The 5 top college towns

Sunset, Oct, 1992 by Peter Fish

An autumnal urge stirs this time of year. You think about filling suitcases and station wagons with sweaters and scarves, beer steins and tennis rackets, dictionaries and calculators. It doesn't matter that you registered for your last class a quarter of a century ago. A college town maintains a lock on the emotions that lasts a lifetime.

A college town is a repository of tradition and change. The entwining ivy, the musty volumes in the upper stacks, speak of weighty thoughts that reach back centuries. The whir of skateboards, the thrash-funk from the dorm stereos, the lights burning late at the computer center, shout tomorrow.

Here's the minimum a great college town must possess: One coffeehouse with espresso strong enough to make you consider a pacemaker. One athletic team high-powered enough to make the playoffs, or lousy enough to be endearing. One mountain bike shop, one chamber music series, one alternative nightclub populated by threateningly coiffed people in torn T-shirts. One leafy nook where, beneath a marble bust of the college's founder, you can read Shelley to your beloved. And terrible parking.

A true college town can be infuriatingly insular. "There are times it makes my teeth ache," one resident says of Eugene. "The self-anointment, the intellectual pretension, drive me crazy," another says of Austin.

Yet there is something about these places that keeps us loving them. Partly it's the recollected joys of being loud, stupid, and 19. Partly it's the knowledge that if these towns often behave as though they're the only places in the world, it's because for four years, they are.

There are a lot of good college towns in the West. Here are five of the best. Go on, pay a visit, have some fun. You're only young twice.

Boulder

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO

In 1878, a professor of French and German, Miss Mary Rippon, arrived in Boulder to begin her career at the new state university. She descended from her Pullman car, gazed west to the jagged peaks of the Flatirons, and uttered one word: "Glorious."

People have been saying that about Boulder ever since. If heaven has a college town, it's probably as beautiful as Boulder.

It's also a town in motion--a buzz of bikes, in-line skates, jogging feet. Outlanders faced with such fierce athleticism end up shuffling around, muttering like the little engine that could, I will do sit-ups, I will do sit-ups. The penchant for self-improvement extends far past the physical: check out the kiosks on the four-block-long Pearl Street Mall, where fliers advertise in-depth astrological sessions and holistic aromatherapy.

Like many college towns, Boulder (population 83,000) is self-aware, not to say self-obsessed. It conceives adages and aphorisms--always about Boulder. "We're somewhere between the Rockies and reality," goes one, and another is the prophecy of an apocryphal Arapaho Indian chief: "If you leave Boulder, you will return." That seems to be blessing and curse, because, as the waiter with the master's degree tells you, "People who work here consider the mountains half their pay."

In fact, the town of Boulder is so, well, Boulder, that visitors beguiled by the scenery and the mall and the restored Victorians may forget about the university that put it all together. Which is unfortunate. With 25,000 students, the University of Colorado is a big school, but its historic Norlin Quadrangle (long lawns and Colorado sandstone interpretations of Italian Renaissance architecture) is an intimate, visitor-friendly public space. The university maintains strong programs in biochemistry (biochem professor Thomas Cech won a Nobel Prize in 1989), in aerospace engineer-(the school boasts 12 alumni astronauts), and in natural resource law. And then there are those CU Buffaloes, 1990 national champions in football.

One of the nation's best-known historians of the American West, professor Patricia Limerick, has taught here for eight years. "I came here from the Ivy League, and I'm afraid I was a snob. But a lot of my students are energized and ready to go. Oh, there are some driving with their parking brakes on--serving time in college because their parents won't pay for the ski vacations otherwise. But there are also really smart kids.

"Of course, there are things about Boulder I don't like," she continues. "It's so smug about being fit that I want to go out in public eating big bags of potato chips. And it's too expensive to be ethnically diverse--I have to go to Denver just to remember who else is on the planet. But in other ways it's heaven. I look around and think, Lucky me."

THE WORD

* Grooviest grocer: Of course, Boulder has the hippest natural food store anywhere: Alfalfa's Market, 1651 Broodway. (All right, Austin's Whole Foods is also a contender.) * Most famous alumni: Robert Redford, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, Glenn Miller * A great day's wander: Start with a mall crawl: Pearl Street Mall is that rarity, a downtown pedestrian mall that actually works (not even the occasional mime can spoil the fun). Favorite stops include Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl, and the Boulder Arts & Crafts Cooperative, 1421 Pearl. From Pearl, Broadway leads directly onto campus, where the University of Colorado Museum and the CU Heritage Center entertain and enlighten. Next, an athletic choice: bicycle along Boulder Creek, or hike Boulder Mountain Park. For dinner, try the Flagstaff House Restaurant (303/442-4640), on Flagstaff Road, for its view; the three restaurants at The Hotel Boulderado, 2115 13th Street, for history; or the Walnut Brewery, 1123 Walnut Street, for Boulder's truest love--locally brewed suds.