I was in Berkeley on Saturday - what for, I'll recount later - so I got a chance to see what's been done to People's Park. Both flanking streets, Haste and Dwight, are blocked off half a block below at Telegraph, and Bowditch, the cross street, a block above at Channing. Haste is blocked a full two blocks up to College Avenue, though Dwight not so far. I didn't see what they've done at Hillegass or Regent.
The blocks consist of barricades across the streets and sidewalks, a small fleet of Highway Patrol cars - which could have been out patrolling the highways - parked blocking each street two or three rows deep, and a lot of people looking like private security guards standing around, ensuring that not only cars but pedestrians were not allowed in. All the businesses in those areas are therefore closed; what the residents do I have no idea. This has been the status for several days now.
Where it's possible to look inside, cargo shipping containers, stacked two high, surround the park itself on all sides, blocking it from view or access. It's a thoroughly authoritarian, even fascist, sight.
What's going on requires an explanation of what People's Park is. In the early 1960s, the University of California, whose campus abuts the neighborhood on the north, condemned three half-blocks in this built-up district around Telegraph Avenue - the main business/residential service district to campus, and the heart of what "Berkeley" means in popular culture - to build high-rise student dormitories. They're still there; I lived in one for two years when I was a student.
In 1967, the university condemned a fourth half-block and tore down the existing buildings but never built the dorms. It just sat there, an ugly empty lot full of mud and abandoned cars, for two years. Then the protest movements took note of it. These had begun with the Free Speech Movement on campus in 1964, and continued with civil rights and anti-war protests, mostly held in the campus plaza adjacent to the end of Telegraph. A speaker said, that land is a blight and it's not being used; let's turn it into a park. So they did: went in and cleaned it out, planted trees and grass and gardens and turned it into a public space.
The authorities responded in the most heavy-handed fashion: called in the police, erected metal fences around the park. The people tore them down; the conflict became violent; many people, not all of them protesters, were shot by the cops, one fatally; Governor Reagan and his aide Ed Meese called in the National Guard, which occupied downtown Berkeley a mile away.
In the end the official forces withdrew and the park was allowed to stay. Every few years the university would try to block it off or build some sports facilities or a parking lot, and the barricades or construction would get torn down. So the park has stayed for over 50 years. It's grungy and attracts the homeless - who are around a lot anyway - and crime - that's around a lot too - but it's a monument. It's an official city cultural and historic landmark and it's even on the National Register of Historic Places.
What it means to people was shown to me one day in the mid-80s. I was hanging around at The Other Change of Hobbit, the SF bookstore in the neighborhood, when an SF fan from the east, whom I and the proprietors knew by name, came in. She was a young woman whose presentation could best be described, in the language of the time she was evoking, as "hippie chick." She'd never been to Berkeley before and was interested in seeing the historic sites she'd read about. So I volunteered to show her around. We went everywhere in the neighborhood from the patch of sidewalk on the edge of campus that the Free Speech Movement was fought over, on down. And when we turned the corner and I gestured to the green space in front of us and said, "And this is People's Park," she ran forward, dropped to her knees, and kissed the ground.
So with that degree of cultural importance and holiness, really, and the degree of defense the park attracts to any attack on its integrity, it takes a real fascist crackdown, timed for intersession when few students are around, to overcome it. The university authorities have been saying sanctimonious things like "We wish we didn't have to do this," but they don't. They only have to do it to destroy the landmark that fifty years of the people of Berkeley have wanted there, and have defended with their bodies and their lives. They call this defense "violent" and "unlawful," but what's violent and unlawful, or at least unethical and obscene, depends on viewpoint, and most of us who love Berkeley prefer the anti-fascist viewpoint.
It's likely to stay as this gash on the neighborhood for some time, as the authorities still don't have permission to build the dorms - something to do with environmental impact requirements, I think. True, the university needs more dorms, even though more have since been built. But it's needed them since 1967, and it didn't build them then. But the neighborhood also needs open space, which the park provided, and historic landmarks, which it's been one of for a long time now, deserve respect.
The defense of the park is defense of our democratic traditions and institutions, which is why the police actions to destroy the park are the entire opposite of the police defending the Capitol from an anti-democratic insurrection on a previous January 6; I hope that's clear?
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