40 years older, but no less liberal

The handful of hippies enrolled at USC 40 years ago banded together for moral support.

The aging individualists returned Saturday to one of the 1960s’ last remaining communes, strictly for fun.

The commune occupies a 114-year-old Victorian mansion on West 27th Street, a few blocks from the USC campus. These days it sticks out from other houses in the area because it doesn’t have a fence in front or bars on the windows.

But back then the commune’s founders felt like unwelcome outsiders among their conservative classmates. That’s why they named the place “Ellis Island,” after the legendary East Coast port of entry that welcomed so many newcomers to the United States.

“I enrolled at USC because I didn’t know any better,” house co-founder Rush Riddle said Saturday at a backyard barbecue, sitting beneath a wall decorated with a peeling anti-war poster. The 59-year-old still lives in the commune and now works as a Los Angeles electrical station operator.

“I wanted to study architecture and my parents had a friend in Mobile, Ala., who said he’d heard it had a good architectural program. I’d visited Berkeley. I just figured more hippies would eventually show up at USC,” he said.

But they didn’t, said former commune resident Tom Conerly, 60, an architect in Santa Cruz.

David Harris, an anti-Vietnam War activist, “came on campus to make a speech and a bunch of football players showed up to shut him down,” Conerly recalled. “David Harris would not let us intervene.

“That nonviolence incident impressed me. I joined Students for a Democratic Society and moved in here in 1970,” he said of his introduction to the commune.

Life at Ellis Island “was an intense enough experience to bring us back” for periodic reunions, Conerly said. “I won’t go to a USC homecoming, but I’ll come here.”

Hamid Naficy, a film professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, lived in the commune for two years.

“This house has always been on the margins of USC -- it’s been a place for the disaffected. Originally, buying the house wasn’t part of the ethos. There was no thought of becoming mainstream,” said Naficy, 65.

But that’s what happened in 1967 when USC evicted commune members from their first house on nearby 35th Street to make way for construction of Dedeaux Field. When the owner of the vacant three-story dwelling on 27th Street balked at renting to hippies, several of them decided to work within the system.

“We went downtown and talked to the city Redevelopment Agency and they agreed to set up a lease-option agreement,” said Terry Poplawski, 59, an original resident of the house who is now a mail carrier in Ukiah.

Four of them chipped in $700 and signed a lease with an option to buy. They purchased the house for $28,000 in 1976.

Ellis Island is now co-owned by Poplawski and his wife Karen, Riddle and Peter Van Zant, who lives in Seattle.

Karen Poplawski, 59, a somatic educator, met and married her husband at the commune. “I was a USC student, but I didn’t fit in with the sorority crowd. The people here were people I was at ease and comfortable with,” she said.

The couple’s son, Orion Poplawski, was born in the commune and lived there for six years. Now a 37-year-old computer administrator who is married with two children in Boulder, Colo., he also returned for Saturday’s reunion along with about 50 others.

As many as 300 have lived at one time or another at the commune, which for years operated an attic crash pad for short-term residents. Los Angeles actor Christian Reeve, 59, lived there for six months in 1973.

He had forgotten Ellis Island’s street address but went to the downtown library to look it up in a 1973 phone book. At Saturday’s reunion, Reeve said he was stunned to find out the commune still exists.

There’s more stability now. Its eight current residents have lived there an average of 16 years.

“I feel very comfortable. We’re all kind of liberal, but we give each other space,” said one of the newest, two-year resident Radhika Hersey, a 27-year-old artist.

Fifteen-year resident Mark Torres, a KPFK-FM radio producer, said he waited three years to get in.

No matter how bad it seems outside, “when we walk in the front door of Ellis Island, our liberties are restored,” said Torres, 47.

As the ex-hippies were setting up a video projector in the living room to show early pictures of Ellis Island, Riddle was in the attic showing off its music stage, psychedelic lighting, Day-Glo painted walls set off with black lights and the old car bumper plastered with stickers hanging from the ceiling.

Longtime next-door neighbors are tolerant of the bands that perform there on Halloween and May 1 each year, and nearby college students drop in to listen to the music, Riddle said.

There are plans to put the West 27th Street house in a trust so the Ellis Island vibe can continue after its four owners are gone, he said.

Survival of the commune in perpetuity, he feels, would be outta sight.

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bob.pool@latimes.com