Berkeley Jaunt

We have explored a number of places over the past few weekends, but we have confined our local jaunts to this side of the bay. We changed that on Sunday when we hopped on a very crowded BART train and took it under the bay to Berkeley. I'll be spending a lot of time there in the winter and spring doing research at the Bancroft Library, which is currently closed for renovations and an earthquake retrofit. That's fine with me. I'll take comfort knowing that if the big one hits while I'm digging in the archives, I'll have a fair chance of surviving to work another day.

I mostly know Berkeley mostly through lore about the '60s. I recently read a book and saw a video about the town during that tumultuous decade, so I was curious if it bore any resemblance to the radical enclave it once was. Telegraph Ave., the main student drag, certainly has retained some of the spirit of that time. Old hippies sell bumper stickers, posters, and strangely, computer mouse pads sporting leftish slogans. Others sell various trinkets. (One was hocking--I kid you not--a chain mail bikini bottom. A potential Christmas gift for Dawn.) Besides that, the street didn't look that much different than the ones around other large university towns, such as the AVE in Seattle.

We were sad to learn that Cody's Books, a Berkeley institution, closed its doors for good just a month earlier. It had a reputation as one of the best independent bookstores on the West Coast. But it met the fate of other bookstores unable to compete with Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and the like. Cody's Books was also a home for students, faculty, and locals involved in the Free Speech Movement during the '60s. With its passing, another symbol of that era has passed. We went to Moe's Books down the street. Though not as famous as Cody's, it still is far better than any bookstore in Syracuse.

After spending an hour (and some money) at Moe's, we went to People's Park just off Telegraph Ave. For the casual observer, the park looks pretty much like many other urban parks: some trees and lawns, a basketball court, and bathroom. There are more homeless people there than in most parks, either in San Francisco or Syracuse for that matter. In 1969, the park became a battleground for the city's Free Speech Movement. UC-Berkeley acquired the land through eminent domain to build dormitories. Before construction began, locals and students attempted to turn the land into a park for community use. Eventually, the university erected a fence around the park. The protests that followed led to a violent suppression by the police; one young man was killed by a shotgun blast. Since then, the university has sought on occasion to expel the homeless from the park leading others to insist that the place belongs to all the people, including the homeless. Nearly thirty years later, bitterness endures among those involved in the People's Park riot. When asked at his retirement party in 2007 to reflect on his long career, Alameda County Sheriff Charles Plummer, who was a policemen involved in the confrontation at People's Park in '69, said "I wish I would have hit some people harder during the riots. I regret that."

There's stunning mural depicting this history near the park on Haste St. I've included a photo of it here. You can see more of the mural and others photos from our day in Berkeley on our Flickr page.