Lawrence, Kansas has a population of about 50,000 residents, most of which are kids related in some way, shape, or proverbial form to the dominating University of Kansas which resides in the center of the city.
This is not meant to imply that most of them are students.
The fact is, Lawrence also has a very heated and contested history--much akin to Paola, KS--in that the city was often a bloody battleground between pro and anti-slavery forces in the 1850's. The city itself was burned down once by William Quantrill and his raiders, and the Eldridge Hotel located at 7th and Massachusettes Streets in downtown Lawrence has a history that sounds reminiscent of Swamp Castle.
In the 1840's somebody came along and burned it down.
Less than a year after it was rebuilt, someone else came along and burned it down.
A few years after that an entirely new group of people stopped into town to burn it down again.
After several years of nobody coming to town to burn it down--the owner's decided to burn it down themselves and build a new one--which they did in the 1920's.
As far as the town itself goes today, well, it's not exactly a hippy town. Calling Lawrence a "Hippy Town" is little more than ascribing to a particular local stereotype that is woefully outdated. The actual "Hippies" that first resided in Lawrence were a group of slightly malcontented university students who managed to incite riots and burn the student union down in 1968. The end result being the Governor declaring martial law, sending in the National Guard, and instilling a 7-to-7 curfew due to unsubstantiated reports of snipers crawling all over the place.
Of course, if one's definition of Hippy merely means, "one who smokes pot," you might be on to something. Lawrence has to be one of the most drugged-out population centers I've ever lived in. I wasn't able to meet or hang out with anyone, it seemed, who did not ingest copious amounts of narcotics.
I don't just mean smoking a lot of pot either. I mean: smoking pot, dropping acid, snorting cocaine, shooting heroin, smoking meth, frenetically leaping upon any fungus you might find growing on the street in the hopes it will make you see little pink bunny rabbits, and so forth.
Lawrence, for lack of a better term, is quite successfully stoned.
The sad part of this drug induced narcosis is actually the awe-inspiring stagnation this creates in the community. Most of the student body is transient: in that they will come to Lawrence to attend university, graduate from the univeristy, and then move on to somewhere else. Very few members of the KU student body, and thus the population of Lawrence as a whole, are actually from Kansas, anyway--so they will be used to going to school in Lawrence, getting their degrees, and then taking off to another part of the country.
For the Kansans in Lawrence, though, the story sometimes ends up a little different. Most of the student body seems to hail from Chicago or St. Louis, thus inflicting a kind of pseudo-cosmopolitanism upon any poor hayseed who strolls onto campus from, say, Beloit. It kind of stunts some people insto a sense of false security, making them think they are--for lack of a better term--"the shit." Combine this with the flagrant drug use, and what you get is a population of folk who stay in Lawrence, inflated on Lawrence's somewhat hollow sense of importance, and who never get out of Lawrence--or even college. They just sort of float back and forth between the many temporary part time positions offered by local Lawrence businesses slowly getting older and older and becoming more and more stoned.
It starts to read like "Time" from The Dark Side of the Moon.
In a sort of conclusion--unless I decide to update or revise this at a later date--Lawrence is a decent place to visit, and an okay place to go to school if you can deal with the mods, indie rockers, emo kids, burnouts, and the fact that the campus station, KJHK 90.7 seems to playing larger and larger amounts of hip-hop over rock and roll these days. The trick is in not getting caught in the trap of the community, which is a kind of cultural egocentricism based on being a media flash-in-the-pan musically around 1993. Generally, people in Lawrence tend to think they are the center of Kansas intellectualism (which isn't saying much, sometimes) and the rest of Kansas usually forgets Lawrence even exists until college basketball season rolls around.
There has certainly never been an issue about going to Lawrence, Kansas--nor has there ever been any local ordinance conerning the mandatory nature of
skinny dipping in Boy Scout Lake (much less as there has ever been a "Boy Scout Lake" anywhere in the vicinity of Lawrence--maybe Clinton Lake was meant). In all honesty, you probably don't want to go anywhere in Lawrence without any clothes.
In three years of living there, I think I probably entered the shower totally naked maybe five times.