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BERKELEY — Half a century ago, Berkeley activists seized a chunk of a three-acre dirt lot where the University of California planned to build dorms and declared it a park for all people.

“The university has no right to create ugliness as a way of life. We will show up on Sunday and we will clear one-third of the lot and do with it whatever our fantasy pleases,” read a 1969 ad in Berkeley’s radical underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. It was signed “Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner.”

On cue, a group of activists showed up at the lot on April 20 and began planting trees and flowers. They served food and hosted a concert headlined by the rock band Joy of Cooking, kicking off a litany of political and historical events over the following decades at what widely became known as “People’s Park.”

Although the old stage remains, the music and anti-war speeches that once fired up crowds of rebels, idealists and weekend hippies have long faded into local lore. People’s Park has morphed into a napping spot for the homeless, a crime hot spot that today’s students mostly avoid.

But now the university is back, with another dorm plan.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ last year unveiled a proposal to build dorms at the park for about 1,000 students, part of her plan to add 7,500 campus housing units by 2028, double today’s total. A 2017 survey found that demand for campus housing far exceeds supply, and 10 percent of students went homeless at some point during their studies.

This time, however, the university is also planning to partner with a nonprofit developer to build apartments for 75 to 125 homeless people in the dorm complex.

In a letter to alumni, Christ said the 40 to 50 homeless people who congregate at the park most days often “tend to be the victims and not the perpetrators of serious crimes too often committed on the park’s grounds.”

She said the university “has a responsibility” to support the city’s growing homeless population by offering them supportive housing.

But to Michael Delacour, one of the original “founders” of People’s Park, the proposal isn’t an altruistic gesture as much as a way for the university to finally get its way.

“If the park were to go, it would be a loss felt around the world,” Delacour said. “Thousands of people every year had participated in People’s Park.The slogan is, ‘Everybody gets a blister,’ and in a sense everybody who played, performed, attended the concerts, they’re all going to feel the loss.”

Perhaps in anticipation of such skepticism, Christ’s statement announcing the latest housing proposal noted that People’s Park isn’t what it used to be.

“Whatever one thinks of the ideals that motivated the creation of the park, it is hard to see the park today as embodying those ideals,” Christ said. “It is equally hard to determine who the people are that benefit from the park in its current form.”

The development proposal must be approved by UC’s Board of Regents. University spokesman Dan Mogulof said it likely won’t be presented to the board until next year, although public meetings will be held before then to solicit feedback.

If all goes well, construction of the dorms will start in 2021, Mogulof said.

In the beginning

Local historian Steven Finacom has pulled old city records and curated a free exhibit documenting the history of People’s Park, on display at the Berkeley Historical Society through Sept. 28.

He says the park site encompasses six blocks once occupied by 26 structures, ranging from cottages to a 16-unit apartment building. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the university bought up the land, and in 1968 it tore down the structures in “a classic urban renewal scheme.”

The plan was to build six high-rises, he said, but the university couldn’t get the necessary funding so the property sat vacant and later was used as a parking lot.

Delacour, now 81, lives near the park in an apartment stocked with books about the turbulent times such as “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” as well as photos chronicling Berkeley in the 1960s.

“We wanted a place where we could talk about the (Vietnam) War, and it mushroomed,” he said about the early days of People’s Park. “The next weekend, thousands of people showed up.”

Soon, concerts were being held every week and more and more activists started showing up there instead of Sproul Plaza.

Another early founder, Wendy Schlesinger, says People’s Park helped shape the modern “communitarian ecology movement.” She remembers lines of people passing sod to one another to lay down, cooking meals together, dropping off supplies and donations.

“We turned a muddy, dangerous parking lot into something constructive and useful,” Schlesinger said.

By then the nation’s eyes had turned to Berkeley and People’s Park, Delacour said. Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan thought enough was enough and ordered UC to crack down, which it did by putting up a fence around the park to keep out trespassers.

That triggered what was meant to be a peaceful protest on May 15, 1969, but instead turned into “Bloody Thursday.”

Thousands of protesters rallied on campus, then marched to the park to tear down the fence. According to a May 16,1969, article in The Daily Californian, protesters threw rocks and shattered glass at the hundreds of riot gear-clad police officers guarding the park. The police responded with shotgun fire.

“They just opened up on us,” Delacour said. One of the bullets struck and killed 25-year-old student James Rector, of San Jose, who was watching the confrontation from a rooftop.

Rolling Stone reported 128 protesters were hospitalized, some with bullet wounds. One police officer was stabbed and three others injured from the rocks and glass, according to the Daily Californian.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the park continued to be a hub for protests and clashes with police. In a demonstration against the United States’ invasion of Cambodia in May 1971, protesters destroyed an asphalt basketball court the university had built. In the late 1980s, a group of people drove a 66-foot trailer onto the park, proclaiming it “People’s Cafe” and feeding the homeless.

The university made a few attempts to take back the park. In November 1979, it paved a portion of it for a student parking lot. But the next day, protesters — including then-mayor Gus Newport — tore up the asphalt. Some people set up tents and lived in the west end of the park for a while, according to the university’s website.

In 1991, while the city leased the park from the university, it attempted to install sand volleyball courts. That led to several days of violent protests.

In the ensuing years, the park became a haven for drug use and other crimes. Between January 2013 and April 2018, police were called there more than 10,000 times, according to the University of California. Yet, not everyone considered the park a dangerous place.

Berkeley resident Arty Finmann, 70, would go to the park several days a week to eat rice, lentils, cooked vegetable and other vegetarian fare served up by East Bay Food Not Bombs.

“I think people here are doing their own thing,” Finmann said. “Sometimes people are uncomfortable because people are acting out, either because of anger or drugs, and that’s unpleasant, but they’re their own people and that’s their right to do so,” he added.

Anthony Thomas, 60, has gone to the park for decades to hang out and says he isn’t bothered.

“I come here to unwind,” Thomas said. “I went to jail for this park before, and I’ll do it again.”

Under the university’s conceptual plan, the dorm complex will feature open recreational space and a memorial honoring the park’s historical significance.

Mayor Jesse Arreguin, who has publicly endorsed the plan, says the city’s housing shortage is too dire to pass on a chance to develop People’s Park.

“We can honor (the park’s) rich history, while re-imagining it as a place where all people can come together, where we can shelter our homeless and provide needed housing for our students,” Arreguin said in a statement.

Finacom isn’t on board, however, and points out that the university’s housing master plan task force identified other potential sites in 2017 for student housing, including the tennis courts at Channing Way and Ellsworth Street, offices at Bancroft and Oxford, the Upper Hearst parking garage and the Oxford Tract.

“It’s a battlefield, and a really important part of American history, one of the most important parts of the 1960s, certainly one of the most important parts associated with Berkeley,” Finacom said. “From my perspective, you don’t go building on battlefields. They’re to be remembered.”

Activists have said they’ll turn out to protest the university’s renewed efforts to build dorms. Delacour hopes so, but does wonder whether they’ll pack the same fervor as those in the late ’60s and 1970s.

Finacom thinks they will.

“It won’t be a bunch of 75-year-old hippies out there,” he said. “They’ll be out there, but it will be people of all ages who will say it’s important to preserve.”