The Trashing Toll

Over the past few years of student unrest, boarded-up storefronts and broken glass on sidewalks have given some campus communities the look of inner-city ghettos. Now, as another college term approaches, merchants are preparing for the worst. Around the Berkeley campus of the University of California, for example, a group of store owners is organizing a credit association to help members whose property may be damaged by youthful protesters. Local businessmen are also putting together an area-wide electric-alarm system. They hope to have it finished by election night, in case President Nixon wins.

Little wonder. Campus hostility to Nixon exploded last spring when the President announced the mining of Haiphong harbor. Students across the nation took out their anger on the nearest "imperialist" institutions they could find, usually stores, banks and campus buildings. The rioters smashed windows, broke doors and set buildings on fire in an outburst of what counterculture lingo identifies as "trashing" --spontaneous revolutionary vandalism. The bill for that spree is yet to be paid. In Berkeley, a group of 31 merchants this month filed a claim against the city for $170,000 in damages, asserting that police failed to protect their property. The city council refused to pay, and the merchants plan to sue.

The spring riots added to a trashing toll that over the years has reached impressive proportions. In Berkeley, an incomplete city battle-damage study shows that in the past four years 72 merchants have suffered losses of nearly $4,000,000--$152,427 in physical damage and $3,659,042 in potential sales unmade because stores were closed or customers stayed away. The tally will doubtless rise as more stores report.

In Cambridge, Mass., Bobbi Baker ran a high-fashion dress shop near the Harvard University campus for six years but sold the building this year and moved to a quiet suburb. "One year we were trashed three times," she recalls bitterly. "In the first trashing, they piled up a lot of merchandise inside the store and set fire to it. Women's Lib picketed us and sprayed our windows with slogans. We got tired of being threatened with knives and being bullied."

In Manhattan, Columbia University trashers last spring hit neighboring branches of First National City Bank ($5,000 damage) and Chemical Bank ($2,500). Then the action shifted to Columbia's School of International Affairs, where students knocked out half a dozen windows that school officials say cost $1,500 each to replace. By the end of the spring session, the university's share of the cost of Viet Nam escalation during the semester came to more than $95,000.

Even merchants who have suffered little or no trashing damage find the violence driving their insurance costs prohibitively high. Shopkeepers along State Street in Madison, Wis., near the University of Wisconsin, say that glass insurance can be purchased only with a $100-deductible clause, making coverage there worthwhile only for the largest stores. Universities themselves have also been hit. In 1968, Columbia paid $117,000 in annual premiums for a $ 1,000-deductible casualty policy. Now it must pay $182,000, and the deductible has been raised to $ 1,000,000.

What can be done to stop trashing?

Trashers themselves say that ending the war would help, but that option is hardly open to a college-town merchant. Most can only try to fortify their stores. Officers of the Telegraph Avenue branch of Bank of America have bricked up its windows and installed a metal fence over the doorway. Officials of Cambridge Savings Bank near Harvard twice installed safety glass (it did not break, but it shattered) and finally settled on metal and plywood window shutters.

Some campus merchants are trying to escape the wrath of students by becoming socially responsible. Many Berkeley shopkeepers donate part of their profits to local counterculture organizations. But the end may come only when the times quiet down or there is nothing left to trash--a point that in some places may not be too far away. During last spring's disturbances, one reporter asked a Columbia student leader: "Well, what's the target for tonight?" The trasher replied, "I don't know, man, it's a real bitch. We've broken all the imperialist glass within 20 blocks of this place."

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