UC Revives Plans for Dorm : New Controversy Simmers at Berkeley People’s Park

BERKELEY —  Twenty years after its creation amid radicalism and bloodshed, People’s Park in Berkeley is again the center of controversy. The issue is the same as the one that sparked riots in the passionate spring of 1969: whether the University of California should build a dormitory there.

The debate has been revived even as the park’s history as a center of the Vietnam War-era protest movement is being commemorated with a street fair today and lectures and concerts over the next few weeks. Complicating matters, the park continues to be a troubled resting spot for the homeless, who frighten off some passers-by.

“It is ironic that this current dispute about the park is occurring on the 20th anniversary,” said Dan Siegel, UC Berkeley’s student body president in 1969 and now an assistant city attorney in San Francisco. Siegel was influential in the initial attempt to block construction on the UC-owned lot that students, hippies and activists had turned into what the Berkeley Barb newspaper called at the time “a cultural, political, freak-out and rap center for the Western world.”

One person was killed, another blinded and hundreds injured in the students’ confrontation with sheriff’s deputies and National Guardsmen in mid-May, 1969. In the two decades since, various ideas, including leasing the land to the city, have been put forward and died. Recently, UC presented a scaled-down but still criticized version of its original plan.

In the new proposal, the university would build a low-rise residence for 200 students, a dining hall and an underground garage on about a third of the 2.8-acre property, with the rest remaining as open space and playing fields. The plan is part of a UC push to add living quarters near the campus for as many as for 3,000 students who otherwise might be forced to live far away in increasingly expensive apartments.

But many people in the city consider the park to be the symbolic soul of Berkeley, a sort of hallowed ground.

“You wouldn’t build a dormitory on the battlefield of Gettysburg,” said Mayor Loni Hancock. The only appropriate building at the park, she said, would be a museum about the 1960s and Berkeley’s pivotal role in events of that time.

Pledge of Resistance

Community activist April Buckner said she and many others will physically resist any dormitory on the site. “If they tried to put up a fence, we would rip it down,” she said. “If they come with a bulldozer, we will put ourselves in front of the bulldozer.”

According to UC officials, an important goal of building the dormitory is to reclaim the park from the homeless and drug dealers, who scare most students away. An architect’s drawing of the project shows a cheery game of volleyball in progress.

Some community activists say UC is responsible for bad conditions in the park. They, along with city officials, want the park cleaned up but left entirely open. The park, they say, should be an oasis in the densely populated area that is about to get a lot more crowded with other university projects.

Local governments have no control over UC developments within their boundaries, a fact that causes much town-and-gown tension. But that has made no one shy in Berkeley, where arguing UC policy is what football is to other communities.

Signifies Conflict

In a recent editorial, the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, declared: “People’s Park, more than any other local issue or symbol, signifies not only our past but the ongoing battle for power and control between the University of California and the City of Berkeley.”

Last month, nearly 300 people, many angry at the university, packed a City Council meeting about the park plan. The council voted 6 to 3 to urge UC to transfer ownership of the land to the city on unspecified terms. Although the student body is divided on the issue, the current student body president and nine former ones, including Siegel, sent the school letters of protest against the dormitory plan.

Such reactions seem to have taken university officials aback. Last week, UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman said he was “open” to further discussion about the park.

“Any thoughts I have are really tentative,” he said at a news conference announcing the university’s building plans for the next 16 years.

Under those plans, the school’s total enrollment would not grow. But 48% of UC Berkeley’s 30,000 students would live in university-owned or affiliated housing, up from the current 30%.

Mayor Encouraged

Mayor Hancock pronounced herself encouraged by Heyman’s statement, but warned that the city would not accept everything else UC might propose in exchange for an open park. “The fate of the city, environmentally and economically, is at stake,” she said. “The park is a piece of that, a very important piece of that, but just one piece.”

UC Regents will make the final decision. Some regents may be unwilling for political reasons to abandon the property that UC purchased for $1.3 million in 1967. Yet the board is much less conservative than it was under Ronald Reagan’s governorship and some regents may be happy to get the 20-year-old tangle out of their hair.

Meanwhile, no one wants the park to stay in its current troubled state.

People’s Park fills most of a block just behind Telegraph Avenue’s cafes between Haste Street and Dwight Way, three blocks from the campus. On its western side, closest to Telegraph Avenue, community activists have planted gardens and trees, with UC’s permission, and keep that section tidy and attractive. At the edge of the gardens is a wooden platform for concerts and festivals.

The other day, volunteer John Hart was out working with his gasoline-powered weed whacker. “There are very few real urban parks,” said Hart, a free-lance book editor. “This one has a lot of potential. It’s comforting to be here, at least that’s how I feel.”

Nearby, about 30 homeless men were sprawled on the large lawn at the park’s center. Some were sleeping next to shopping carts filled with their tattered possessions. Some were roughhousing with each other and asking the few other visitors for change.

Several charities bring food to the park regularly but university police forbid overnight sleeping in the park. The homeless often use the area of trees and bushes at the eastern edge as a toilet. Earlier this week, two portable toilets at the park’s northern edge were filthy and their doors were broken.

The university has foiled attempts by activists to build permanent toilets in a corner of the park. Last month, UC workers removed a cement foundation for a restroom. And on Friday morning, university police and grounds workers tore up a new foundation and removed eight people from the site. Officials said permission for the construction had not been granted.

Lisa Stephens, a UC Berkeley graduate who is a coordinator of today’s fair, said the university blocks attempts to improve the park and then uses the resulting problems as an argument to build the dormitory--allegations denied by UC officials.

University officials stress that they spend more per acre on maintenance and security at People’s Park than on any other property. As part of the dormitory plan, UC would help create a daytime service center for the homeless a few blocks away.

271 Arrests in 1988

According to campus police, there were 271 arrests at the park in 1988, including 140 involving drugs and 26 involving weapons possession. The arrests reportedly accounted for about 18% of all violent crimes committed on UC Berkeley property that year. Police said, however, that park crime has not increased much in recent years.

Most of the arrests result from fights among the homeless, not attacks on other visitors, said Stephens, who works as a research gardener for the university. “It’s not that bad compared to other parts of Berkeley,” she said. “There are no drive-by shootings, no big-time crack dealers.”

Albert Flor, a student senator who supports housing in the park, said current conditions are a mockery of what the park’s founders envisioned. “The initial ideals of the park are just gone,” he said. “Even the homeless people are preyed upon.”

The ideals behind the park were a strongly held, if a bit jumbled, belief that young people and radicals should defy UC in the same way they tried to defy conduct of the Vietnam War. But then-Gov. Reagan and the UC Regents did not go along.

Volunteers Create Park

In June, 1968, the university demolished existing houses on the property, which then became a muddy mess. On April 20, 1969, hundreds of volunteers showed up with shovels and sod to create a park. Work continued through May 15 when authorities put up a fence, planning to create interim playing fields and a parking lot until funds for a dormitory could be budgeted.

A big rally on campus poured down Telegraph Avenue into a confrontation with authorities. Street fighting continued for a few days, with Reagan calling out the National Guard and a helicopter at one point spraying tear gas from the air.

Students boycotted the playing field for several years and the fence finally came down in 1972 after other protests. The western side then became a free-for-all parking lot until 1979 when the university tried to start charging fees and protesters ripped up the pavement with pickaxes. UC then dropped the idea of a paid lot and has since warily negotiated park use with community activists.