By Lydia Gans, Special to the Planet
Thursday October 01, 2009
People's Park: Still Blooming, brilliantly compiled by Terri Compost,
longtime Park activist and gardener, is a book that grabs your
attention. On the cover is a captivating picture of a sweet-faced
child peeking out from behind a flower, and, as you look more
closely, below it a vaguely familiar black and white photo of a mass
of soldiers standing at attention, wearing gas masks and armed with
bayonets. The 190-page book contains hundreds of photographs
interspersed with short segments of text culled from museum and
newspaper archives, and conversations and recollections from a wide
variety of sources. It's an unusual way to construct a book, but it
works well.
The book starts with the history of the park. It is not always a
pretty story. Jesse Palmer, in his preface to the book, writes that
the university "(disputably) legally owned the land." Where the park
is now, there were houses. The story begins in June 1967 when UC took
over the houses, by purchase or by eminent domain, evicted everyone
and destroyed the houses. It announced that it planned to build a
dormitory on the site. It turned out Cal didn't have the money to
build, nor even enough to clean up the debris-littered lot. It stayed
that way for almost two years.
Finally, on April 20, 1969, a call went out to the community, and
hundreds of people gathered to turn the site into a park. They
cleared the land, planted trees and flowers, built a children's
playground. For three exhilarating weeks they came and created a true
community park while the university dithered. Terri has many quotes
in the book about those heady days of park building. A woman recalls,
"We were seeing ourselves as basically fighting for the children.
This was an unbelievable beautiful place and the energy, the
multi-level, the strata, rich, poor, middle-class, working homeless,
it was a place for everyone and it was incredibly compelling to be
there, that energy was so full of love and joy." Someone else wrote,
"It was a very special experience for Americans. ... It was a time
when you were working and you were actually believing in what you
were doing." And there was the member of the Berkeley City Council
who warned the Board of Regents that "this is anything but a harmless
frolic. ... this cleared land, awaiting development by the
university, is being rapidly built into a hippie Disneyland. ... I
have been informed by intelligence sources ..." And Ronald Reagan
declared, "It should be obvious to every Californian that there are
those in our midst who are bent on destroying our society and our
democracy and they will go to any ends to achieve their
purposewhether it be a so-called park or a college curriculum."
For three weeks there were negotiations and betrayals, promises made
and broken, leading up to violent surprise attacks by police and
national guard with helicopters spraying tear gas, hundreds of people
jailed and abused for protesting, one young person blinded and
another, James Rector, killed in police gunfire. It felt like the
city of Berkeley was under siege. Accompanied by incredible violence,
the university built an eight-foot chain-link fence around the park.
It was three years before a massive protest succeeded in tearing down
the fence, and the park became a garden.
From that time on, the story is one of user development, which
means, Jesse explains, "the people who use ... the space ... should
be the ones who determine how it is developed and operated" through a
democratic process of decision making. In contrast to that, the
university's process involves various in-house bureaucrats, who hire
high-priced consultants to produce reports which get filed away and
may or may not be acted upon. Consequently, over the years there were
and still continue to be confrontations over user developments that
the university tries to tear down or university impositions that the
park users object to.
There were skirmishes about placement of toilets and the free speech
stage, but a major confrontation occur-red in 1991 when the
university decided to build volleyball courts in the park. Park users
and friends insisted there was no need for or interest in volleyball,
but their protests were ignored. A fence was built, bulldozers came
in, protests were met with a massive police force and once more there
was violence. The photographs of that period show a striking replay
of the early days of the park. The volleyball courts were rarely
usedthe word was that the university offered to pay people to
playand six months later the bulldozers came back and the courts
were removed.
The main message of the book is a positive affirmation eloquently
expressed in a cover blurb by Osha Neumann. The park continues to be
"... a free space for free people, for the earth and for justice!"
The book, he writes, "is full of all the joy, laughter, heartbreak,
passion, and courage of all genuine people's struggles." On page
after page we see an amazing variety of activities and happenings;
social activism, promoting progressive causes, free speech and free
expression and free food, music, art, dance. There are the exuberant
celebrations of the park anniversaries, of Mardi Gras, music
festivals and student activities, all richly illustrated with
photographs contributed by scores of people whose lives are somehow
connected with the park. There are pictures and poems to the plants,
flowers, trees and the community garden, descriptions of work parties
building the stage and the pergola, and much, much more. One can't
help wondering if there is any other place in the world where so much
goes on in such a small space.
Conflicts with the university flare up fairly regularly, but the park
continues to be part of the fabric of Berkeley. The spirit of the
park users that has kept it going for 40 years is still there. But
the world has changed and the city has changed, there is poverty and
homelessness that this generation has not experienced. This has
brought a new population of users to the park, people who are
homeless. For them, the park is a place of refuge, a life sustaining
place to rest, to be free and undisturbed during the day after being
in the streets all night. Perhaps part of the battle over the park
today is simply holding on to it, making sure that this special place
is not lost. Terri's book is a good reminder of how important that is.
PEOPLE'S PARK: STILL BLOOMING
By Terri Compost. Published by Slingshot Collective. 200 pages. $24.95.
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