Public Comment

Things are different now, and it's time for thoughtful reconsideration.

People's Park itself is different, having suffered UC's chainsaw display destroying hundred year-old redwoods, oaks, and pine. Community resistance and a court-ordered stay put an end to the destruction. It's still People's Park, but now resembles the park some of us remember from 1972, a park with a lot of work to do to restore gardens and replant trees after UC's repeated efforts to destroy the garden that stopped a war.

The awareness level of community-wide resistance is different now, too. Few acknowledged before today the fact of the potential for violence over the park despite years of historic battles more famous than the university itself. Whoever it is among the UC regents, UC's administration, or city leadership who thought twelve stories of construction on People's Park would be easily accomplished knows what the Alameda County Sheriff's Office has plainly stated: this will not be easy and could cost lives.

But there's another important consideration, especially for a Berkeley City Council which has yet to even meet with representatives of the People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group (PPHDAG)[1], a group which successfully envisioned not just the historic Park's retention as open space but its use as the primary vantage point for the wealth of more than a dozen landmarked historic properties surrounding it like a necklace of architectural jewels.

The People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group's success in getting unanimous support at the California Historic Commission's hearing and the admission of People's Park to the National Register of Historic Places accomplished at least two crucial things. First, Berkeley's internecine squabbles over the Park's use, abuse, and future are no longer as important as its recognition as a national historic resource now belonging to the nation, not just the UC administration, a crucial repository of shared history.

The second is the recognition which should obligate the Berkeley City Council and the university to respect a national review process different from what little local process was offered to the public before this moment, a moment severely compromised by the pandemic in any event. People's Park is nationally recognized as a significant representation of our shared history, and its alteration or loss is now the legal purview of a much wider group of people who recognize the site's historic importance along with that of Kent State.

The Berkeley City Council lit the fuse, covered its eyes, and put its fingers in its ears long before People's Park's recent inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. It's time to listen and to reconsider. They can choose a bloodbath on southside. Or they can mark this moment by honoring the scholarship and research this effort took years to bring about with an appropriate ceremonial recognition when the Berkeley City Council comes back from its recess. It's time, at the very least, to recognize that we don't need to destroy parks to create housing given the abundance of alternative locations both on and off campus for not just more housing, but more parks, a recognition which is required by CEQA. The more housing we create, the more parks we need.

------------------------------------------------- Carol Denney is a co-founder and former advisory group member of the People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group