Henrietta Hay's Column

I first saw Aspen in June 1949. The town was full of world famous philosophers and musicians and historians, there for the Goethe Bicentennial, which Walter Paepcke planned as the re-birth of Aspen. The backdrop was this tiny ghost town high in the Rockies, with dirt streets and shabby Victorian houses. The centers of activity were the Hotel Jerome and the Wheeler Opera House, which were built in the 1880's at the height of the silver boom. They had been largely ignored from then until 1949 and they looked their age. Spanish philosopher and humanist Jose Ortega y Gasset was holding court on the cracked sidewalk in front of the hotel with his huge Great Dane at his feet and other guests were wandering up and down the dusty street.

For some reason which I don't understand, but which my friend the philosopher would probably call a time warp, the Aspen of my first memory never changed very much. I visited it a few times and, of course read the papers. I knew that Aspen was getting pretty far out, was full of famous people and odd behavior and lots and lots and lots of money. I read about the adventures of John Denver and Hunter Thompson and Claudine Longet and all the others. But they were off "up there" and probably weren't real anyway. I still managed to keep the image of the way it was that day in June of 1949.

Ted Conover, a Denver native, has completely demolished my fantasy with his book, "Whiteout: Lost in Aspen." It made me realize all the stuff I have missed by not driving upriver oftener during the past thirty years. Today it is one of the richest pieces of real estate in the country. The streets are paved and the green hillsides are filled with mansions.

Here we are, Aspen and Grand Junction, on the same side of the same mountains in the same state. Really, though, we're on different planets.

I have special trouble realizing the unbelievable amount of money that has poured into this little mining town of ours. The $50 million in silver that was mined from 1879 to 1893 would probably be pocket change for some of the people who are there today.

The most obvious way to understand the vast wealth is to realize the kinds of houses that have been built. The little Victorian houses of yesterday are selling for more than $1 million. Most of the new houses have been built with more wealth than taste and most of them are occupied only a few weeks each year. Goldie Hawn has a 6500 square foot exaggeration of a hunting lodge in the Tyrol. The summerhouse of the heir to the Marshall Field fortune is worth $21 million and has an elevator with suede seats. The prizewinner, which caused a major environmental war, is the 55,000 square foot vacation cottage of Saudi Arabian prince bin Sultan bin Abdel Aziz. The median value of a house in Aspen is, according to the census report, "$500,000+." There is apparently not room on the computer for seven digits.

The author admits that he started the research for the book with, "some ill intent...To be skeptical about Aspen, it seemed to me, was to take a position against hype and elitism...It was to endorse traditional values of my state, like neighborliness and a dislike of pretension, and to eschew trendiness, in-crowds, and the influence of cities like New York and Los Angeles."

He met the natives and he met the newcomers. He discovered the upside and the downside of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. He dealt with such esoteric subjects as the massive drug trade, the far out New World activities that go on there and the odd behavior of the famous people who vacation there. What he found out is that while we may consider ourselves morally superior to those with great wealth, given the same circumstances we could probably all force ourselves to live with it.

Aspen is certainly different now. Where is it going in its next life? "The phenomenon of change in Aspen inhabits its very name. Certainly there have been changes for the worse since the miners noticed ... their environmental devastation but also, perhaps, some changes for the better. One of the things that changes, it seems, is the idea of a paradise... As one paradise has lapsed, another has flowered. Paradise, one might conclude, has not been lost. It has simply changed hands."