A new crop of UCSB freshmen and transfers will move into their university housing this Saturday. As an experienced fourth-year student — or, at least, the girl who has made enough mistakes to know better by now — my Mama Bear instincts are kicking in. I want to take these kids’ hands and tell them about the gloriousness that is Isla Vista and Gaucholand. At the same time, however, I know that all the advice in the world could never adequately prepare newcomers for their first Friday night on Del Playa Drive. Hell, when I first moved into the Santa Rosa residence hall three years ago, I was scared to death of parties and I.V. I’d heard lore of water balloons sailing from balconies toward unsuspecting freshmen and I feared that my friends and I would be rejected from every party we went to.

As it turns out, I.V. is not the frightening place I made it out to be in my freshman mind. I promise. But party-hopping between Pasado and Sabado Tarde didn’t teach me everything about I.V. In fact, wandering from Storke Tower to Freebirds only stirred up more questions. What’s the deal with those eucalyptus trees between campus and I.V.? Why don’t the intersections on Camino Pescadero and Camino Corto line up? What’s with Tipi Village on Sueno? Why is there zero parking?

Davidson Library held the answers to all of these questions, and as your Eye on I.V. girl, I feel it is my duty to shed light on some of I.V.’s absurdities, both for the benefit of the newcomers and oldies alike.

Why don’t the intersections on Camino Pescadero and Camino Corto line up?

In the 1920s, Isla Vista was still fairly uninhabited. A group of land speculators came to the area looking to either make it into a resort community or to develop oil reserves that were rumored to be in the area. The land was subdivided into three sections. From Camino Corto to what is now UCSB West Campus was called Orilla del Mar; Camino Pescadero to the present-day UCSB campus edge was dubbed Ocean Terrace; the largest of the subdivisions, between Camino Corto and Camino Pescadero, was named Isla Vista. The county didn’t require the subdivisions to coordinate street layouts, hence the unaligned streets along Camino Pescadero and Camino Corto. However, drinking water was not readily available to I.V. and the whole oil reserves thing never panned out, so nothing much came of the speculators’ efforts, save for some skinny streets and messed up intersections.

Eucalyptus trees forever!

With all the talk of revamping I.V. with the Master Plan came some mention of removing the “Eucalyptus Curtain” between I.V. and the UCSB campus. Some people — including yours truly — worried that tearing down the trees was a symbolic effort on UCSB’s behalf to extend jurisdiction into rowdy I.V. But besides being a divider, the trees are also a piece of I.V. history. In the late 1800s, farmer Augusto Den owned a number of acres of land in the Goleta Valley. Long story made very short, through droughts, lawsuits and Augusto’s death, only a small piece of the land was passed down to two of Augusto’s sons. They split the land they inherited—present day campus and I.V.—with the line of now-famous eucalyptus trees in the late 1800s.

I don’t see a single tipi in Tipi Village.

Before landowners swooped in on I.V. to check their properties all the time, squatters were able to pitch tipis on empty plots of land. The tipis were so popular that it has been said there were up to 25 in I.V. the mid 1970s. When the landowners found the squatters, they were forced to pitch their tents elsewhere. Eventually, all the tipi dwellers ended up on the 6700 block of Sueno Road. They lived primitively and without plumbing. Local house dwellers complained to the Isla Vista Sanitary District (the predecessor to the Goleta West Sanitary District) about sanitation problems — a fancy word for poop and trash — emanating from Tipi Village. In 1979, those living in tipis were evicted. Tipi Village — the park located on the 6700 block of Sueno Road —remains as a commemoration of the former residents.

There’s not a damn parking spot in the whole town!

Parking is one of the biggest headaches in I.V. — well, minus those Saturday morning ones — and one of the concerns addressed by the I.V. Master Plan. Because amenities like a drug store or movie theater aren’t within the lazy man’s walking distance, and at least half of the population goes home-home for various school breaks, many I.V. residents have a car. Only a moron would assume every household would only have approximately one car.

But, then again, this is I.V., so of course, that is exactly what happened. In the 1960s, enrollment at UCSB shot up faster than the university could build housing. Developers got together to zone the land adjacent to the campus in I.V., and without anybody on the planning committee to represent student needs, the developers created special “student” zoning restrictions. These zoning laws allowed builders to ignore things like breathing space for students (as they could build the homes closer together than elsewhere in the county) and proper parking for a full household of students. Because they assumed students wouldn’t need cars, they didn’t provide adequate parking. And here we are today, reaping the lovely benefits.

And those are all of my answers—for now, anyway. There are still many mysteries and oddities to be solved, but there’s no fun in figuring everything out at once, now is there?

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