On an August afternoon, the soaring notes of a jazz band float across the green lawns and white-columned porches of Aspen’s West End. The peaks of the Rocky Mountains rise above the trees, reaching toward the late summer rain clouds that gather almost every day around dusk. A cool breeze rolls down from the mountains, carrying the first hints of autumn and the smell of wood smoke from nearby chimneys.
On Cooper Street, a steady stream of Land Rovers and Mercedes-Benzes make their way toward a stately Victorian mansion. The cars stop and dispatch a stream of guests wearing jewels, feather boas, and towering hats. They stroll to a large tent stretched across the mansion lawn. A band plays a ragtime tune. Waiters dressed in white shirts and bow ties hold out silver trays filled with Veuve Clicquot champagne, shrimp, and fried catfish bites. Bouquets of blue lilacs, roses, and wildflowers sprout from the tables. Over the next hour, more than 270 revelers arrive to kick off Aspen’s biennial Great Gatsby Party.
The guests are decked out in 1920s attire. The men wear white linen suits and vintage ties, with candy-striped shirts, knickers, and Panama hats or golf caps. They all play roles from the rich of the past—pre-Depression tycoons, suspenders-wearing “club men,” and zoot-suited gangsters with dangling pocket watches.
The women wear sequined flapper dresses and low-cut silk gowns. Jewels the size of ice cubes pour down from their tanned necks and ears. The early evening breeze has brought out a few mink shawls and ermine wraps from their summer hibernation. Bobbing along the top of the crowd are jeweled cloches and headpieces piled high with white silk and feathers.
A pair of vintage cars—one yellow, one red—frame the entrance. Fred Ayarza, one of the hosts and a longtime Aspen party fixture, stands at the gate wearing a white suit and straw hat. “Hello, sweetheart, you look beautiful.… There you are. Love ya! … Now here’s the nicest and most generous guy in Aspen! Hey, Bob! … Hi, darling. Terrific party last week.”
With a broad smile and bright blue eyes, Ayarza beams with pride at the turnout. “This could be our best year yet,” he says.
Shana Tyler, a curvy blond diamond dealer wearing a velvet-trimmed bustier and feather boa, clinks champagne classes with Dessire Curiel, an exotic twenty-two-year-old in a tasseled flapper dress who sells jewelry to celebrities such as Mariah Carey. “It’s a bit of an older crowd,” Shana says. “But boy, these guys know how to party.”
Jack Crawford, a retired oil man from Texas, wears a dark suit and a lapel button that says “I did time with Al Capone.” He sits at a table with a glass of champagne and chats with his brother and a few other friends about the good old days in Aspen. “I remember one of our first winters here in the 1960s. We stayed for a month and had all kinds of parties. The ratio of men to women in Aspen back then was very high, like four guys for every gal. So having a party was one way to even it out. We would invite two women for every guy.”
Many of the guests are recovering from the previous night—an Italian wine-tasting bash held at one of the co-host’s houses. “You have to come over,” the host says. “We have an amazing kitchen—it was featured in a magazine. And we have a great home theater. I’m not bragging, we just do. Other than that, our house is pretty normal.”
The chatter at the tables is filled with the typical preoccupations of the well-heeled—their travel plans for the fall, frustrations with finding good help, discussions of diets and doctors, stories of sending the kids off to college (“with two Amex Gold Cards!”), and the escalating battle between cyclists and joggers on Aspen’s mountain trails.
The Gatsby hosts—there are sixteen of them—form the core of a tight-knit group of wealthy Aspenites who host what seems like a nonstop party throughout the year. There is the Shit-Kickers Ball, held in May. There is the Fishbone Grill, held in August, followed by the Beach Blanket Bingo party, the Night in Tunisia bash, and many more. Betty Weiss figures the group has at least two parties a month, “probably a lot more.”
Yet of all the parties, Gatsby is the most sumptuous. In part, that’s because of the outfits. One woman who attended a few years back placed a special order with the Universal Studios costume department to get the perfect ensemble. “It’s the women and the costumes that really make this,” says Fred Ayarza. “The men are just props.”
The Gatsby party also stands out for its cost. This year’s event cost more than $50,000, all paid for by the hosts. It’s not held for charity. There are no causes to support, diseases to fight, or philanthropists to honor. Its sole purpose appears to be to drink, dance, and wear over-the-top costumes.
The party invitation, which featured a fake gemstone and pink feather adorning a woman’s shoe, quoted a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel: “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue garden men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and stars.”
That Aspen’s version of the Gatsby party was held during the daytime in a remote valley of the Rocky Mountains, rather than in the evening on the sandy shores of Long Island, didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the fact that there was a recession going on, with most of America looking more like Fitzgerald’s derelict “valley of ashes” than the blue-gardened East Egg. The guests had all gathered to celebrate what they called “the Gatsby values”—that sumptuous combination of wealth, exclusivity, and scenic hedonism that once made the rich feel so special. They saw Gatsby as a hero. The irony of the book appeared to be largely lost on the crowd.
In Fitzgerald’s book, of course, Gatsby’s world was one of corruption and moral decay, a symbol of all that was wrong with the entitled, reckless wealth of the pre-crash 1920s. As Fitzgerald wrote: “They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Yet to the guests sipping champagne on a summer lawn that afternoon in Aspen, paying homage to Gatsby seemed to be the perfect way to end the season, and an acceptable—even commendable—reaction to the troubles faced by the rest of America.
“Sure, times are tough. That’s exactly why we should be celebrating and having fun,” said one guest. “That’s what Gatsby was about. Enjoying life and success and sharing it with others.”
Their Gatsby party was Aspen’s final summer blowout, the finale to an eight-week stretch of parties and festivals that has become even larger than Aspen’s famed ski season.
Nancy Snell, the Gatsby party planner, stands near the dance floor recalling the other recent parties she’s thrown in town. There was the party at one of the town’s biggest mansions featuring acrobats swinging from chandeliers. There was the Egyptian-themed party, where the hostess was dressed like Cleopatra and carried in by muscular men dressed as Nubian slaves. There was a can-can party, the beach-themed bash, and a Western-themed party featuring naked cowboys painted in gold leaf.
“I’m gearing up for gay ski weekend now,” Nancy says. “They always have some great parties.”
As the sun begins to set behind the mountains, the wind grows colder. The Gatsby guests begin to gather their gold and silver clutches and drift out of the tent. Many are heading over to the Little Nell Hotel for an early Saturday supper.
The guests stop by to congratulate Nancy on the party. “Splendid, just splendid,” says one guest. As Nancy pays the band and hurries up the cleanup crew, she looks out over the empty tent. “I was trying to capture that line in the book about ‘blue gardens and champagne.’ It’s hard to do that during the day, here in Aspen. But I think we captured the spirit. I think Gatsby would have been proud.”
Indeed he would have. Because behind the glitz and glamour of the Gatsby party, the wealthy of Aspen have changed the town in dramatic ways. While they have brought visible improvements and huge amounts of money, they have also created economic and social messes that have proven difficult for others to clean up. And a town that once prided itself on its display of millionaires and billionaires is now learning the downside of depending on the high-beta rich.
The Ute Indians used to have a name for Aspen and its environs. They called it “the shining mountains.” And true to its name, Aspen has long been a town defined by great wealth and shine.
In the 1800s, Jerome B. Wheeler, a wealthy Macy’s department store partner and silver miner, snowshoed into town and changed its name to Aspen. He helped make silver mining Aspen’s growth engine. The town’s population soared to more than twelve thousand. In 1894, miners carved out a 2,054-pound nugget of silver—the largest in the world—from nearby Smuggler Mountain and paraded it through the streets of town.
Aspen’s first boom was short-lived. When silver crashed in the late 1890s, so did Aspen. Its population fell to under seven hundred, and the area looked set to become another of the many Rocky Mountain ghost towns left behind in the mining bust.
Yet forty years later, another rich visionary came to town: Walter Paepcke. Walter was a Chicago tin-can magnate who had an eye for art, literature, and philosophy. His wife, Elizabeth, was a highly cultured beauty who went by the nickname “Pussy.”
The Paepckes vacationed on a large ranch named Perry Park, just outside Colorado Springs. In the winter of 1939, Elizabeth Paepcke and two houseguests decided to venture to Aspen, which was rumored to have great skiing. They took a train, then drove the rest of the way through a blizzard. They stayed at the dilapidated Hotel Jerome and the next morning hitched a ride with some miners to the bottom of Ajax Mountain. After a long trek on their sealskin-covered skis, they reached the summit.
“At the top, we halted in frozen admiration,” she wrote in a memoir. “In all that landscape of rock, snow and ice, there was neither print of animal nor track of man. We were alone as though the world had just been created and we its first inhabitants.”
Elizabeth was hooked. Walter—who didn’t join that first trip—needed more convincing. It wasn’t until after World War II that Elizabeth dragged him to Aspen. He quickly saw the commercial potential. He built the town’s first ski facilities—founding Aspen Ski Co. and other ventures—while Elizabeth focused on the town’s cultural growth. She helped attract world-class musicians, artists, and architects. Their largest cultural creation was the Aspen Institute, which brought together the world’s leading thinkers for conferences and idea festivals.
They hosted the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, which brought two thousand people to Aspen in the summer of 1949. Dr. Albert Schweitzer spoke at the event on his only trip to the United States.
The Aspen the Paepckes envisioned was more than a ski town and winter playground for the rich. It was a cultural oasis, an “Athens of the West,” where great minds could gather to contemplate the world in a peaceful setting. The Paepckes called it the “Aspen idea,” which, as Walter put it, meant “a place for man’s complete life … where he can profit by healthy, physical recreation, with facilities at hand for his enjoyment of art, music, and education.”
The Aspen idea set the town apart from the other Rocky Mountain ski towns such as Vail and Breckenridge. It sprouted art galleries, poetry readings, musical performances, theaters, and a string of summer festivals that attracted some of the world’s top artists and performers. It became a haven for artists, writers, ski bums, and assorted cowboy bohemians who could rail against the establishment but live a comfortable and carefree life in the mountains.
Aspen always had plenty of rich people. But they were of a certain type—quiet, older money and frizzy-haired heiresses who lived in small homes with their multiple pets. They blended easily into the Aspen scenery. Few people knew or cared who was wealthy in town.
Michael Cleverly, an artist and writer who came to town in 1972, said the old Aspen was almost entirely devoid of class distinctions. “It was the most democratic place I’d ever been to,” said Cleverly, who grew up in Vermont. “There were really no class distinctions, at least none that I could see. I couldn’t believe such a place could even exist. You had ski bums and rich guys and celebrities, and in Aspen, you couldn’t tell the difference. No one put on airs.”
Aspen also had a colorful cast of local characters. There was Ralph Jackson, a local ski bum who took to the slopes in a top hat and bearskin coat. There was Freddie “Schnickelfritz” Fisher, a bawdy clarinet player who ran a novelty shop and used to ride in the July 4 parade with a toilet float. And of course, there was Hunter Thompson, the drug-addled, gun-crazed gonzo journalist, who came to Aspen in 1960 and moved to a private compound in nearby Woody Creek.
Jack Crawford, the oil tycoon, said that during the mid-1960s he and his brother would spend an entire ski season in town without anyone asking what they did for a living. Money helped defined Aspen, but it was rarely talked about directly.
The party scene and nightlife were also devoid of velvet ropes and VIP lists. “At our parties, and at all of the parties, it was a hell of a mix,” Crawford said. “You’d have a society woman next to a ski lift operator next to a construction guy. There was no stratification.”
Michael Cleverly said the arts and culture scene in town was also accessible to everyone. A couple of his friends launched the Aspen Center for Visual Arts, which showed work by artists from around the country. The shows were free, and they would usually get a local bartender to help out, doling out wine and carrot sticks for openings. Michael also helped host the annual Art Cart soap box derby, which usually ended with a big open party.
Starting in the 1980s, however, Aspen’s wealthy began to change. The quiet old money gave way to proud new money. Entrepreneurs, cable TV magnates, media tycoons, and the first wave of Wall Streeters started pouring in. A new breed of publicity-seeking celebrities, such as Don Johnson and Ivana Trump, came to town.
Speaking at a conference in 1987, an aged Elizabeth Paepcke warned of the ill effects of so much new wealth. “Are we going to kill the golden goose by feeding the animal until its liver becomes distended and we produce a pâté which is so rich that none of us can digest it anymore? What price glory?” She told a reporter that Aspen had “become a town of glitz and glamour … a nut without a kernel.” “My heart,” she said, “is broken.”
And that was only the beginning. The dazzle of the 1980s turned into the dot-com craze of the 1990s, which snowballed into the real estate and finance boom of the 2000s. Aspen became one of the richest towns in America, with a high concentration of billionaires, celebrities, CEOs, and Wall Streeters. Ironically, it was Aspen’s anti-establishment culture and artsiness that became a big draw for the America’s new plutocracy. There was also, of course, the appeal of other rich people, or what F. Scott Fitzgerald called in The Great Gatsby “the consoling proximity of millionaires.”
Aspen has always been a protected place for the wealthy, surrounded by steep mountains and national forestland. Yet by the turn of the twenty-first century, the rich had blanketed the town like an overnight blizzard. Aspen’s airport became a crowded parking lot of Gulfstreams, Lears, and Citations. One winter afternoon in 2006, the airport had to divert 150 jets because it was so jammed for space.
Many of the town’s mom-and-pop shops shut down, unable to afford the rents. They were replaced with luxury stores owned by global giants such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada. Knit sweaters and ski boots were out. Crocodile-skin handbags, fitted gowns, and diamonds were in. By 2008, Aspen had more than five stores selling fur coats, but only one drugstore (which also sells wine, liquor, and other high-margin goods to stay in business). The town’s last toy store shut down in 2010
Its last bookstore—Explore Booksellers—almost closed in 2007 before a last-minute rescue by billionaire Sam Wyly. Wyly, a conservative Texas financier, marked a stark contrast to the store’s former owner, a left-wing activist and book lover named Katherine Thalberg. Before her death in 2006, Thalberg railed against the rich, held anti-fur rallies, and raised money for Ralph Nader. Although Wyly, a book lover and writer himself, no doubt saved the store, some longtime locals criticized the purchase as yet another takeover by the right-wing rich. The Aspen Daily News, in its April Fool’s issue, lampooned the new ownership with a fake story about Ann Coulter appearing at the store to christen the “Ann Coulter Room.”
Aspen’s famously egalitarian social scene became highly exclusive. The casual house parties where construction guys mixed with heiresses were replaced by private dinners in the stone mansions of Red Mountain. Private social clubs such as the Caribou Club and the ultra-lite Aspen Mountain Club allowed the wealthy to keep the right company without bumping into the hoi polloi. Tightly guarded gated communities such as Starwood became the most desired enclaves.
The most dramatic change was in real estate. By the mid-2000s, the business of Aspen was no longer tourism and skiing. It was selling homes of ever-increasing size and value to ever-wealthier buyers. In 2006, $2.6 billion worth of homes were sold in Pitkin County, which includes Aspen. The biggest sale was the $47 million purchase of Crystal Island Ranch, an estate with multiple building sites. By 2008, the median price for a single-family home in Aspen hit $5.8 million, among the highest in the country.
Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan owned what most agreed was the most lavish spread in town—a six-property compound in Starwood that included a 56,000-square-foot main house, Hala Ranch, that has fifteen bedrooms, a spa, a beauty salon, an indoor pool, and 234 phone lines. The house was put on the market in 2006 for $135 million, a record at the time.
“This market got crazy, and I mean crazy,” said Joshua Saslove, a real estate agent and the king of the mega-mansion market in Aspen. “It was like the prices were set by two guys in a room smoking a joint, and one guy would say, ‘What do you think it’s worth?’ and the other guy would say ‘How about $10 million?’ And the one guy would laugh and say, ‘Good one. Hey, how ’bout like $20 million!’ And they would just keep going.”
Even with the hallucinatory prices, demand was so strong that real estate agents could barely keep up with the buyers. “We were order takers,” says Joshua. “All we did was take orders for twenty years.”
There is no question that the wealth improved many aspects of Aspen life. The Aspen Institute, now run by former Time editor and author Walter Isaacson, has become a global powerhouse of high-minded conferences, panels, and leadership seminars. Its board is filled with entrepreneurs, Wall Streeters, and former CEOs, and its annual summer Ideas Festival has become a kind of Davos West, featuring the likes of Alan Greenspan, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Gates.
The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, the Aspen Music Festival, Theatre Aspen, and Jazz Aspen have all become famous far beyond the town’s borders. While the ski season used to be the main draw, Aspen is now filled throughout the year with concerts, art exhibits, craft fairs, book readings, poetry contests, and food fests. Summer is now its busiest season.
The Aspen Art Museum, with funding from a new crowd of New York and L.A. collectors, is planning to move out of its current home in an old hydropower plant and into a shiny new 37,000-square-foot modernist building downtown.
“The wealthy have done a lot for Aspen.” says John Phelan, an affable New York hedge fund manager who, with his wife, Amy, is a major donor to the Aspen Art Museum. “They’ve done more than people realize.”
Aspen’s $43 million high school, one of the nicest in the state of Colorado, has also received property-tax dollars from the wealthy. The town has more than 250 nonprofits—from animal shelters to the hugely successful Aspen Buddy Program, which pairs mentors with disadvantaged youth—supported in large party by the alms of the rich.
Yet even the wealthy agree that the big money of the past twenty years has had some downsides. Aside from the usual side effects of gentrification—including social dislocations, class stratification, and $5 muffins—Aspen highlights a deeper problem. Rather than insulating the town from downturns, an influx of high-beta wealth may have made Aspen more economically unstable.
On New Year’s Day in 2010, folk singer Dan Sheridan was playing his usual gig at Sneaky’s Tavern, just outside of Aspen. With his baseball cap, button-down shirt, and guitar, Dan had become one of the unofficial balladeers of the laid-back mountain crowd.
He moved to Aspen in 1988, after a ski-bum friend suggested he come visit. Dan arrived with nothing but his guitar and a black trash bag filled with his clothes. He instantly fell in love with the town and the hiking, cycling, fishing, and jogging in the surrounding mountains. He got a job bagging groceries and slept on his friend’s couch.
Over time, Dan pulled together enough music gigs to make a living. He got married, had two kids, and was lucky enough to win the “lottery” to buy an affordable trailer in town. At forty-four years old, with soft blue eyes, a receding hairline, and scruffy chin, Dan has the weather-beaten cheeriness of many longtime resort workers.
For the past twenty years, he has carried his guitar from bar to bar, providing comfortable background music to skiers and tourists as they warmed up after a day on the slopes. He sang Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, and James Taylor covers, along with his own tunes. He wrote about the bucolic Rocky Mountain life, about the cold, clear streams and the warm people. On that New Year’s Day in 2010, Sneaky’s Tavern was packed, since it was peak season. Dan was winding down his act. He had performed many of his standards, including “Small Town Love,” “Be the Light,” and “All This Beauty.” Then he sang a song that was fast becoming a local favorite. It was called “Big Money Ruins Everything.”
I was walking my dog, down the old walking trail,
When I ran into a posted sign, “Pending Future Sale”
To some Hollywood mogul, who feels that he should
Build a mansion in the mountains, his “cabin in the woods”
They come here from Miami, they come here from L.A.
And bring a part of a city that will never go away
Like a fear of strangers, accelerated time
The sound of car alarms, in a town without crime
Like quaint wooden fences, patrolled security
Setting up borders where they never used to be
Down in their graves you can hear the miners sing
Big money ruins everything
Well, it happened in Aspen, and down in Santa Fe
It happens everywhere, when the locals move away
Because we can’t afford to live here, we can’t afford the rent
Unless we win the lottery, or live in a tent
I think big money sucks, please write that down
Please take a look what it did to this town
Trophy houses, trophy wives,
Trophy people leading trophy lives
Down in their graves you can hear the miners sing
Big money ruins everything
Say goodbye to all the artists, and people who can ski
Say hello to private golf courses and elective surgery
I think I’ll build a billboard at the entrance of this town
If you came to prove how rich you are, please just turn around
Please turn around, hightail and run
You probably already ruined where you coming from
So I went to the hardware store, but it has been replaced
With a boutique for trophy wives, with a reconstructed face
All it sells is handbags, stuff you’ll never need
Like fine Italian shoes, or tasteful jewelry
So we blame it on the landlords, blame it all on greed
We blame it on the excess, of the nouveau riche
Down in their graves you can hear the miners sing
Big money ruins everything
The crowd cheered and laughed. They loved it, which always struck Dan as a little strange, since many of his listeners—wearing shearling coats and custom-made cowboy boots—were the very people he was writing about. He wrapped up the gig with a rousing version of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” for a group of four-year-olds. Then he went home.
The next day he got a call from Aspen Ski Co., which owned Sneaky’s. A company vice president had been in the audience during the New Year’s Day performance of “Big Money Ruins Everything,” and apparently he wasn’t amused.
Dan was fired and asked not to play at any other Aspen Ski Co. venues. “Our job is to welcome these visitors to town, not to promote class warfare,” Ski Co.’s spokesman Jeff Hanle told the Denver Post.
Dan was stunned. He had never thought of himself as a class warrior—just a folk singer from Fredonia, New York, who liked to play for tourists. “Big Money Ruins Everything” was supposed to be funny. At least that’s what he thought.
After he was fired, Dan wasn’t sure how he was going to make a living. Aspen Ski Co. owned most of the bars and restaurants where he played. Without any income during the peak tourist season, he wouldn’t be able to pay his bills. “I was pretty bummed,” he said.
The next day, word of Dan’s firing quickly spread through town. Many of the longtime locals had had enough of the big-money crowd throwing their weight around and bullying people with their wealth. They were furious at Aspen Ski Co. The company’s firing of a folk singer, while it may have been trivial in the scheme of Aspen life, became a flashpoint for Aspen’s economic war between the rich and the longtime locals.
The Aspen Times wrote an article on Dan’s firing, which unleashed a flood of letters to the editor. Dan was barraged with supportive phone calls, letters, and e-mails. Denver TV stations and radio stations came to interview him. His church congregation burst into applause at Sunday services. Some Aspenites called for a boycott of Aspen Ski Co. to protest what they saw as a heavy-handed attempt to silence any criticism of the wealthy.
After mounting publicity, Aspen Ski Co. backed down. A company spokesman announced, “The Ski Company acted hastily, made a mistake and is now acting to repair that mistake.” He added that “the way it was handled was not proper” and didn’t match the company’s values.
The Aspen Ski Co. told Dan he could play at their bars and restaurants anytime—as long as he didn’t play “Big Money Ruins Everything.” Dan declined. By then, he had plenty of other gigs from all the publicity. And he didn’t want to work for a company that was so fiercely protective of the wealthy and their interests.
“If they want to be on the side of the Madoff crowd, on the side of all those people who have building contests to show how rich they are and who ruin all the open space and the mountains, well, good for them. I’d rather not be on that side.”
Until 2010, Dan had never even realized he had a “side.” He loved Aspen and most of the people who lived there. He’s always sought out the good in people, whether they had money or not. Some of his best friends are wealthy, he says. Yet he feels most comfortable with the people usually referred to in Aspen as “the worker bees”—the bartenders, waiters, cleaning ladies, musicians, writers, and artists who keep the place running every day as the super-rich blow in and out.
Dan didn’t see himself as a class warrior or musical activist in the Bob Dylan or Arlo Guthrie mode. He was a guy with a guitar who played fun songs for skiers. He was more in the mold of John Denver, the sunny folk singer who also lived in Aspen. As Dan tells it, “Big Money Ruins Everything” wasn’t written to become the anthem for Aspen’s anti-wealth crowd (though that’s exactly what it became). He wrote it to tell people about a bad morning he had on the jogging trails.
“I’m a big runner, and I’ve always liked running out in nature, in open space. One day I was running on one of my favorite trails in the east end and I noticed that the trail had been diverted for construction. So I’m running along this detour and all of the sudden this big guy riding an ATV pulls up with his walkie-talkie. And he’s very stern and he says, ‘Can I help you?’ So I said, ‘What?’ ‘Can I help you?’ ‘Um, no, you can’t help me. I’m jogging on the trail, thanks.’
“So the guy says, ‘Well, you need to get off the property now. It’s private property.’ I could see that the trail was next to some big development for luxury homes. It used to be a jogging trail that everyone used and now this security guard was telling me that I couldn’t run there anymore. I said, ‘Yeah, fine, I’m going.’ I was so angry that I went home and sat down and wrote the song. It was really about losing public space and nature to people who think they own it. And I guess they do.”
Dan didn’t play the song much at first. It wasn’t one of his favorites, “and I don’t think my best one.” But over time, audiences started asking for it every time he played. By 2010 it had become his most requested song.
“It was surprising to me,” he said. “Especially since the crowds are sometimes the wealthy. They never think it’s about them. They always assume it’s about someone else, about the guy who’s even richer with an even bigger house.”
Whatever the audience, “Big Money Ruins Everything” struck a deep chord. It summed up the discontents of Aspen’s longtime residents who watched their town become a Rocky Mountain wealth preserve. The song mourned Aspen’s lost soul. And it shone a light on the vanity and bling of the new rich, who clearly had their own version of the Paepckes’ ”Aspen idea.”
“We have an economic war going on,” Helen Klanderud, Aspen’s former mayor, told me at the Gatsby party. “There are a lot of people who would like Aspen to be like the 1970s again. Those were glorious times here. But that’s gone. To those people, if you’ve got money, you’re bad.”
Yet beyond the stereotypes and the typical complaints about high prices, “Big Money Ruins Everything” also spoke to a deeper fear among the town’s leaders. It was a fear that traced back to those old silver miners singing from their graves, telling the story of how they paraded their own giant nuggets of wealth through Aspen’s streets, only to see it all come crashing down years later.
It was a fear that big money could ruin everything, but in a way that was different from the hyper-gentrification described in Dan’s song. Rather than providing Aspen with economic stability, high-beta wealth may have made the town more prone to booms, busts, and sudden economic dislocations.
On a rainy afternoon in downtown Aspen, Mayor Mick Ireland is helping to host Aspen’s first Blues and Barbecue Weekend. The streets are lined with dozens of smoke pits cooking slabs of ribs, loins, and pork butts. For less than $10, visitors can get a paper plate piled high with pulled pork, a Coke, and two slices of white bread. They also get a free blues concert on the outdoor stage, set at the foot of Aspen Mountain. Despite the downpour, hundreds of families sit on bales of hay or dance in the mud to the music.
“This is what we’re trying to build more of in Aspen,” says Mayor Ireland, a lanky attorney in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, who first came to Aspen as a dishwasher and busboy. “We’re trying to let people know that they can come to Aspen even if they’re not super rich.”
Mick Ireland’s message marks a dramatic turnaround from the Aspen of the past two decades. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Aspen pinned its hopes on the wealthy. It kept property taxes low, so the rich would come and build bigger, more expensive homes. The hotels, shops, and restaurants raised prices so high that the town became unaffordable for all but the elite. Rooms at the Little Nell start at $500 a night during ski season, and the Chilean sea bass goes for $39 a plate at Matsuhisa, run by the international sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa.
Aspen’s tax revenue no longer came from ski boots, burgers, and beer; now it was from highly discretionary luxury items such as jewelry, fur coats, and handbags. “I think it became the implicit policy for a lot of businesses and nonprofits to focus on the very high end, the people with a lot of money,” Ireland said. “Some people thought that you would have fewer growth problems if you had a smaller number of people spending a larger amount of money.”
Their theory worked—for a while. The town’s tax revenues soared, and unemployment fell to under 4 percent. Demand for labor became so high that the rich began outbidding each other for household help and maintenance crews. Construction workers would often walk off a job because a richer person down the street offered more money.
Yet by the mid-2000s, the downside of wealth dependence started becoming clear. Among the biggest problems was the huge shift in the population from full-time locals to wealthy seasonal residents.
Between 1996 and 2007, the number of permanent residents in Aspen’s high-priced West End fell by more than half, even though the number of homes stayed largely the same. Aspenites call this “going dark,” since the wealthy typically spend only a few weeks a year in the homes, leaving them empty and dark the rest of the year.
Michael Cleverly says the shift has hollowed out many of Aspen’s most prized neighborhoods. “You go to the West End and people still have their Christmas decorations up until July 4,” he says. “They’re never there. Aspen is not their second home. It’s their ninth or tenth home. You know those satellite pictures where they look down at the earth at night and North Korea looks like a black spot? Well, that’s the West End, and now other parts of Aspen too. They’re like giant black holes.”
Mick Ireland calls it the “trick-or-treat indicator.” A former journalist and regional planner, Ireland loves to create maps illustrating Aspen’s shifting population and social trends. According to one map, a thousand new homes or housing units were added to Aspen between 1996 and 2007. Yet the number of voters declined by five hundred. “That tells me that we were converting a substantial number of full-time residences to part-time residences,” he says.
His findings are confirmed every Halloween. “On Halloween, kids go where the candy is. They’re very good at finding it. If you go back fifteen years or so, they used to go all over town, including the West End. Now there are no trick-or-treaters in the West End on Halloween. Why? Because there’s no candy there. The houses are dark.”
All those empty homes paying taxes might sound like a mayor’s dream. Seasonal residences generate revenues but use few services. Yet the extreme nature of Aspen’s wealth created a new set of problems.
As the seasonal homes for the rich grew in size, they needed ever larger staffs to maintain them—even when the owners were gone. One local politician described them as “cruise ships on land,” with their attendant armies of cleaning people, groundskeepers, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, wine stewards, art caretakers, and window washers.
Very few if any of those caretakers can afford to live in Aspen. So they have to commute from Basalt, Carbondale, or other towns more than fifteen miles away. All those workers driving in to town have created monumental traffic jams every morning, not to mention strains on other services such as law enforcement and health care. In Pitkin County, which includes Aspen, the percentage of the local workforce housed within the county fell from about 73 percent in 1985 to less than 40 percent, meaning that the county was increasingly reliant on imported labor.
“It’s a strange paradox,” Mayor Ireland says. “The more empty homes we have, the more workers we need to maintain them. Since there aren’t locals to fill the jobs, the labor comes from outside. And that creates traffic and all sorts of problems. The jobs may be growing here, but the population of people who can fill them is declining.”
The combination of more dark homes and more imported labor has created an increasingly transient community. Neither the wealthy nor their help really live in Aspen, yet they make up a large share of the economy. Just as the wealth boom and rising riches of the wealthy seems to be hollowing out the American middle class, it’s also leaving large holes in high-end communities.
On the surface, Aspen weathered the financial crisis and Great Recession better than most towns. Its unemployment rate in 2010 held steady at around 7 percent—less than the nation’s 9.6 percent. Its median home price has held fast at around $6 million. Aspen is unquestionably still a very rich town.
But behind the affluent exterior, Aspen’s economy is struggling to find a sustainable future. And high-beta wealth has made Aspen’s ups and downs more extreme.
The hotels and stores that once touted ever-higher prices are now struggling with big demand swings. The Jerome Hotel, which famously hosted Elizabeth Paepcke during her first trip to town, became entangled in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy because of a loan from the investment bank. The hotel filed for bankruptcy and was purchased by Chicago investors for a fraction of the amount offered for the hotel before the financial crisis.
The St. Regis Aspen, after suffering a decline in occupancy, was sold in 2010 to an unknown Delaware-based buyer. The shopping area downtown is now pocked with empty storefronts and For Lease signs.
Some of Aspen’s most prominent names suffered losses to their fortunes and reputations. The Bucksbaum family, the Chicago-based clan that controlled the nation’s second-largest shopping mall empire, lost more than two-thirds of its net worth between 2008 and 2009. The family’s company, called General Growth Properties, filed for bankruptcy protection because of its crushing debt load. The family’s stock, once worth more than $6 billion, shrank to a mere $25 million, though it eventually gained back some ground.
The Bucksbaums are among Aspen’s largest philanthropists, giving to the Aspen Music Festival, the Aspen Institute, the ballet, and other cultural institutions. While the arts groups declined to comment on the family’s giving, several town officials and arts patrons said some branches of the Bucksbaum family had dramatically cut back their giving.
Sam Wyly, the Dallas billionaire who bought the local Explore Booksellers, and his late brother, Charles, gave generously to local charities. Both came under fire in 2009 for alleged tax fraud. A lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that the Wylys used secret offshore accounts to hide stock sales and other assets. The Wylys have denied the charges.
Bernie Madoff also reached into Aspen’s pocket. While Palm Beach and New York got most of the attention, Aspen had dozens of Madoff investors who lost their life savings. Some news accounts put the losses in Aspen at more than $1 billion. Lenny “Boogie” Weinglass, a longtime Aspen businessman who owns Boogie’s Diner and a large clothing store in town, said most of the rich people he knows in Aspen have lost at least 25 percent to 30 percent of their wealth since 2008. “A lot of my bigwig friends got hurt bad this time around,” he said. “I know at least a dozen people who lost everything with Madoff. I know, let’s see, maybe six or seven people who were worth more than $100 million who are now worth maybe $10 million. And I know a whole lot of guys who lost 30 to 40 percent in investments or real estate. They’re quiet about it, and they like to keep a stiff upper lip in public. But lots of people in this town lost a lot of money.”
One morning I took a drive with Joshua Saslove, the Aspen real estate broker who helped pioneer the market for $20 million homes in town. When there’s a trophy property in Aspen for sale, Joshua is usually the one selling it. I asked him to take me to some of his most expensive listings. But rather than a tour of Aspen’s rich and famous, I got a tour of fallen fortunes.
First we went to a 7,500-square-foot mansion festooned with intricate wood carvings, digitally controlled window shades, countless flat-panel TV screens, and stained glass. The house also had two “safe rooms”—a dressing room and a bathroom—that became bombproof shelters when the doors were locked.
Joshua politely refused to talk about the owner. But I later found out he was a dot-com tycoon who had made hundreds of millions of dollars after selling his company. He and his wife had made large pledges to charity, and they were now struggling to honor their commitments in the wake of investment losses. They had spent more than $30 million to build the house, but it was listed for $16 million. And it still hadn’t attracted buyers.
In the downstairs media room stood a memory of better times—a life-size cardboard cutout of the couple, smiling and dressed for a black-tie ball. Their photos had been pasted onto a six-foot-tall piece of cardboard and propped up with a stand. Joshua stood in front of the couple and smiled. “They looked pretty happy back then, huh?”
Next we toured a 14,000-square-foot stone mansion that was part royal château and part dude ranch. The heated driveway led to an arched portico with a twenty-foot-high wooden door. The interior was filled with deer-antler chandeliers, Italianate fireplaces, onyx bathtubs, and giant flat-screen TVs. Along with the wine cellar, home theater, and gym, the property also had a guesthouse and a horse stable, which doubled as a ballroom and party house. Records show the owner is also a tech tycoon who, Joshua says without being specific, “had undergone some financial changes.”
Of course, real estate and personal wealth fell everywhere between 2008 and 2010. But Aspen’s losses, and the impact on its economy, were more dramatic because of its dependence on the high-betas.
Real estate sales fell by more than 65 percent between 2007 and 2009. That compares with the national sales-price declines of about 45 percent. Aspen’s median sales price spiraled from $5.8 million to $1.6 million—far greater than the national decline of 40 percent. Aspen’s consumer economy, relying as it did on people’s ongoing need for Gucci shades and tuna belly, also collapsed. Its sales tax receipts fell by more than 15 percent between April 2008 and April 2010—nearly three times the decline reported by Vail and other nearby ski resorts. The luxury bust left more than a dozen stores closed and one of America’s most expensive streets with empty windows.
At the same time, rents have not fallen far enough to lure back the drugstores, grocery stores, and mom-and-pop shops that can sell more everyday items.
“It’s kind of the worst of both worlds,” said one downtown retailer. “We got a town for the rich, but the rich aren’t spending. It’s not like other towns, where you have a middle class that needs to keep buying milk and bread and underwear every day. People don’t need to buy $20,000 watches. In Aspen it’s like someone just shut the water off.”
Local charities have also taken a hit. When local nonprofits depended on small donations from large numbers of people, they could ride out the economic cycles. Now that many nonprofits have bet their futures on a select few rich backers, some of whom stopped giving, they are scrambling to survive.
“There are quite a few people who are now avoiding my calls,” says Boogie Weinglass. “I tell them it’s okay to just give a little. But they just don’t want to have the conversation.”
Mayor Mick Ireland says the wealth shocks in Aspen have forced a radical change in thinking. Rather than being a megamall for millionaires, the town has to become a playground for the people, or at least the merely affluent. It has to figure out a way to lower the prices of housing, hotel rooms, restaurants, ski lift tickets, and just about everything else in town—a feat that many say is impossible. Yet the mayor says that reducing Aspen’s dependence on a small group of itinerant rich people is the only way the town will preserve its culture and its past.
On the same afternoon that the Gatsby party is winding down, with many attendees headed for supper at the Little Nell, the Big Aspen BBQ Block Party is in full swing. Hundreds of people are lined up for $5 lime pork tacos and Tennessee ribs slathered in sauce. The Otis Taylor Band is belting out its own brand of “trance blues” to hundreds of fans and kids dancing in the mud and rain.
The mayor, who helped create the festival, rides his bike through the crowds and chats with some of the longtime locals. He says the festival is a taste of the new Aspen, a town that draws families of all incomes and ages, and celebrates a history of arts and culture rather than wealth and status. He’s not sure how to get prices down at the hotels and restaurants. But at least, on this afternoon, visitors can get a $5 lunch.
“You don’t see many rich guys here,” he says excitedly. “In fact, lots of the people here are people I’ve never seen, they’re new. That tells me it was a successful event.
When I ask about whether it brings in more money and jobs than events like the Gatsby party, he laughs. “Things like the Gatsby party are great. We need those. But the block party tells me that you don’t have to be rich to have a good time in Aspen.”
By the spring of 2011, Aspen’s crisis seemed to be melting away like another winter’s snowfall, making way for another boom cycle to pop up from the empty shops and For Sale signs on East Main Street. Housing prices were once again smashing records. The Wall Street Journal named it the most expensive town in America, noting that Aspen had “formed its own orbit,” with the lowest-priced home in town—located in a trailer park—listed for $559,000.
Yet Aspen’s next crisis—and there will be a next crisis—will likely be even more extreme than the last. More than two hundred years after the silver bust almost wiped Aspen off the map, the town is once again home to a financial mania, this time from stock markets and asset bubbles rather than silver prices. It will never suffer another 1890s catastrophe. But hypercycles of euphoria and despair, and the strains they produce on the daily bonds of community, are now as much a feature of Aspen’s landscape as the snowcapped peak of Mount Sopris.
It’s not just towns like Aspen that are experiencing the sudden drops of high-beta wealth. It’s also the people and companies that serve the wealthy.