Opinion: People’s Park: It’s still there
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To call People’s Park blighted would be an insult to the poorly lit, urine-soaked alleys of the world. As a UC Berkeley student not long ago, I’d do everything to avoid passing through People’s Park, let alone use it as an actual park and spend time there during the day. The one time I was lazy enough to traverse it for a shortcut, a man barked like a German Shepherd at me and another solicited his pot supply.
So Rone Tempest’s article in the LA Times today about the park’s ‘identity crisis’ and decrepit state caught my attention. Particularly interesting was the quote by Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, a UC alumnus who, after his days as a student, was no stranger to protesting things like building dormitories when his wife, Assemblywomen Loni Hancock, was mayor.
‘Over time, people have come to realize that the park has not become what they hoped it would be,’ said [Bates], who joined the first demonstrations for the park in 1969 and who still keeps a piece of souvenir asphalt that protesters ripped from a parking lot the university later built on the property.
A primer: UC bought the land in the 1960s through eminent domain and, over a few years, let it devolve into a muddy pit, which didn’t please locals. On their own accord residents planted trees and grass, transforming the mud patch into a park. But in 1969, with the anti-hippie Ronald Reagan as governor, UC fenced off the land for development, triggering protests that resulted in one student being killed and many others seriously injured. It’s a 2.8-acre patch of grass, trees and shrubs that’s as much a part of Berkeley’s lore as the city’s views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The problem is, activists who vociferously demanded to keep People’s Park essentially that and promised to maintain it haven’t really kept up their part of the bargain. Shrubbery and trees (note the photo above*), many of which are planted by locals, now conceal much of the land and the drug use that goes on there. The Daily Californian, the student newspaper I worked at, played its annual flag football games with Stanford’s paper at (I’m not kidding) Ho Chi Minh field, a park further from the campus.
People’s Park does have historical value -- the best reason to keep it from becoming just another parking lot. Still, the city and university have every right to keep People’s Park from staying an unsightly pit. But, knowing Berkeley, I won’t be surprised if the park’s current identity crisis ends like previous ones, with People’s Park remaining a scary but useless patch of grass.
*Photo credit: D. Ross Cameron / Oakland Tribune