than any neighborhood, in a city that was revitalizing very fast. So you just knew that the city’s deteriorated back door could become its handsome front door.”

The Bayside neighborhood is not at that point yet, but it appears to be on the way.

The question facing developers and the city, which adopted a Bayside redevelopment plan in 1999, was this: Would people with means, particularly college-educated professionals just getting started, be willing to settle in a neighborhood known for its soup kitchen, shelters and transients?

Unity Village, which cost $5.25 million and opened in 2001, seems to have answered that question, city officials and residents say. In their view, it has served as an economic catalyst that has helped stabilize the neighborhood by providing shelter and a sense of community for those with rising fortunes, like the Woods, and those less fortunate. By offering affordable apartments in attractive town-house-style buildings just blocks from City Hall and the arts, central business and entertainment districts of the city, it has coaxed people of different incomes, backgrounds and races to live side by side.

“A lot of people didn’t think it could happen,” said Alex Jaegerman, the director of Portland’s planning office. “Piece by piece, it’s happening.”

Mr. and Mrs. Wood, who arrived at Unity Village last September after she completed a graduate degree in social work from Smith College in Northampton Mass., said they were more than satisfied with their new home.

“We specifically chose Bayside,” said Mrs. Wood, 31, who just landed a job as a clinical social worker with the Providence Service Corporation in Brunswick. Mr. Wood is a regional coordinator in New England for the Bahai faith.

“We were looking for a city that was close to the ocean, and a neighborhood that was as diverse as possible,” Mrs. Wood said. They pay $850 a month for their two-bedroom apartment.

Jennifer Guptill, a 32-year-old property manager and single mother, has lived in Unity Village since October 2005 with her four children in a three-bedroom market-rate apartment that rents for $1,000 a month. That is hundreds of dollars a month less than similar apartments in the tonier neighborhoods to the north and west that overlook Casco Bay and the Atlantic.

“Outside of the fact that the homeless shelter is around the corner, it seems like they are making Bayside better,” Ms. Guptill said. “My vision is to stay here as long as I need, as long as it is safe and it continues to get cleaned up. The neighborhood’s improving.”

The neighborhood’s population is slowly growing. A century ago, Bayside was a densely packed area of stout homes that sheltered perhaps 5,000 residents. Urban renewal, though, scraped away many of the homes, replacing them with parking lots. Other houses were abandoned. The homeless shelters were established in the 1970s. The population dropped below 1,000.

Then, in the 1990s, Portland, which now has 64,000 residents, the same number as it did in 1990, joined other New England cities in an economic and cultural revival. Upwardly mobile young professionals resettled the city’s seaside neighborhoods. Artists colonized lofts and old homes in other areas of town.

Bayside, with its ample open spaces and old homes ready to be rehabilitated, was seen by city planners as a place of metropolitan opportunity. With the help of Bayside residents, the city developed its plan to turn Bayside into Portland’s “urban gateway.” The neighborhood’s population is now about 1,400.

The increase in residents is accompanied by a rise in construction. A 37-unit loft-style condominium is being built on Chestnut Street. Apartments will be priced from just under $200,000 to $400,000, numbers competitive in Portland’s market, which has cooled in recent months.

Avesta Housing, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing based in Portland, will open a 60-unit apartment building later this year at Pearl and Oxford Streets. Rents will be $700 for a one-bedroom apartment, $840 for a two-bedroom and $950 for a three-bedroom, including utilities. Work on a 105,000-square-foot medical office building is scheduled to get under way in the spring.

Unity Village, the first project completed under the gateway plan, was developed by Jim Hatch, a nonprofit housing consultant, and Richard Berman, the principal of Berman Associates, a local builder.

Both men responded to the city’s request to build on three city-owned lots that make up the Unity Village site. Winton Scott Architects designed the four three-story buildings. One-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are on the ground floor, with three-bedroom units above. Each apartment has a front door and a stoop that faces the street. Because the project is in the central city, the designers minimized the number of parking spaces and maximized the development’s density.

Seven apartments are reserved for families and couples capable of paying market rents. Seven other apartments are reserved as transitional homes for people moving out of shelters. The remaining 19 units are subsidized housing for single men and women and working families, many of them with young children and teenagers who are often found in Unity Village’s community room during the winter, or on the Oxford Street playground when it’s warm.

Unity Village has attracted national notice among public housing agencies for its novel layout and design.

In 2005, the federal Environmental Protection Agency awarded Berman Associates the Environmental Merit Award for significant contributions to environmental awareness and problem solving.

“These projects take stamina, patience and creativity,” the award citation said.