People’s Park near UC Berkeley, where questions over its fate have inspired student protests for decades and led deputies to kill a man and blind another on infamous “Bloody Thursday” in 1969, is again being considered for development.

This time, UC Berkeley is eyeing the grassy 2.8-acre park as one of nine sites for development to alleviate one of the worst shortages of student housing in campus history.

“It is such an urgent issue,” said Carol Christ, UC Berkeley’s interim executive vice chancellor and provost, who chaired the committee that produced a draft report of student-housing recommendations she will present to the UC regents on Wednesday. “We have increasing reports of student homelessness, and students trying to live in academic buildings.”

The campus is 6,900 beds short of the 15,600 it needs to meet goals to house half of its undergraduates and a quarter of its graduate students, according to the report.

Students are often stumped by Berkeley’s high rents, which average $2,600 for a one-bedroom apartment and $3,200 for a two-bedroom, Christ said.

The nine sites could house 4,400 students — including 200 to 350 in a People’s Park residence hall, according to the report.

The draft report proposes not only dorms for the People’s Park site, but “long-term indigent housing with services,” as well as “open space and a memorial to the People’s Park history.”

Christ said that before moving ahead with student housing in People’s Park, UC wants to work with the city of Berkeley to help the dozens of homeless people who live there. She plans to hire a social worker and has tapped Sam Davis, architecture professor emeritus, to serve as the park’s liaison with the city and as her assistant on the matter.

“We’re teaching (social justice) to our students, so we should demonstrate it ourselves” by helping create supportive housing for the homeless, Christ said. “We own the land, but we’re essentially running a daytime homeless shelter in the park. It’s a safety problem.”

Considering the park’s deadly history, however, it’s unlikely that Christ will even mention the sizzling hot phrase “People’s Park” when she presents the recommendations to the regents Wednesday at their meeting in San Francisco.

The regents first considered student housing for the property at 2556 Haste St. when President Dwight Eisenhower sat in the White House. But in the 1950s, the regents didn’t own the land dotted with the homes of professors and others who had no wish to sell.

In 1967, the regents used eminent domain to force them out, paying out $1.3 million. They bulldozed the homes — then ran out of money. What had been a block of cozy homes soon became a deserted junkyard.

UC administrators considered turning it into a recreation area, Davis wrote in “People’s Park: It’s Time for a Change,” his 2015 blog. But students were also hatching a plan to turn the rubble-strewn field into a park where the ideals of the Free Speech Movement of 1964 could percolate. As both sides negotiated, “Gov. Ronald Reagan, in an attempt to solidify his conservative political reputation, intervened by sending police to remove landscaping that had already been planted by park proponents, and to fence the park,” Davis wrote.

That act, on May 15, 1969, led to the day’s infamous Bloody Thursday designation and embedded People’s Park in history and in the hearts of generations to come.

About 3,000 students marched from Sproul Plaza as Dan Siegel, the student body president-elect, shouted, “Let’s take the park!” Encountering more than 100 police officers from UC and the city, they tried to yank down the fence. As students threw bottles and bricks, police responded with tear gas.

Then Reagan sent sheriff’s deputies with shotguns. Hundreds of officers in riot gear, facing off against a crowd that had doubled in size, began shooting. James Rector, 25, of San Jose, was struck as he stood on a rooftop watching the surreal scene. He died four days later. Alan Blanchard, a carpenter, lost his eyesight. More than 100 others were treated for injuries that day, many of them gunshot wounds.

“Ultimately, the university capitulated on the use of the land, and People’s Park was born,” Davis wrote. “The park was a symbol of community autonomy and self-determination that many feel must be preserved as a touchstone of the historic societal changes of the times, and as a memorial to victims of the police action in 1969.”

One of them is Michael Diehl, 61, who wears a thick gray beard and a button pinned to his black fedora reading, “Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.” As a denizen of People’s Park, he holds strong views on the subject.

“We think they should build housing,” he said. “Just not here.”

Diehl and his friend, a man in a knit cap who gave his name as Condor Twinkles and his age as “infinite,” gestured to a dilapidated platform known as the People’s Stage. It looked as weather-beaten as Diehl and Twinkles, who accused UC of blocking efforts by the homeless to fix it up.

“They want to make the park look bad” to foster public opposition, Diehl said.

Back to Gallery UC Berkeley ponders People’s Park for housing in... 15 1 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 15 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 10 of 15 Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle 2017 11 of 15 Photo: John Storey, San Francisco Chronicle 12 of 15 Photo: Vincent Maggiora, San Francisco Chronicle 13 of 15 Photo: Vincent Maggiora, San Francisco Chronicle 14 of 15 Photo: Dave Randolph, San Francisco Chronicle 15 of 15





























Lydia Gans, 86, of Food Not Bombs, which delivers free food daily to homeless people in the park, said UC won’t let people store gardening tools in the park and has ignored requests for a compost bin. For 20 years Gans has fed the park’s homeless, and the other day helped serve a feast of vegetable stew, fruit salad, homemade chocolate cake and raspberry tart to dozens of hungry men.

“The park means so much to these people,” she said. “To build more of these ugly structures” — she pointed to a nearby glass and concrete university dorm — “is terrible. This is one place people have fought for for so many years.”

Gar Smith of Berkeley, a retired journalist and former student activist who lost his home to UC’s bulldozers in 1967, called it sacrilege to build housing on People’s Park. It would be a “gift to developers” disguised as a “bouquet of roses,” he said.

Siegel, now an Oakland lawyer who led the charge to “take the park” 48 years ago, said it makes little sense to develop a rare green space with historical value. As for housing the homeless, “I think another spot would work better,” he said.

Today’s student body president, Will Morrow, said that any effort by UC to take back the park “would garner widespread opposition among many students.”

Davis, who is spearheading the People’s Park project for UC, said he’s not sure what the next step will be. But he said it’s time to take it.

Davis was among 30,000 people who marched through Berkeley in 1969 to express horror at Rector’s killing two weeks earlier, and love for the park they claimed as their own.

In the decades that followed, protests arose whenever UC tried to develop the site. In 1971, 44 people were arrested when the campus tried to build a soccer field there. A year later, a crowd ripped down a chain-link fence UC put around the park. And when the university paved an area near the stage for paid parking in 1979, protesters, including Mayor Gus Newport, ripped it up in one day.

A riot ensued in 1991 after UC installed volleyball courts. Brandishing a machete, protester Rosebud Denovo broke into Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien’s house and was killed by police. The volleyball courts lasted six years. The only structures there now are the stage, a basketball court, a playground and a bathroom.

“I feel the park no longer reflects the intentions of the original park activists and volunteers,” Davis wrote in his blog about the park, citing 800 needles found there, sexual assaults and other crimes. And so, he said, it’s time to develop People’s Park into housing for the homeless, dorms and a memorial to its history.

“Maybe the stars are aligned this time,” he said.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov