Calm Before the U-Hauls

Neighbors Savor Last of Summer's Silence as College Students Begin to Return

It's quiet in College Park. Too quiet, some neighbors would say. They know what's coming.

The first U-Hauls have lumbered down side streets. Harry Pitt pointed to a red plastic cup rolling down his street, the kind purchased by the hundreds to fill with keg beer. It was like a robin, the first sign of the season: The students are coming back.

"It's a nice place to live," Pitt said, "in the summer."

A college town without college kids is like a beach town in January. In a week, two weeks for sure, these quiet streets near the University of Maryland will amp up.

The scene is common across the country as college students return to campus. And across the Washington area, tens of thousands are about to arrive.

Students and longtime residents have clashed since medieval times, said Blake Gumprecht, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who wrote a book about college towns. In Oxford, England, he said, people were killed over town-and-gown issues such as student behavior, especially drinking. "The classic university is surrounded by a wall almost like a monastery -- that is because of these conflicts," he said.

Many neighbors welcome the flood of energy and enthusiasm, the just-sharpened-pencils feeling of a new school year. "The students that I see are for the most part fairly aware and respectful," said Larry Mrozinski, who lives in Foggy Bottom near George Washington University. "They're young people trying to chase the American dream."

Others are braced for an onslaught.

"It's like elephants moving through a village," said Don Kreuzer, who has lived in Foggy Bottom for more than 30 years. He battled GWU officials as they expanded the school onto his block. He lives directly across from an enormous dorm, and he's dreading the students' return.

"The first sign is the PODS that come to town," he said. (Wasn't that a horror movie?) Trucks deliver giant storage bins to be unpacked by students, and the streets fill with parents, their children and carts. "You hear this clankclankclankclankclank over the sidewalk all day," he said.

If Kreuzer sounds tired, it's because he is. He's tired of picking up beer bottles in the morning. He's tired of hosing vomit off the sidewalk.

There could be 1,000 perfect students in the neighborhood, studying in the library and volunteering in the area -- GWU students give tens of thousands of hours every year, much of it in the community. But it takes only one sophomore screaming on the way home from the bars on a Tuesday night to wake up the whole block.