Berkeley isn't what it used to be.

More than a score of neighbors are suing an "Animal House" near the University of California campus here where over the years students have hurled chunks of roasted pig at passers-by during a luau, beheaded a chicken with garden shears, and twirled a flaming baton next to a neighbor's fence.
The off-campus cluster of houses called Le Chateau has developed a reputation for outrageousness that has forced even the open-minded to demand closure to the situation. On Monday, a small-claims court judge concluded hearing testimony from 21 neighbors, each of whom seeks $5,000, or $105,000 total, from the student housing cooperative association that owns Le Chateau.

A date for the ruling wasn't announced.

For 15 years, next-door neighbor George Lewinski has endured noisy pool parties, marijuana smoke and homeless people from the nearby 1960s landmark People's Park camping at Le Chateau.

"It's (like) a very bad frat house, with a kind of anarchist politics that welcomes all sorts of undesirable people," Lewinski, 57, said in an interview. His wife, a UC-Berkeley psychology professor, has used earplugs to sleep since 1989, he said.

Another plaintiff, Julie Morfee, 40, who resided in a different co-op while a UC-Berkeley student in the 1980s, said she's hardly an old fuddy-duddy but has to sleep with her windows closed because her back yard abuts the raucous Chateau pool.

"It's extraordinary and outrageous in an outrageous town," she said. "At its worst, it's like living next door to a pretty wild commune."

At first glance, Le Chateau, established in 1977, blends nicely into the residential neighborhood, though its Web site promotes it as "a crossroad for those who dare to express themselves" and "a social science experiment open for interpretation." The co-op, which is independent of UC-Berkeley, is a row of three large houses on a side street emblematic of any college town, a mish-mash of apartments, modest houses and restored Victorian beauties.

Chateau student managers and their landlord, the University Students' Cooperative Association, say the sensational horror stories are exaggerated and ancient history. They insist that Le Chateau's residents want to work with their neighbors but that the plaintiffs only want to shut the place down, an assertion that the neighbors deny.

"I want to stress that we want to be good neighbors and that we've been a making a good-faith effort to meet our neighbors and we're continuing to meet with them," said Ian Latta, 21, a UC-Berkeley junior who's co-manager of Le Chateau and a recent transfer from a Sacramento community college.

In Berkeley's tight housing market, the association is the city's second largest landlord, with 1,300 tenants, and counts 50,000 former tenants as "alumni," including Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

Of Le Chateau's 63 residents, 53 attend UC-Berkeley, and the remainder attend community college, Latta said. Le Chateau is part of a score of student-managed housing co-ops that charge a student $2,000 a semester for room and board.

Many of the plaintiffs in the suit against Le Chateau teach or study at UC-Berkeley, including Lewinski, a senior producer for the local National Public Radio affiliate and a journalism instructor at the campus.