Editorials

A churlish commenter on Berkeleyside.com, posting under the pseudonym of Shutter, said of Tracey Taylor’s Storify coverage of the “Why Berkeley” event at the new Book, Inc. location: “With all due respect, a series of reposted tweets is a poor substitute for a well-written article.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

This technique, which allowed many photos and a sentence or two from a baker’s dozen of 5 minute speakers, was the ideal representation of the “Berkeley Lite” tone of the feel-good event. The room was packed with Berkeleyans of the older generation, many of whom I know and like, and regardless of political views everyone seemed to have a good time. Berkeley has always loved bookstore chats, ever since Fred and Pat Cody started them sometime in the last millennium.

It was not the time or place for naysayers. Though I recognized plenty of chronic critics in the room, they kept their quibbles to themselves. Panel members with a couple of exceptions limited their comments to gentle reminiscences on the announced theme of “Why Berkeley?”—mostly how they got here and why they stayed. By and large, a love fest.

Presiding over all was genial elder Malcolm Margolin, of the Heyday Books publishing company. Sadly perhaps, I got the most interesting part of my education in the ever-cynical Cal French Department, way back in the day before the school expropriated the name “Berkeley”, so I was irresistibly reminded of a favorite character in a book on my reading list, memorialized thus by Leonard Bernstein: 

The evening was dominated by the kind of optimism preached by Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. Speakers for the most part spoke of their delight at discovering Berkeley and what the city still meant to them. The two most notable exceptions, not surprisingly, were two of the four minority speakers, both of whom, perhaps significantly, no longer live in Berkeley. Here I’ll just quote Tracey’s excellent notes [typos fixed]: 

“ [Maxine Hong] Kingston on 2211 Harold Way: To build high rise that will block that sacred view (from Campanile) will create bad feng shui.” She told of a visit to Berkeley with her high school teacher, who pointed out the Campanile and said it was calling her. Never a woman to mince words, Maxine, now a proud Cal alumna, must have encountered the petition started by the current generation of Cal students, who are objecting to the eighteen-story obstruction that now threatens the Campanile viewshed. (This will be the subject of a special Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting on August 13.) 

“ Ishmael Reed said racism is alive and well in Berkeley, as evidenced by experience of black playwright at Berkeley Rep…Going from his home in Oakland to College Ave. is like the Freedom Rides: going into segregated territory.” (He’s more right than you might think. The African-American population of Berkeley has declined from 30% to 10% and is shrinking fast.) 

The others on the panel were mostly sunnily nostalgic for the Berkeley of the imagination, a territory reminiscent of Candide’s El Dorado, who said their rulers “ordained, with the consent of the whole nation, that none of the inhabitants should ever be permitted to quit this little kingdom; and this has preserved our innocence and happiness.” 

Here’s the Bernstein version: 

Tracey Taylor’s business partner, Frances Dinkelspiel, a Stanford alumna, delivered a very mild reproof of the dominant Berkeley paradigm in her five minute slot. She talked about coming to a Model U.N. or some such event on the U.C. campus with her classmates from her San Francisco private high school in the late 70s and being disgusted with the seedy hotel on Telegraph where they were housed. She said her husband, looking for something less urban than The City, persuaded the family to move to a house in the Berkeley hills high above the Claremont Hotel—just in time to be burned out in the big fire. But they rebuilt, and she stayed around to co-found Berkeleyside.com. Here’s the gripe: she’s tired of the constant criticism she sees here, as exemplified by a snarky comment she quoted from her site about too many oldsters on the panel.  

[Here’s a little tip: if you don’t like disagreeable letters, and who does, if you require commenters to sign their real names, first and last, the trolls will go back under their bridges. Both the Planet and the East Bay Express have that rule, and it makes for a much more interesting discourse. The anonymous SF Chronicle commenters, on the other hand, are awful, and many dreadful ones find their way to Berkeleyside. The one she quoted was from a person whose real name I know, someone characterized by a consistent prose style easily recognized by an old Comp Lit major like me, who uses a panoply of pseudonyms. And the letter writer is no youngster herself, ironically. ] 

John King, another speaker, is part of the tradition of San Francisco architecture critics who extoll the virtues of the modernist urban landscape in The City but live in pleasant traditional Berkeley neighborhoods. His predecessor at the Chronicle, Allen Temko, lived near me in the Elmwood, and King says he has a modest bungalow in North Berkeley, next door to the kind of Berkeley brown shingle house he lived in when he came here to school, which he praised as an iconic Berkeley style.  

When I transferred to Cal in 1959 as a junior, I lived in one of those brown shingle rooming houses myself. My housemates were very smart girls from Taiwan who were studying physics and biochemistry, from whom I learned how to dismember a chicken Chinese-style, lickety-split with a big cleaver, leaving no fingers behind. That house is still there near the corner of Channing and Telegraph, but it has been lavishly remodelled inside and out in a flashy multi-colored Thai motif to suit the current owners’ restaurant. 

Is that progress? I kind of enjoy the change, non-traditional though it is. 

From my classmates I learned how to protest, joining a neighbor in my next house who’d been raised on a Petaluma chicken farm in demonstrating against the House Un-American Activities committee, which was then persecuting old lefties like her family. That’s what Berkeley gave me, inspiration for action which went beyond the ideas I’d been raised with, though pointed in the same direction. 

As several of the panelists pointed out, the old Berkeley civic tradition was conservative. I seem to remember that when I came here the town had both a Republican city council and a Republican congressman. I married in 1960 and moved to Ann Arbor for graduate school. When we came back in 1973 the old-time conservatives had been scared out of town by school integration, the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park, leaving Berkeley for a couple of decades to be managed by what we used to call “progressives”.  

My prediction that our post-progressive mayor might not appear was half right: he came, late, but he didn’t say anything much—nothing even worth Storifying about. His minder, Councilmember Maio, who sits next to him on the dais at council meetings, invoked the past but said little about the present or future.  

Storify quote: “Margolin says that Vice Mayor @LindaMaio has been in office since 1992, so she has perpetually been in meetings.” During Maxine Hong Kingston’s passionate defense of the view from the Campanile, Maio’s face displayed what my seldom-vulgar companion described as a “shit-eating grin.”  

Now, it seems to me, Berkeley is returning to its Republicanesque roots as a toney bedroom suburb for San Francisco. The Claremont neighborhood was built as a “streetcar suburb”, with trains to San Francisco’s financial district coming right up to the Claremont Hotel. The Uplands was one of the original transit-friendly developments.  

Houses in the Claremont-Elmwood neighborhood dropped precipitously in price after the tumultuous ‘60s. When we moved to upper Ashby, to a house we bought at a bargain price, we were surrounded by communes, but lately investment bankers have been moving in. There goes the neighborhood! Prices are now back in the stratosphere.  

Now downtown Berkeley is on the verge of becoming the same thing. Easy transit to The City is fostering development of expensive luxury housing which will be convenient for well-paid people who work in San Francisco, viz. The Residences at Berkeley Plaza project now being promoted for 2211 Harold Way. The prices of family-size houses in all parts of town are skyrocketing. And the demographic profile is reverting to the status quo ante, mostly white. 

Can anything be done about this? The panelists, by and large, expressed no awareness that the Berkeley they celebrate may be changing out from under them. Since they skewed mature, it might not be their problem. 

Us old folks will get nothing much out of saving Berkeley from itself, it’s true. Those of us who were canny enough to snag a house or a rent-controlled apartment when it was still possible just might make it home free. 

I hope the bookstore survives on North Shattuck. My fear is that Berkeley is no longer a book-dominated culture—that we’ve shifted from a literary scene to a foodie enclave.  

Alice Waters is supposed to be signing books (though not talking) at Books Inc. as I write this on Thursday afternoon.  

She’s another French Department alumna, I see from her online bio. After a brief fling with Free Speech Movement activism, she started an unpretentious neighborhood restaurant that’s become every bit as good as the similar (though less pricey) ones I just tried in France. A marketing genius, she’s gone on to propagating what she learned in the restaurant business in more do-goodish contexts. Waters’ event is billed as a benefit for her Edible Schoolyard Project, which teaches kids about growing vegis and nutrition.  

Candide said it first: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” 

This key phrase can be translated as “It’s necessary to cultivate our garden,” or “We must cultivate our garden.” 

The implication of the seminal quote was being debated while I was in college, and it’s still being questioned. The best essay on Candide I’ve seen lately was Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece in 2005.  

Here’s Gopnik: “The force of that last great injunction, ‘We must cultivate our garden,’ is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action.” 

Here in Berkeley, immediately, the threat is and continues to be that international speculators are being allowed to buy up everything in town to extract maximum profit and then depart. One of the better commenters on Berkeleyside compared the process to strip mining, and she’s nailed it. 

One might ask the local gardeners, Alice Waters among them, if they’ve noticed that construction is taking place on every flat surface in flatland Berkeley, that there will all too soon be no place for children to cultivate their own gardens. Nothing will grow in the shadow of 18-story luxury apartment buildings.  

We should all recognize our local responsibility, and concentrate on action. Our El Dorado is at risk. 

For our grandchildren’s sake, il faut cultiver notre jardin.