Features

Landmarks Commission Urges Preservation of Oak Grove

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday January 09, 2007

Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) weighed in on the side of the tree-in protesters at Memorial Stadium Thursday, urging the preservation of a grove threatened by university building plans. 

Commissioners voted unanimously to send a letter to UC Berkeley officials urging preservation of the stand of trees marked for destruction to make way for a gym along the stadium’s western wall. 

Meanwhile, former mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf is back in the branches, perched even higher in a towering redwood from which he had been banished Dec. 13 by a seven-day stay-away order served by campus cops. 

“They served another stay-away order Saturday, and that’s the sixth or seventh time they’ve done it,” said Running Wolf. 

The latest to be ticketed was Jess Walsh, one of the first to join Running Wolf after he climbed into the branches on Big Game Saturday, Dec. 2. 

“Now we’ve got six people up,” said Doug Buckwald, who has been coordinating ground support for the arboreal activists. 

“Zachary (Running Wolf) went up very early this morning, about three o’clock. It’s the same tree he was in before, but he’s even higher. He’s got the penthouse suite, with all the comforts of home.” 

Meanwhile, UC officials and their lawyers are preparing for a court hearing Thursday in Oakland on efforts to delay university plans to launch the first phase of a construction program budgeted at more than a third of a million dollars. 

The City of Berkeley, the Panoramic Hill Association and the California Oaks Foundation are each seeking to delay the start of construction of a four-story, 132,500-square-foot Student Athlete High Performance Center at the site of the grove. 

The actions charge that the project—along with planned renovation of the stadium—violates the California Environmental Quality Act and state law governing construction on and adjacent to earthquake faults. 

The LPC’s objections are based on federal, state and city ordinances governing designated landmarks. 

The stadium and nearby grounds were named a city landmark this summer and added to the National Register of Historic Places in the fall. The stadium is also a state landmark. 

But the LPC’s motion Thursday night was also based on impacts to another landmark, Piedmont Avenue—known as Gayley Way on campus. 

The roadway is a city landmark, and its landscape and setting were designed by America’s preeminent landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, whose best-known creation is New York City’s Central Park. 

“We are urging the university to respect the grove because of its significance to Piedmont and because it is important to preserve as a retention of the rustic landscape that reflects the original condition of the site as Olmsted found it,” said Landmarks Commissioner Lesley Emmington. 

Attorneys are scheduled to meet Tuesday afternoon with an Alameda County Superior Court judge to discuss consolidating all three legal challenges into a single case. 

A hearing on a motion to grant an order blocking further work on the gym project until the issue is resolved is scheduled for Thursday afternoon in Dept. 140 of Alameda County Superior Court, 600 Washington St. in Oakland. 

“We want everybody to show up for the hearing,” said Buckwald. “We want people to know how the community feels.”