Research

People’s Park Historical District

by Charles Wollenberg

It almost seems as if Berkeley invented the sixties.  No northern city was more affected by that decade than Berkeley, and social and political events in the city had a major impact on the nation and the world.  If there is going to be an historical district commemorating the sixties anywhere in the United States, it should be in Berkeley, California.

Consider the historical record.  In 1960 students from the Barrington Hall co-op crossed the bay to protest a meeting of the House Committee on un-American Activities at San Francisco City Hall.  Their action was one of the first significant political demonstrations of northern college students since the 1930s. In 1964 Cal students began the Free Speech Movement, the first of the great protests that hit American campuses during the ensuing decade, establishing the student New Left as an important political force. Berkeley’s Vietnam Day in the spring of 1965 started a decade of massive anti-war protests.  Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in South Berkeley and North Oakland in 1966.  By 1967 the counter-culture was well established in Berkeley and rapidly spreading through the rest of the country.   Young people flocked to the Bay Area, heading to Telegraph Avenue as well as San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury.  In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front closed down the Cal campus, striking for an ethnic studies college.  1968 was also the year the Berkeley School District began an unprecedented elementary school desegregation program that included two-way busing of Black and White children.

Berkeley naturally became a major target of the New Right conservative backlash.  That movement’s titular leader, Ronald Reagan, campaigned for governor in 1966, promising to “clean up the mess in Berkeley.”After his election, one of Reagan’s first actions was to engineer the firing of UC president Clark Kerr.  In 1968 and again in 1969, Reagan sent the National Guard into Berkeley, establishing something like martial law.  Reagan was the most influential electoral politician produced by the sixties. He owed very much of his initial support to his opposition to Berkeley and all it seemed to stand for.  Differences between Reagan and Berkeley activists during the sixties are still reflected in many of the political and social issues that dividecontemporary America.

All of these forces came together and acted and reacted upon each other in the conflict over People’s Park in the spring of 1969.  Student leftists, counter cultural idealists, ethnic activists, followers of the new ecology andwomen’s consciousness movements were among those who supported the park.  But the establishment responded with force to protect the university’s property rights.  Alameda County deputy sheriffs killed one man and seriously wounded several others.  And yet the violent confrontations ended with a massive, peaceful march, accompanied by music and pungent clouds of marijuana smoke.  Young women put flowers into the rifle barrels of equally young national guardsmen.

Probably no single event, then, involved so many of the diverse and often conflicting forces of the sixties than the struggle over People’s Park. It is altogether fitting and proper that the park should be the core of a proposed historical district.  If Civil War battlefields are preserved and protected to commemorate the great conflict of the 1860s, why not preserve and protect People’s Park to commemorate the profound social and political struggles of the 1960s?

It is a minor miracle that the park still exists as publicly owned open space available for preservation.  For the last half century, the University of California has barely tolerated rather than actively treasured People’s Park.  The university’s attitude of neglect if not hostility is at least one of the reasons for the park’s physical and social decline.  It is difficult to believe that one of the world’s great educational and research institutions, with brilliant faculty and talented students, cannot find ways to work with community members to make People’s Park a valuable resource that welcomes visitors, neighborhood residents, and students without turning away and marginalizing the poor and the homeless.  Accomplishing this would not only be consistent with the university’s mission of education and public service, but also with the best values andideals of the sixties.

The People’s Park story is part of the larger history of town/gown relationships in the South Campus neighborhood.  The area is part of a large parcel of land purchased by the private College of California in the late 1850s.  Then located in Oakland, the college intended to eventually move to its new land holding.  A portion of the property was reserved for a campus, while the college subdivided and sold rest of the land, including what is now Peoples Park. The College of California named thecommunity Berkeley and established a grid pattern of streets that still exists.  The new public University of California absorbed the private college and its land holdings in 1868.  When the university moved to Berkeley in 1873, the South Campus neighborhood began a period of rapid growth and development.

“Now one of Berkeley’s oldest and most important neighborhoods, South Campus is the site of twelve buildings and properties established as official Berkeley landmarks some of which are listed on the National Register as well.  Peoples Park is quite properly on that landmarked list. Probably the most distinguished Berkeley listing is the architect Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ Scientist, a National Landmark located on Bowditch Street across from the park.  The proposed People’s Park Historical District includes all nine National Register properties.  The district would help protect these sites from inappropriate development and allow them to be seen in something like their original state.

 Since the 1950s, the university has used its power of eminent domain to occupy and clear formerly private landin the South Campus district to build high-rise dormitories and other structures.  As a result, the neighborhood is one of the most densely populated in the Bay Area.  Ironically, People’s Park is on land the university seized and cleared but did not develop.  As a result, it is the only piece of open space in an otherwise crowded urban environment.  Developing it as a welcoming community park at the center of an historical district would be a tremendous benefit to the neighborhood and an important contribution to good and proper town/gown relations.

But the university has other plans for People’s Park.  After more than fifty years, university administrators propose destroying the park and developingthe land for student housing.  There is no doubt that Berkeley, like the rest of the Bay Area, suffers from a critical shortage of affordable housing.  In Berkeley’s case, the university contributed to the problem by allowing the number of students to grow well beyond UC’s own long-range plans.  But in spite of the housing shortage, Cal would never build dormitories on Faculty Glade or tear down the Eucalyptus Grove to make way for faculty apartments.  Like these properties, People’s Park should be off limits for development.  The university has identified eight other sites for student and faculty housing.  Why can’t Cal build the needed new units on these sites, while maintaining People’s Park as open space?

There are precedents for the People’s Park Historical District.  Berkeley already has such a district surrounding Civic Center Park.  In the South Campus neighborhood, the university bought the site of the Anna Head School for Girls several years ago, when the school moved to a new location.  University planners sought to raze the old buildings and replace them with modern facilities.  But popular opinion and pressure convinced Cal administrators to renovate the historic brown shingle structures, some of which date back to 1892.  The buildings are used for various university purposes, while still gracing the neighborhood with their historic presence.  The site, located on Haste Street opposite People’s Park, is a Berkeley landmark listed on the National Register.  It is an example of town/gown cooperation that can serve as an exampleof how to proceed in establishing the People’s Park Historical District.

History is not the past itself but rather the present’s attempt to make sense of the past.  That’s precisely the purpose of the People’s Park Historical District—to document the sixties in the context of the longer story of town/gown relations and to make sense of this important decade and its impact on the present and future.  If Berkeley all but invented the sixties, surely the city and its university should be able to commemorate that decade by preserving People’s Park as the heart and soul of a vital historical district.