History is not just what happened long ago. It’s also recent events that leave permanent marks on communities. One such event occurred just two years ago today, June 16. It was the collapse of a balcony on the Library Gardens apartment complex on Kittredge Street in Berkeley.

Six young people, five of them Irish students summering and working in the United States, were thrown into the street below and killed. I believe this was the worst disaster in terms of loss of life in Berkeley history since the 19th century, and it was entirely preventable.

There are things that Berkeley should do because of this tragedy and one of the most important is to remember. The balconies are gone from the building, and the building name as well. It has been repainted and “rebranded” and is now marketed as “K Street Flats”. There is a small impromptu memorial of candles, notes, flowers that some thoughtful people — I don’t know who they are — maintain on the sidewalk against an alcove of the building.

But temporary memorials eventually fade, and the owners aren’t going to remember, at least publicly; we have to.

Communities that have a strong and decent sense of their own history remember and recognize the bad as well as the good. There should be, on Kittredge Street near the building, a permanent and visible memorial honoring those who died and explaining honestly to passersby what happened there.

Coolbrith remembered

This past Sunday I attended an uplifting event in the Berkeley hills that also involved a permanent monument. About 25 people gathered to unveil a plaque honoring California’s first Poet Laureate, Ina Coolbrith, next to a pathway that has been renamed in her honor.

Catalyst of the renaming was Aleta George, who researched and wrote a fine biography of Coolbrith, and was a smiling and vigorous presence at the event. The renaming was brought about by a small group of volunteers including George, initially called together by Burl Willes, who has been instrumental in so many good projects about Berkeley history.

The Berkeley Historical Plaque Project, organized in the 1990s by Robert Kehlmann, produced the plaque with funding that came through the Berkeley Historical Society. The Berkeley Path Wanderers were also active participants.

(Ina Coolbrith Path, formerly named Bret Harte Lane, runs between Miller Avenue and Grizzly Peak Blvd, just south of the Creston Road intersection. Don’t worry about Coolbrith’s fellow poet, Harte, being diminished. There is still a street, and another path, named for him in the Berkeley hills.)

Rubber drive

Berkeley residents were responding to a call to donate rubber for the war effort by inundating service stations with rubber objects 75 years ago this week, June 16, 1942. Boy Scouts were also going door-to-door asking for rubber donations.

For the donors, the effort wasn’t as entirely altruistic as the “tin can” drive of several weeks before. The United States government was planning to pay penny a pound for any rubber turned in.

Albany house

Also on that date in 1942, Albany announced that a $5,000 “Hospitality House” for servicemen would be built with donated materials and labor on a loaned lot at Kains and Solano. “Preliminary plans call for a 36- by 75-foot structure for which C.M. McGregor will draw plans and furnish some labor.”

Was this building ever built and, if so, what became of it after the war? I don’t know. Today the Albany Theater is on one corner of that intersection and there are commercial buildings — two looking older than 1942, one newer — on the other three corners.