Telegraph Avenue: Home of Free Speech Movement, Needs a Makeover
Once Cal's spiritual center, the street has fallen on hard times. Pandhandlers, a fire and empty lot mark its decline.
Telegraph Avenue has long been considered the spiritual center of Berkeley.
Mario Savio stood on top of a police car on one end of the street in 1964 and called for free speech, creating a movement that swept the nation. Antiwar activists clashed with the police, adding to the momentum that ended the war in Vietnam. But the street has fallen on hard times.
A fire in November destroyed a historic apartment building that housed two popular restaurants. Fencing around the structure drastically reduced pedestrian and car access, and some merchants saw holiday sales drop by as much as 40 percent.
Many University of California, Berkeley, students avoid the area. Though the campus sits on the north end of Telegraph, some students visit the avenue only when they want an inexpensive snack, according to a recent survey. They are intimidated by the youthful panhandlers who make Telegraph and nearby People’s Park their home.
No spot on Telegraph has become more emblematic of the street’s decline than an empty lot at the intersection of Haste Street. Once the home of the Berkeley Inn, the lot has been vacant for 25 years, despite city incentives to its current owner, Ken Sarachan, to waive $640,000 in liens and interest if he builds stores and affordable housing.
Sarachan, who also owns Rasputin Records and Blondie’s Pizza nearby, and the vacant Cody’s bookstore building, has offered a number of ideas for the property over the years. But he has never submitted completed plans, city officials said. A metal fence surrounds the property, but people frequently dump trash. Rats scurry at night.
“You can’t say that everything that is wrong with Telegraph is because of this one site, but it’s a blight,” Councilman Kriss Worthington said. “It has had the largest number of noise, trash and rat complaints in my district.”
After years of frustrating and unsuccessful negotiations, the City of Berkeley finally sued Sarachan on Jan. 26, 2012. The city wants to seize the lot to pay off the liens and interest that have accumulated since it cleared the land after the Berkeley Inn burned down in 1990. When Sarachan purchased the lot in 1994, he assumed responsibility for the liens.
“The city is alleging that Sarachan has not lived up to his agreement to pursue development of the site in a diligent and timely manner,” City Attorney Zach Cowan said.
Sarachan rarely speaks to the media and declined to comment. However, he sent a letter to the Berkeley City Council in September blaming the city for the situation.
“This whole delay in the Pagoda Project is really due to the planning department’s lack of competence to make a decision and get work done,” Sarachan wrote, referring to a proposed building that he said would be the greenest in Berkeley.
Doris Moskowitz, whose family has owned nearby Moe’s Books on Telegraph since 1959, had to lay off 10 percent of her staff because of the decline in shoppers. She says she is happy that Berkeley has taken action against Sarachan but wonders what can be accomplished now that the street has “hit bottom.”
“It’s nowhere near the lively or exciting neighborhood it was years ago,” Moskowitz said.
“People find it uncomfortable and scruffy, and now that we have all these empty spaces, they are not sure what they would come there for.”
She thinks Berkeley should rebrand Telegraph as the place where the Free Speech Movement happened.
The city could erect plaques describing the events of the 1950s and ’60s, which would attract tourists and shoppers.
“It ought to be a place celebrated by our whole city,” she said.
A recently formed group of merchants and students called the Telegraph Livability Coalition has drawn up a list of 21 ways to improve the avenue. It includes plans like better lighting and increased police and foot patrols.
“It’s in the middle of one of the richest metropolitan areas in the country,” said Marc Weinstein, the owner of Amoeba Records. “When you consider how much money there is, the real estate costs and the fact that a world class university is right there, there no reason Telegraph shouldn’t be hopping.”
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the city of Berkeley filed its lawsuit against Ken Sarachan on Jan. 28, 2012. The suit was filed on Jan. 26.
Aldo Moretti
Heads Up: The historic apartment building has been demolished recently, and the owners are going to rebuild apartments at the site, but it takes many years to do a project like that in Berkeley.
In the mean time, 3 temporary restaurants are starting construction in a few weeks after the 2 week public review period. They will be in tents with a giant beer garden. This project will liven up the area and attract more people of all kinds, so please , everyone support this project.
Stephanie Mackey
I have always enjoyed Telegraph Avenue, but, as I get older, I notice how much I resent being asked to leave my bags and purse at the door of these establishments. I'd just as soon shop where I am not automatically a suspected shoplifter.
Kimberly Smith
This makeover looks amazing! I mean, it's a pretty bad thing to do, but I know a talent when I see it. So whoever painted the wall is a fine artist.
http://ytubedownloader.org/
how to download youtube videos
MR Kaczorowski@gmail.com
Landlords need to Lower the rents in parity with the economic times.
Bring back a grassroots business similar to Cody's .
Shuttered businesses and empty lots are signs of speculators waiting to take a windfall when the economy improves even though they do nothing to earn it!
Be it San Rafael, Oakland, San Francisco or Berkeley-- Marin or Maryland, Washington D.C. you name the city-- as long as the appetite to get high is there be it affluent folks or non-affluent folks -- drugs will be on the streets-- and too bad for it is fueling Drug Cartles and even the Taliban poppy fields if that is what folks are doing.
Don't blame it on the homeless! Homeless have been known to keep crime down by keeping an eye on things.
MR Kaczorowski@gmail.com
Sorry for spelling errors- am in a hurry! :)
M. Roberts
Good news for Telegraph businesses & locals, Raleigh's & Intermezzo employees & patrons...if the city government focuses on doing it's job for once instead of issuing proclamations about international issues; or imposing requirements that half the jobs be filled by elves, use locally made hemp fiber uniforms or (enter a typically ridiculous Berkeley City Council style requirement here). Let your city council member know how you feel. And if you visit from out of town, please email them and tell them that you'd love to come back and spend money here if they deign to allow these businesses to re-open, employ people, and pay the tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and fees our town so badly needs. Contact info for elected officials: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=9242
Mary Ann Uribe
While Telegraph Avenue may be or may have been considered the “spiritual center of Berkeley”, the conditions and people who created that world have died, moved on or, more than 40 years later, have entered the world of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
The Free Speech Movement began on the UC Berkeley campus in the early 1960’s as a protest where students demanded the administration acknowledge their right to freedom of speech, academic freedom and political activity. The movement was informally led by charismatic and intelligent UC Berkeley students Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker and others.
These students and the thousands who joined them were idealists, well-organized and effective catalysts for bringing about change. They had worked in groups before setting goals, developing strategy and implementing a plan while attaining results effectively.
The people on Telegraph Avenue today do not have these abilities. They are not students. Many of them are mentally and psychologically challenged, have learning disabilities and have limited resources.
Many lead marginalized existences as the recession has hit resulting in their loss of jobs, defrauded out of their homes in foreclosure schemes and have become houseless in a country with 18.5 vacant foreclosed properties and 4.5 million houseless. Among those 4.5 million, 1.6 million are children with California ranking 5th in the nation in its number of homeless children.
Yet our government and elected officials cannot see their way into putting the houseless into the hundreds of vacant homes in Berkeley for lack of will and resourcefulness. Or they just do not care.
The “activists” of Telegraph and the Park spend more time fighting among each other over their politics than doing anything effective to help their own people. They are not the students of Cal. Having personality disorders of their own including oppositional personalities, they remain legends in their own mind, entrenched in their politics and unable to recognize their own shortcomings.
While there are panhandlers on Telegraph Avenue and in other parts of the United States, it must be remembered there are no jobs for even our college graduates at the present time. What are these kids suppose to do, stay at home with their parents who have lost their jobs and their homes? What is there to go home to?
The Telegraph Livability Coalition, the Telegraph Business Improvement District and the City of Berkeley will never bring Telegraph Avenue back to life without taking into account the needs and desires of all the people who inhabit the area. Rather than increasing police foot patrols to sweep away the people including children, veterans, seniors and the disabled they do not want to acknowledge have a right to live, these groups have to work together to implement a plan that will address the concerns of everyone involved.