PEOPLE'S PARK IN BERKELEY IS STILL A BATTLEFIELD

People's Park in Berkeley Has Long Been a Symbol of Activism.
Debating Its Future, Some View It As Sacred Ground; Others See It As
a Blight on the Community.

BERKELEY -- Once an international symbol of political activism,
Berkeley's People's Park is suffering an identity crisis.

Homeless flock to the park for free food and clothing. But residence
counselors in nearby University of California dorms warn students to
stay away. Cleanup crews in the university-owned park regularly
remove needles, crack vials and other drug paraphernalia from the grounds.

In other places, a straightforward park rehab might seem in order.
But that's not so clear here.

Some still view the 2.8-acre park south of the UC Berkeley campus as
sacred ground that should not be touched. Almost everything in the
park carries a political history and message. The trees are named
after deceased activists, and the grape arbor is made from the wood
of a volleyball court the university installed on the property in
1991, sparking 12 days of rioting.

Others, meanwhile, have come to see the park as a blight on the
community and an insult to the high ideals of brotherhood and
community that marked its origins.

The debate over the park's future, which is up for discussion by a
university-appointed advisory board scheduled to meet today in a
Berkeley church, divides even those who marched for the park's
creation nearly four decades ago.

"Over time, people have come to realize that the park has not become
what they hoped it would be," said Berkeley Mayor Tom 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.

"I love the idea of having some kind of memorial recognition there,"
Bates said.

"But right now, it is not a place that a lot of people are
comfortable going to."

Police say the partly wooded park has become a drug haven, and they
want to clear vegetation and level grassy berms to improve
visibility. Nearby residents and businesses complain about crime and
the park's large homeless population.

"The park is for people who are on drugs or are insane. The rest of
us are asked to be endlessly tolerant," said Doris Moskowitz, owner
of Moe's Bookstore on nearby Telegraph Avenue.

But after years of frequently violent battles over the property, some
activists remain suspicious of the university's motives regarding the
park. The reasons for the proposed changes, they say, are nearly the
same as they were when the university acquired the property in 1967,
citing "hippie concentration and rising crime."

On a sunny afternoon earlier this week, 43-year-old Terri Compost
tended several gardens she maintains on the grounds and distributed
fliers proclaiming "No Bulldozers in the Park."

Compost, who changed her name to reflect her passion for organic
gardening, contends that police and homeowner claims about the park
are exaggerated.

"I really think the crime thing in the park is way over-hyped. A lot
of the crimes are just open containers or smoking a joint," said the
Los Angeles native, wearing a long peasant skirt and sitting on a
bench next to the "John Lennon Memorial Plum Tree" she planted some
years earlier.

Not far away, near the park's bandstand and speakers' platform,
workers from the Food Not Bombs peace collective served free vegan
food -- brown rice, lentils, tofu and bread with persimmons -- to a
long line of homeless park denizens. One of them, toothless and
wearing several layers of dress shirts, advised a visitor to "eat
more raw food" if he wanted to lose weight.

Another, 38-year-old Jon Reed, an unemployed health worker, said he
comes to the park several times a week for the food and other times
for the concerts and other activities. "I really think the people of
Berkeley have a right to adverse possession," he said, citing the
principle from English common law that allows those who continuously
and openly occupy property belonging to someone else to eventually
claim it as their own.

Usually, from 50 to 100 homeless people hang out in the park during
the day, leaving to find shelter elsewhere when the park closes at 10 p.m.

To Charles Gary, a Berkeley drug counselor and longtime park
activist, the main issue is economic, tied to rising Bay Area housing
prices. "The university is using neighbors and their inflated
property values as a way to take the park and reconfigure it into a
gated community's vision of security," Gary said.

Gary describes his fellow park activists, who maintain a nonprofit
website at http://www.peoplespark.org , as "a nebulous community
group of people who have kept People's Park in their hearts, working
to make sure that the university doesn't take history and turn it
into their vision of gentrification."

Irene Hegarty, director of community relations at UC Berkeley, said
the university has committed $100,000 to study ways to reshape the
park to better serve the public. Hegarty said the university has no
immediate intent to bring bulldozers into the park, though it does
plan to continue to thin vegetation to provide better sight lines for
patrolling university and city police.

"It's so dense in there that the beat cops have a hard time seeing
into the park," Berkeley police spokesman Ed Galvan said. "It's time
for a change. This is not the 1960s anymore. It's time for this to be
reworked -- update the lighting and knock down the vegetation." In
the last six months, Galvan said, police have made 56 drug arrests in
or near People's Park.

Some of those involved in the creation of People's Park in the late
1960s and in the battles that followed agree that the park today is a
depressing site.

"It's now become this somewhat forlorn urban park," said Dan Siegal,
an Oakland attorney who was a UC Berkeley student leader when the
park was created.

People's Park began as a vacant lot that students and activists
turned into a flower garden, and food-sharing and free-speech zone.

Before dawn on May 15, 1969, several hundred California Highway
Patrol and Berkeley police officers cleared an eight-block area
surrounding the park and began building a cyclone fence and removing
the plants and playground equipment installed by the park's founders.

It was Siegal's exhortation of "Let's Take the Park!" in front of
3,000 students on the Berkeley campus later that day that led to a
march down Telegraph Avenue to the park site and a bloody
confrontation with police and Alameda County sheriff's deputies. One
student was killed, another was blinded and more than 100
demonstrators were injured.

What's missing now, Siegal said, is historical context. At the time
that People's Park was created, Berkeley students had been in
conflict with the university administration since the Free Speech
Movement of 1964. Protests against the Vietnam War were escalating
and the countercultural movement that began in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district was at its height. Ronald Reagan was governor.

Control of People's Park was just one of several issues pitting
radical students against the university.

After years of skirmishes, including riots in 1972, 1979 and 1991,
the university finally abandoned its long-held plans to convert the
land to student housing or campus offices. Although smaller battles
continue today over crime, a controversial free-clothing box recently
removed by the university and the distribution of free food by
churches and charity groups, the park is no longer an issue that
concerns students.

Only a few students use the space, playing pickup basketball and
throwing Frisbees on the open grass.

"It is a place that no longer reflects the will for independence of
the campus community," Siegal said. "I think today if the university
turned off its Wi-Fi [wireless Internet access], they'd get bigger
demonstrations than they would for People's Park."

For "Samatman," a resident mystic and park regular, the whole issue
of ownership is illusory. "The truth is that nobody really owns
anything," he said.

Hunched over a paper plate heaped with Food Not Bombs lentils and
brown rice, Samatman said he was "ageless." Chewing his food
methodically, he described People's Park as an "island of sharing in
a sea of separation."

As for the park's crime problems, he just shrugged.

"Like everything else, it is a product of the wider society in which
it is located. Humanity as a whole is sick."