The Berkeley City Council upheld a commission vote Tuesday evening to landmark a 1939 ice skating rink, an act supporters of the nonprofit corporation Save Berkeley Iceland hope will facilitate the group’s purchase of the site and pave the way to reopening the facility for ice skating. 

The 5-4 decision (with Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak, Dona Spring, Kriss Worthington, Betty Olds and Linda Maio voting to uphold the landmark designation) came at a special 6 p.m. meeting, one week after an extensive debate at a public hearing that focused more on whether the site should be redeveloped for housing and child care, or if the use should return to ice skating.  

As councilmembers reiterated Tuesday evening, the decision they were making had to focus narrowly on the historic value of the structure to be landmarked.  

Voting to uphold the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation means an eventual developer will either have to preserve the exterior walls of the site, as well as the packed earth berms on the north and the south sides of the structure, or go through an extensive environmental review process to make changes.  

Developer Ali Kashani, president of Memar Properties, Inc. of Oakland, has an option to purchase the site where he has said he wants to build housing and a child care center. California State law allows developers to build higher than local zoning laws permit when they include child care in the project. 

Kashani told the Daily Planet after the council decision—which he opposed—that he may still want to purchase the property. “It depends on the price,” he said. 

Speaking for Save Berkeley Iceland, Caroline Winnett told the Planet after the meeting, that while, “the owners have the right to sell to whom they want, the assumption is that a developer will not find the [landmarked site] economically attractive.” 

Now that the site is landmarked, Winnett said Save Berkeley Iceland is anticipating two significant donations. The nonprofit group is trying to raise $2 million to purchase the site, although it legally cannot negotiate with the owners, East Bay Iceland, while Kashani is exercising his options. 

If the City Council decides to uphold a commission designation of Berkeley Iceland as a landmark, it could put a crimp in development plans for a housing/childcare project, while breathing new life into the plans of a nonprofit corporation to re-open the now-shuttered 68-year- old ice skating rink. 

The council will address the Iceland issue at a special 6 p.m. meeting tonight (Tuesday) to be followed by its regular 7 p.m. meeting, the last full council meeting—a brief meeting is slated for July 31—before a lengthy summer break, scheduled to end Sept. 10.  

In addition to Iceland, the city will consider public comment rules and an audit of the city’s asset forfeiture accounts (see accompanying stories), closing down the B-Town Dollar Store on Sacramento Street because of alleged drug activity there, addressing the zoning board’s approval of a new single-family house on Panoramic Way and more. 

Ice Rink as Landmark? 

The nonprofit organization that hopes to save the property at Derby and Milvia streets for use as an ice skating rink is trying to raise the $2 million they say they need to buy the site from the current owner and previous manager, East Bay Iceland. 

East Bay Iceland, however, has entered into a preliminary agreement with developer Ali Kashani, president of Memar Properties, Inc., who hopes to turn the real estate into townhouses and a child care center. Kashani has an agreement with the YMCA, which wants to consolidate various Y-run Head Start Centers at the facility. 

State law allows developers that include child care facilities at their projects to add units to their development (a “density bonus”) above limits imposed by local zoning laws. Berkeley has yet to take advantage of this law, according to Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman. 

The Landmark Preservation Commission designated the walls around the entire 1939 building as historic, which means that a developer who wants to demolish all or part of the building will have to go through a thorough review process at the LPC before alterations are approved or a demolition can be approved by the Zoning Adjustment Board. 

Proponents of saving the ice rink hope landmarking the facility will discourage development of anything but an ice rink. 

Caroline Winnett, among those working to save the ice rink, says supporters should not be discouraged. “Now is the time to donate and to pressure the council,” she said. The group is continuing in its efforts to raise $2 million for the facility’s purchase, although they are legally unable at present to negotiate with East Bay Iceland, due to its preliminary agreement with Kashani.  

B-town may go down 

The Zoning Board says that B-Town Dollars and More Disc, at 2973 Sacramento St., is a public nuisance due to drug dealing in and around the store and should be shut down. 

“B-Town has been a significant location of drug dealing for several years … the operator … has knowingly permitted it to be used as such,” says a staff report that alleges that the store operator and his managers have never called police for help to curb the problem. 

The property is owned by the Chul J. Kim family, managed by Joo H. Kim, a San Francisco police officer, and operated by Nayef Ayesh. The operator and his attorney say, according to zoning board staff reports, that “B-Town has no responsibility for what happens outside the store. Rather it is the responsibility of the Police Department to eliminate drug dealing….” 

However, the zoning board responded that “a business is responsible for problems on the sidewalk and adjoining public areas.” 

Other public hearings 

The council will hold three other public hearings: 

• On the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) and on the North Shattuck BID. The BIDs are renewed unless more than 50 percent of the members protest by mail or at the council meeting; 

• On the zoning board’s approval of the construction of a home on Panoramic Way. Neighbors of the proposed home say that construction will cause closure of the narrow street, presenting a danger in case there is a need for emergency vehicle access, and that the property owner presented the zoning board with inaccurate plans. The zoning board, however, approved the 1,460 square-foot house with conditions, including that it have sprinklers for fire safety and protection for a live oak tree in the public right of way. 

The City Council will also address: 

• Allocating $25,000, already approved, to Sweatfree Berkeley, to support the formation of a consortium of government entities, which would research and monitor where products are made that cities buy, so that cities avoid the purchase of products made under sweatshop conditions. If the council approves this item, the funds will be released only when at least one other governmental entity contributes an equal or greater sum; 

• Condemning Waste Management’s lockout of its employees; 

• A pilot program to double parking fines in certain areas on UC Berkeley football days; 

• Installing speed cushions as a test. They would be an alternative to “speed humps” which cause pain to people with certain health conditions and cause damage to fire equipment. The speed cushions are traffic-calming devices designed as several small speed humps, three inches thick, made of prefabricated rubber. They would be placed in such a way that emergency vehicles with wider axles could straddle the cushions;  

• The cost of establishing “quiet zones” at railroad crossings. “With the expansion of the Port of Oakland and steadily increasing train traffic, residents in West Berkeley are frequently awakened by long and sharp whistle blowing all during the night,” says a staff report written by Councilmember Linda Maio. The item calls for the city to work with Emeryville to get a sense of the cost involved in establishing zones where a train is prohibited from blowing its whistle. Other safety measures are put in place where quiet zones are designated. 

For more on the subject of Iceland see Randy Shaw in today's Beyond Chron: 

www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4722

Berkeley residents have until Aug. 10 to express their concerns about the environmental review of zoning ordinance and General Plan amendments to open up West Berkeley to car dealerships. 

The proposal, strongly backed by Mayor Tom Bates, is designed to keep car sellers in the city, along with the sales taxes they generate. 

While the EIR comment period closes in August, the city’s Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the proposals next week, during their July 25 meeting. 

The proposal calls for opening up all of the land now zoned for manufacturing (M) to car dealerships, along with a narrow parcel south of Ashby Avenue currently zoned for mixed-use light industrial (MULI) uses. 

Currently, dealerships are confined to geographically restricted parcels in the C-1, C-2 and C-W commercial zones. 

Most of the dealer sites are located in the core downtown area and along southern Tele-graph Avenue, while three of the city’s four existing dealerships are located in isolated parcels along southern Shattuck Avenue (Toyota of Berkeley, Berkeley Honda and McKevitt Volvo Nissan) and only one is currently sited in West Berkeley (Weather-ford BMW on Ashby). 

All three Shattuck Avenue sites are nonconforming uses which do not meet current zoning regulations for their sites and could not be located there today. 

During Planning Commission meetings last year, dealers said car manufacturers want their dealerships concentrated along freeways to provide the easiest access, leading to an exodus of car sales locations from city centers. 

Car sales provided 11.5 percent of the city’s sales tax revenues in the second quarter of 2005, the latest figures in a staff report by Jordan Harrison, the associate planner assigned to the commission. 

The proposed zoning changes would allow dealers to locate in a much larger area than currently allowed in West Berkeley—sites primarily clustered along Univer-sity Avenue west of San Pablo Avenue and along Fourth Street near its intersection with University. 

A small number of additional sites are located near Weatherford BMW along Ashby. 

A number of smaller sites are scattered along San Pablo Avenue and a few are clustered along a narrow stretch of Dwight Way west of San Pablo. 

The last remaining dealer on San Pablo, McNevin Volkswagen, abandoned the city at the end of 2005. 

Berkeley’s remaining car dealers have been supportive of the project. 

Two categories 

The new regulations would create two classes of dealerships in each of the new zones, major outlet and small so-called “boutique dealerships.” 

In the M zone bloc, classes are demarcated by parcels above and below 40,000 square feet, with the former requiring a Use Permit (UP) issued by a vote of the Zoning Adjustments Board and the smaller parcels requiring only an over-the-counter Administrative Use Permit (AUP). 

In the south-of-Ashby section, 30,000 square feet would serve as the dividing line between the two permit categories. 

The documents now under review are required under the California Environmental Quality Act, and examine the potential consequences of developments and laws and regulations that pave the way for expanded development. 

According to Harrison’s 36-page draft Environmental Impact Study (EIS), proposed mitigations would eliminate any significant adverse impacts stemming from the proposals. 

Rick Auerbach, a West Berkeley resident and an activist with WEBAIC (West Berkeley Artisans & Industrial Companies), said his group has been generally supportive of the proposal, “but significant questions remain.” 

WEBAIC has advocated for preservation of the city’s dwindling supply of industrial sites, and members challenged the development of the new Berkeley Bowl now under construction in West Berkeley. 

One of WEBAIC’s main concerns has been the increasing volume of traffic on major thoroughfares in the area, including the intersection of San Pablo and Ashby avenues and the eastern end of the proposed MULI dealership zone. 

Auerbach said he wants to see confirmation that traffic projections include the impacts of the new supermarket and other developments now in the planning stages. Harrison said she would check to make sure they did. 

Impacts listed 

Potential adverse impacts to air quality would be reduced to insignificance by measures that include:  

• Water spraying to reduce dust;  

• Covering or reducing the levels of truckloads of soil and other loose materials; 

• Daily sweeping of access roads and nearby streets and parking areas, seeding or stabilizing nearby soil; 

• Covering, binding or watering earth and sand stockpiles; and 

• Limiting traffic speeds on unpaved roads and installing erosion control measures to prevent silt runoff onto roads. 

Other measures call for: 

• Preventing exposure to lead paints and asbestos during demolition of old buildings;  

• Examining sites for historic or prehistoric relics and remains and fossils; 

• Examination of sites for earthquake and soil liquefaction hazards;  

• Mandating traffic impact analyses for new dealerships and following their recommendations; 

• Fair-share payments from new M zone dealers for the cost of installing a signal and Fourth and Gilman streets, and  

• Limiting the size of dealerships near the Gilman/I-80 interchange to 4.5 acres or less unless evidence of no adverse impacts are shown.  

The documents are all available online at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/planning/  

landuse/WestBerkeleyAuto/default.htm 

An auditor’s report released late Monday morning says Berkeley police and city workers mismanaged asset forfeiture accounts, which could have caused the city to lose the uninsured funds or allowed the money to be misused or embezzled—neither of which happened, according to the audit. While the council and public did not receive a copy of the audit on asset forfeiture funds until late Monday morning, the council will be asked to approve the report and its suggested remedies at tonight’s (Tuesday) council meeting.  

City Auditor Ann-Marie Hogan performed the audit following a request by the Police Review Commission’s Subcommittee on Evidence Theft Issues, a committee originally formed to examine issues arising from the theft of drug evidence by convicted felon and former Berkeley police sergeant Cary Kent, who stole drugs from the evidence locker he oversaw.  

After another alleged incident of police misconduct, the subcommittee added to its charge a review of policies that could have led to the alleged theft of cash and property belonging to arrestees by another officer. This officer was charged with criminal activity by Berkeley Police; he subsequently left the department. The Alameda County district attorney’s office declined to press charges against him.  

Kent’s responsibilities, in addition to oversight of the drug evidence room, included being a signatory on the asset forfeiture funds accounts. When cash is found by police as part of narcotics enforcement, it is placed in an asset forfeiture fund.  

There are three of these funds that had been housed at the United Services Credit Union. As a result of the audit report, the funds were moved to Wells Fargo Bank, according to Hogan, in a Monday morning phone interview with the Planet.  

Hogan underscored that, while there were a number of managerial problems in the account oversight, she concluded that no money was stolen from the accounts, which had been a major concern for members of the Police Review subcommittee.  

The audit covered the period of July 1, 2003, when Kent began his role in charge of the accounts, to April 30 of this year.  

When Berkeley police confiscate cash, they put the money into a bank account. That money then is transferred to the Alameda County District Attorney, Hogan said.  

“If they don’t successfully prosecute, they have to give the money back [to the suspect],” Hogan said.  

Part of the funds not returned to former suspects are given back to the city. The funds are shared with the state or federal government, depending on the jurisdiction of the crime.  

“We found no indication that any transaction in the three asset forfeiture related accounts during the period covered by our review was inappropriate,” Hogan said in her report. “However, accountability and controls for these deposit accounts need improvement.”  

Among the problems was that a sum of about $738,000 was in uninsured, non-collateralized credit union deposits. The credit union cannot insure accounts of that magnitude and the city risked losing the funds if the credit union failed, Hogan said, noting that the city has responded by moving the funds to a commercial bank.  

Another problem is that, while the City Charter requires two signatures for every withdrawal, the officer in charge—the one convicted of stealing drugs—was able to withdraw funds without the signature of either the city manager or city auditor.  

“During the period of our review the city manager and the city auditor approved only two of 35 transfers from the seized cash impound account,” the report says, further noting, “One police officer had autonomy over withdrawals because the credit union did not enforce the dual signatures requirement.”  

The audit report points to the potential for embezzlement: “…one police officer acting alone could withdraw funds from the three accounts, which increased the risk of misappropriation of funds. Segregation of duties, where no one person has control over all aspects of a transaction, is a basis [sic] tenet of internal control.”  

On the question of signatures, the report concludes that no wrongdoing was found: “Although we found no evidence that any withdrawal was for an inappropriate purpose, failure to obtain required approval, combined with the lack of dual signatures, increased the risk of withdrawals being made for inappropriate or illegal reasons.”  

The report says that on June 26 the police chief instituted corrective action, issuing a memorandum stating “… no withdrawals should be made from police credit union accounts without approval signed by the city manager and the city auditor.”  

The audit also discovered that:  

• The Finance Department did not reconcile the quarterly and monthly deposit account statements received from the credit union and  

• Police do not have written procedures to specify requirements for credit union transactions involving seized currency and asset forfeiture.

Threatened by citizens considering a lawsuit to force state-mandated public participation in city meetings, Mayor Tom Bates has been experimenting since the fall with a variety of rules aimed at increasing opportunities for public comment at council meetings.  

Now the mayor says he wants to make the rules permanent and has proposed a set of guidelines for public participation that appear on tonight’s agenda for council approval. 

Counclmembers Kriss Worth-ington and Dona Spring, however, say Bates’ draft resolution gives the mayor/presiding officer too much latitude to decide who speaks, when, and for how long. “It shouldn’t be someone with so much vested interest” making these decisions, Spring told the Daily Planet.  

Worthington wrote his own resolution, which he submitted last month but delayed at Bates’ request, to allow the competing resolutions to go before the council at the same meeting. 

Spring has made some suggestions for rules on public comment, but is calling for a fall workshop to fully discuss citizen participation in meetings. 

Bates’ proposal “gives him dictatorial power over public comment.” Spring said. “The public needs to know what the rules are ahead of time.” 

How long? 

One question the council will be asked to resolve is how long speakers can talk.  

Under the old rules, before SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Or-ganizing for Library Defense) threatened to sue the city for limiting a citizen’s right to comment at public meetings, 10 speakers were chosen by lottery to speak for three minutes each at the beginning of the meeting.  

SuperBOLD and attorneys from the Oakland-based First Amendment Project said the system unfairly restricts public participation. 

However, “It doesn’t make sense to have 100 people speak for three minutes each,” Worthington said. 

His proposal gives the public two minutes to speak, when there are five or fewer people who want to address a particular issue, and one-and-a-half minutes when there are six-to-nine people and one minute when there are ten or more people who want to speak to one item—this would apply to both the consent and action calendars. 

Bates’ proposal addresses the time issue differently for “consent” items and “action” items. 

With respect to items on the consent calendar—generally non-controversial issues approved as a block—Bates is proposing to allow one speaker in favor of each agenda item and one speaker opposed to the item. Each would speak for two minutes; others present in support or opposing the item would be asked to stand to indicate support or opposition.  

If the mayor determines there is “significant opposition” or if numerous people want to speak in support of the item, it would be pulled off the consent calendar and placed on the “action” calendar at the end of the agenda. 

Spring has proposed that when fewer than 19 people want to speak on one item, there should be a two-minute time limit, but when more than 18 want to speak, a one-minute limit should be imposed. Alternatively, Spring suggested imposing a 12-minute time limit on public comment before each item. 

Bates proposes that the public would be allowed to speak for two minutes on items calendared for action, but if more than 10 people wish to speak “the presiding officer may limit the public comment to one minute per speaker.”  

Alternatively, Bates says that, with the consent of people representing both sides of an issue, he would “allocate a block of time to each side to present their issue.” 

But Worthington says this is an example of the mayor giving himself too much discretionary power. People need to come to meetings knowing how much time they can speak on an issue, he said. 

Gene Bernardi of SuperBOLD said in an interview Monday that while it would be fine with her if people had more time to speak, the compromise time limits suggested by Worthington are acceptable to SuperBOLD.  

While Bernardi said it might be appropriate for the mayor to suggest that only one person speak for and one against a non-controversial consent item, he should not impose that on the public. There may be more than two clearly identifiable sides to an issue, making it difficult for one person to speak on each side of a consent calendar item, she said. 

Non-agenda items 

If people come to the council to talk about concerns not noted on the agenda, Worthington says they should be permitted to talk directly after the consent calendar has been approved, which is early in the evening. 

Bates, on the other hand, says public comment on non-agenda items should come at the end of the agenda.  

“If by 11 p.m. an extension [of the council meeting] is not approved, any unfinished agendized business will be moved to the next council meeting and fifteen minutes will be automatically allocated for pubic comment on non-agenda items,” Bates’ item says. 

Bates did not return calls for comment. 

Enforcing the rules 

Neither of the proposed resolutions suggests remedies for violations or designates an individual or office to oversee the rules. 

When asked about enforcement, Worthington said, “There should be a clearly designated parliamentarian who does the job.” In many cities, the city attorney plays that role, he said, adding that it often falls to him to speak up when rules are broken, which, he said, is not a good way to handle such questions.  

“When a councilmember brings up [problems with following the rules], it adds to the emotions in a discussion,” he said. 

Worthington noted that a substitute city attorney had effectively played the role of parliamentarian when City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque was on vacation a few weeks ago. 

Many cities include public comment rules in their Sunshine Ordinances, laws that mandate greater government transparency than state laws. Albuquerque told the council she would post a draft Sunshine Ordinance on the city website in May, but has yet to do so. 

The Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) set the appeal of an administrative use permit to construct an addition to a one-story, two-unit building at 2516 Ellsworth St. for a public hearing Thursday. 

A group of LeConte neighbors are worried that the proposed building, which will be converted into a dorm for UC Berkeley students by Oakland-based William Coburn Architects, will create noise, shadow, privacy and traffic impacts on the neighborhood. 

The architects propose to construct a 2,974-square-foot addition to an existing 903-square-foot, one-story, two-unit building by expanding the footprint towards the rear yard and raising the existing house approximately 10 feet. As a result of the addition, the building units would increase from two to 14. 

ZAB approved the project on Feb. 6 because of its consistency with the zoning ordinance and the development standards of the district.  

The current building exists right on the border of a higher-density and a lower-density residential zone in a neighborhood comprised predominantly of duplexes and apartment buildings. 

According to the appellants, the proposed development was “too dense” and should be zoned as a medium density residential building because of its proximity to that district. 

The appellants also contend that the project would increase parking demand without providing any additional off-street parking, and they are against the issuance of residential parking permits to its occupants. 

Michael Walensky, who lives around the corner from the proposed project, complained about its negative effects in a letter to ZAB. 

“I bought my condo in 1995,” he said. “At that time things were relatively tranquil in this neighborhood, but in the past few years the quality of life has deteriorated dramatically.” 

Walensky said the level of noise caused by students in nearby apartments having loud parties has become so bad that he frequently calls the police to complain. 

“Students seem to have no notion that many of us in this neighborhood are homeowners who work for a living and have to sleep.” 

In a letter to ZAB, the LeConte Neighborhood Association said that the “massive residential expansion” would prove to be a detriment to the neighborhood because of inappropriate density, “which would exacerbate existing noise and parking problems in the area.” 

Staff maintains that the project is compatible with the size, density and scale of the neighborhood. 

1819 Fifth St. 

The zoning board discussed the 1819 Fifth St. Pads Projects Thursday. 

Architect Timothy Rempel and his wife Liz Miranda have requested a permit to construct a mixed-use project which involves renovation and modification of an existing building at 1819 Fifth St., with four live-work units, 10 residential condominium units, 11 commercial units (7,298 square feet), 27 parking spaces and a new four-story construction. 

Area residents have described the  

project as a “looming monstrosity” and vociferously opposed it, citing shadow, height and traffic concerns. A petition, signed by 15 neighbors, was also submitted to ZAB Thursday. It stated, among other things, that the proposed building would be out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. 

The property, which is located in West Berkeley, on Fifth Street between Hearst Avenue and Delaware Street, was acquired by Rempel for two and a half million dollars in July. Although the existing brick building is not a landmark structure, the site is located south of the Delaware Historic District. 

Rempel asked for a variance modification to add a 4th floor, which is not otherwise allowed in the district. 

“Our neighborhood is mostly comprised of one- or two-story houses,” said Nick Lawrence, who has lived at 835 Delaware St. for almost 21 years. “There is nothing else that compares to the mass and size of the proposed building. The ZAB should not be concerned with whether they will make a profit but with whether it is good for the neighborhood.” 

Owen Maercks, owner of East Bay Vivarium at 1827 Fifth St., which houses up to 30,000 animals at any given time, said that the project would drive his business out of the city. 

“He is asking for 27 parking spaces for 25 units,” he said. “So little parking for such a massive structure. We are already having parking wars in the neighborhood. Nobody will come there to shop anymore.” 

Maercks also expressed concern that the building’s shadow would prevent his reptiles from sunning outside.  

“We won’t be blocking the sun,” Rempel answered. “There are many three storied buildings in the immediate vicinity.” The Delaware Homeowners Association spoke in favor of the development. 

Board member Bob Allen said that ZAB did not have the ability to grant Rempel the variance for the 4th floor. 

“I think it’s too frivolous a reason to just say that we want to make it look better,” he said. “You have to make it more convincing. This building will not do anything but add parking to the street. I admire the design but am not particularly comfortable that the color schemes and the materials don’t match with that of the neighborhood.” 

Board vice chair Rick Judd said that there were a lot of alternatives for the proposed project that hadn’t been looked at. 

“Three stories needs to be explored,” said board member Jesse Arreguin. “It’s clear that there are no four-story buildings in the area. It’s clear that there are parking violations.”

West Berkeley-based Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) is scheduled to release its health risk assessment report (HRA) to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Monday. 

The report, which will help determine whether the steel foundry is a health hazard, was originally due in April, but was delayed due to further testing required by the air district. 

Elisabeth Jewel, of Aroner, Jewel & Ellis Partners, the public relations firm representing Pacific Steel, said that consultants hired by PSC prepared the report based on the emissions inventory report made public on Feb. 23. 

In an email to the community, Brian Bateman, the air district’s director of engineering, said that the HRA would be available for public review after the air district completed its preliminary review of the data. 

“We expect that we will be able to get this done by the end of July,” he wrote. “We plan on providing copies of the document (hopefully in electronic format) to the city of Berkeley for their review and distribution (as we have done with several related preceding documents). We will also provide copies to the local public libraries.” 

For residents of West Berkeley, the release marks the end of a much anticipated wait for information. 

Some, such as environmentalist LA Wood, remain skeptical about its contents. 

“The HRA is a reminder of the ongoing conflict in West Berkeley between mixed-use housing and light industry,” he told the Planet Monday. “If the HRA had any sense of honesty, it would state that the area surrounding the steel mill is not an ideal location for long-term housing. The same should also be said about the steel mill given that PSC has no buffer to the residential community.” 

Wood added that the HRA process reflects a sixteen-year lapse of city zoning regulation oversight of PSC and concern over community health.  

“The HRA should have been done years ago,” he said. “The one PSC operates on right now was done in 1991 and was recognized by the zoning staff as inadequate. The entire process marks a serious failure of the regional air district for waiting so long to update the HRA. The foundry’s increased activities, employment and new sources of emissions demanded a review years ago.” 

PSC has operated out of West Berkeley since 1934. Area residents have protested the foundry’s emissions and odors, which they say pose serious health and environment hazards, for over two decades. 

In an email to the community on June 6, Mayor Tom Bates addressed the HRA release. 

“I understand the limitations of the study, specifically the concerns raised about the threshold standards of the HRA,” he said. 

“The mayor’s comments suggest that the new HRA is headed down the same path as the 1991 steel mill’s health assessment,” said Wood. “The HRA is about community health. Hopefully we are all going to have a review period for this document.” 

According to the California Environmental Protection Agency, risk assessments “help scientists and regulators identify serious health hazards and determine realistic goals for reducing exposure to toxins so that there is no significant health threat to the public.” 

The four-step process of risk assessment usually includes hazard identification, exposure assessment, dose-response assessment and risk characterization. 

The air district is currently in the process of installing a mobile air station to further test and monitor emissions in West Berkeley which will establish baseline ambient air quality and the sources of variations in the air quality.  

The air district and Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE) recently settled their lawsuits against PSC. The air district settlement requires the steel foundry to install a capture hood to control emissions and pay $150,000 in fines to the air district. 

“We have applied to the air district for a use permit to install a capture hood at Plant 3,” said Jewel.  

“As per the settlement with CBE, we will be installing an air filtration system as soon as the air district gives us the necessary use permit.” 

A separate small claims lawsuit filed by the nonprofit organization Neighborhood Solutions against Pacific Steel is scheduled to be heard at the Alameda County Superior Court on Monday. 

Warnings of criminal penalties, charges of intimidation and ousters of worried UC Berkeley workers and concerns about radioactive contamination dominated discussions about two polluted southeast Richmond sites Thursday. 

Cleanup actions at the university’s Richmond Field Station (RFS) and the adjacent Campus Bay development site are being closely watched by the Richmond Southeast Shoreline Area Community Advisory Group (CAG), a community panel advising the state Department of Toxics Substances Control (DTSC). 

Thursday night’s CAG meeting was the first since the DTSC issued two letters June 29 detailing alleged violations during the 2002-2004 cleanup, including alleged illegal dumping of more than 3,000 truckloads of contaminated soil from university property into the massive mound of buried contaminated earth at Campus Bay. 

The soil contained mercury, arsenic, zinc, cadmium, selenium, PCBs and copper at levels above the state thresholds for toxic materials. 

Doreen S. Moreno, a UC Berkeley Governmental and Community Affairs analyst, spoke near the end of the monthly meeting of the Richmond Southeast Shoreline Area Community Advisory Group (CAG) to read a prepared statement. 

Moments after Moreno described the illegal dumping violations as “alleged deficiencies in meeting administrative requirements” and not a current health risk, attorney Peter Weiner rose to challenge her claim. 

What the DTSC had charged were not simply “administrative violations” but substantive problems, punishable by up to nine years in jail for each count, Weiner said. 

A senior attorney with the international law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, Weiner typically represents major developers. But in Richmond, he is representing the community activists of Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD). 

Retribution alleged 

Weiner said he was also concerned with allegations raised minutes earlier by Claudette Begin, vice president of Local 7 of the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), which represents UCB clerical workers, including those at the field station. 

Begin charged that a number of union workers suffered health problems during the cleanup, “and when they spoke up, they were driven out.” As a result, she said, “people are not interested in speaking up. That’s the level of intimidation that’s gone on.” 

Her voice breaking with emotion, she said she felt personally responsible for the plight of workers, including those she said had warned of arsenic contamination at the RFS Forest Products Lab. 

“The university has denied in the past that there were arsenic problems,” she said. 

But those claims were substantiated earlier in the meeting by Barbara Cook, DTSC’s active statewide head of cleanup operations, who said that the discovery of hazardous levels of arsenic at the surface in the lab area pose “a potential imminent threat to people working at the complex.” 

Cook’s staff is reviewing a cleanup plan submitted by the university and will issue a public notice before the actual cleanup of an estimated 85 cubic yards of earth is removed and hauled to the licensed Kettleman Hills hazardous waste facility near King City. 

Weiner said he was concerned about allegations that the university may not have informed employees about the potential hazards to employees during the cleanup at Campus Bay, and said the state labor code bars any punitive action toward workers who complain about possible job safety issues. 

Field station workers and BARRD activist and CAG member Sherry Padgett have also charged that the university has failed to conduct an adequate investigation of hazardous materials at the site, and Padgett has alleged that the presence of a highly contaminated toxic “hot spot” immediately adjacent to the RFS is cause for concern. 

Douglas Moesteller, an executive of Cherokee Investment Partners, told the CAG about plans to clean up the hot spot, a site measuring about 200 feet by 30 feet. 

Michelle Kriegman-King, a vice president and environmental engineer with the consulting firm Erler & Kalinowski, described the plans in detail for a site with high levels of toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and pesticides. 

Rejecting a plan that would call only for excavating and removing some of the contaminated earth while capping the rest and leaving it in place, Kriegman-King said all the earth would be removed. 

Radioactive concerns 

Two scientific consultants working for the CAG under a grant provided by Cherokee Simeon Ventures, the special purpose corporation created to develop the site, are urging caution—and are calling for comprehensive testing of the site for radioactive waste before any further work is done at the site. 

Dorinda Shipman of Treadwell & Rollo and Adrienne LaPierre of Iris Environmental are working under contract to the CAG, as is a court reporting service—all paid for by the Campus Bay developers and negotiated with Weiner’s assistance, a first in the history of DTSC’s CAG system. 

Newly emerging information has also revealed that experiments with melting and coating uranium at the Stauffer Chemical plants were much more extensive than previously revealed, and a document produced as the result of lawsuits against tobacco manufacturers has revealed that radioactive polonium in cigarettes produced by the Philip Morris Co. was traced to a superphosphate fertilizer produced at the site. 

The confidential Feb. 25, 1976, inter-office memorandum recounts a visit by a tobacco company executive to the Stauffer plant which confirmed the fertilizer as the probable source of the deadly substance. 

The memo also alleges that a federally funded University of Virginia scientist who had sided with the tobacco company’s claims that the material was harmless and not proven otherwise would continue to do so because he “knows where his bread is buttered.” 

That document is available online at http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/139670.html. 

Dr. Michael Esposito, a retired UC Berkeley scientist who serves on the CAG’s Toxics Committee, said he is especially worried about polonium because it emits alpha particles, potentially the most deadly form of radiation but impossible to detect using surface Geiger counters used in previous tests at the site. 

The metal was used to fatally poison former Soviet KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London last year. 

He said he was also concerned because tests for other radioactive elements, including groundwater tests for uranium, were incomplete, and many used outdated water samples which prevented accurate measurement of radon gas, a product of radioactive decay. 

An angry Henry Clark, executive director of the West County Toxics Coalition, said that the discoveries of additional work with uranium and other radioactive elements at the site had confirmed the claims of CAG member Ethel Dotson. “Practically everyone made it seem like she was crazy, but she was on point,” Clark said. 

Dotson has been stricken with cancer, which she has attributed to a childhood spent growing up near the Stauffer complex. 

Esposito said that all site maps should now carry the footprints of the vanished chemical plant buildings, given that an increasing number of structures have been identified as the site of work with radioactive materials. 

CAG history  

The CAG, created by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, is advising the agency about cleanup of contaminated sites. It was formed after activists from BARRD, the West County Toxics Coalition, the Richmond Progressive Alliance and nearby neighborhoods grew alarmed over cleanup activities at the two sites. 

Polluted by a complex of plants which manufactured toxic chemicals at Campus Bay for a century and a munitions plant at the RFS, the sites were being rehabilitated by the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board before the activists set to work. 

Concerned about potential hazards from the clouds of dust generated by the factory demolition and soil work and frustrated at dealing with an agency which had no scientists trained in handling toxic materials, activists pressed for a regulatory handover to the DTSC, enlisting the support of Assemblymember Loni Hancock and the Richmond City Council. 

The eventual result was a handover of jurisdiction by the water board to the DTSC, which is well-staffed with toxicologists. 

The 2002-2004 Campus Bay cleanup was conducted by an Emeryville company which had been headed by a former water board staff member, while the university devised its own cleanup. 

UC Berkeley’s plans to build an academic/corporate research park at the field station, with up to 1.5 million square feet of new buildings, have been stalled by change in state agencies and the ensuing tightened regulatory regime.

Oakland Assemblymember Sandré Swanson modified his AB45 Oakland Unified School District local control bill again last Wednesday, giving back more powers to State Superintendent Jack O’Connell over when state control of the Oakland schools will end and winning, in return, key Republican support and passage in the California State Senate Education Committee. 

In the new version the state superintendent, not FCMAT, will control when local control is restored to the Oakland school board in the area of financial management. Swanson’s modified bill continues to give FCMAT power over when local control will be restored in the Oakland schools in all other areas of district operations.  

The new modification in Swanson’s local control restoration bill was not enough to win the support of O’Connell, however. State deputy superintendent for governmental affairs told committee members Wednesday that “although the bill as amended is better” and “FCMAT (Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team) reports are important and critical to the [local restoration] process” and O’Connell “understands the desire for local control and shares that goal,” the superintendent would not support a bill that takes away his discretion in that restoration. “He continues to oppose this bill,” California Education Department staffmember Andrea Ball said. 

But the modification was enough to win crucial 6-1 passage in the Senate Education Committee on Wednesday, including—and perhaps, most importantly—the vote of one of the committee’s Republican members, Jeff Denham (Merced, Modesto, Salinas). Significant Republican support in the legislature is needed if AB45 is to overcome a possible veto by Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but even a small amount of Republican support increases the likelihood of Schwarzenegger signing the bill into law if it passes both houses. 

A second committee Republican, Mark Wyland (San Juan Capistrano, Carlsbad), cast the lone vote against the bill, saying that after “a good discussion” with Swanson, “I thought a lot about it” and preferred to keep authority over restoration in the state superintendent’s hands. 

“There has been tremendous improvement in student achievement [in OUSD], and it’s significant that this happened under the state administrator,” Wyland said. “I don’t want to upset that progress. I’d rather wait until the superintendent agrees it’s time to restore local control.” 

For Swanson’s part, he was upbeat about the passage. 

“Today’s vote represents substantial progress for the return of democracy and accountability to the Oakland Unified School District,” Swanson said in a prepared statement following the Education Committee vote. “I look forward to a successful vote on the Senate floor.”  

Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), a co-sponsor of the measure, added that AB45 “will put in place important benchmarks for the return of local control to the Oakland Unified School District and set the standards for return of local control for districts that may face the same challenges in the future. I have every confidence in the Oakland Unified Board of Education to take the reins in a responsible manner.” 

But before committee members voted to support the measure, the hearing itself at one point threatened to unravel over the contentious, unresolved issues that continue to simmer in and around Oakland over the state takeover. 

It began during a parade to the microphone of Oakland parents, students, education activists, and officials who had come to Sacramento to support Swanson’s bill, with a seemingly innocent statement by Oakland Education Association teachers union president Betty Olsen-Jones that her organization “supports complete return of local control to the Oakland Unified School District.” 

While Olsen-Jones did not use the term “immediate return” committee chair Jack Scott (D-Pasadena) appeared to take it that way, interrupting Olsen-Jones to lecture her that “this bill is not about a return to full local control” to Oakland Unified, adding that “the reason that Oakland is not in full control now is because the district went bankrupt.” 

Olsen-Jones appeared stunned by the chairperson’s outburst and did not directly reply to it, though several people in the committee room who had come from Oakland said “it wasn’t bankrupt” loud enough for committee members to hear. And taking the podium several minutes later, Susan Harman, a former Oakland charter school principal who frequently clashed with former OUSD state administrator Randy Ward, began her testimony by telling Scott, “we were not bankrupt when the state took over the Oakland schools, but we’re bankrupt now. The district is further in debt under state administration than when it began.” 

Senator Denham then said that he had been in the Senate in 2003 when the OUSD takeover legislation was passed, and voted for it himself. When he asked Harman, “were we duped when we voted for that bill,” Harman answered pointedly, “yes.” 

That brought Scott back into the discussion, appearing disturbed by Harman’s challenge to his version of the school takeover issue, but before Swanson’s carefully crafted compromise could fall apart, the assemblymember smoothed things over by saying “it was clear that we needed assistance from the state in Oakland at the time it was given,” and Scott appeared satisfied and dropped the issue. 

But the state superintendent’s office caught committee heat as well from an unlikely Republican source. 

After Ball expressed O’Connell’s opposition to the bill, Denham told her, “you’ve said that there are gaps in [Oakland Unified’s] performance that prevent the return to local control. What are those gaps?” 

Ball answered that “until FCMAT gives the district a rating of 7 in any operational area, [FCMAT doesn’t] recommend a return to local control,” but when Denham asked her, again, what was keeping those scores from the local control threshold, Ball suggested that he read the FCMAT report. 

That answer appeared to annoy Denham, who told the superintendent’s representative, “you’re here to tell us that the school district is not ready for local control. I just want you to tell us why they are not ready.” 

Ball did not answer. 

A spokesperson for O’Connell later said by telephone that Ball realized following the hearing that she had been in error in saying that FCMAT requires a score of 7 on a scale of 1-10 before a recommendation is made for return to local control. The state superintendent’s public information officer, Hilary McLean, said that the actual score is 6, and comes from the written FCMAT scoring criteria that state standards in a given area “are implemented, monitored, and becoming systematic.” 

There was also a contradiction in Ball’s statement to the committee that was not caught by committee members or Swanson at the time. 

Making the point that AB45 was not necessary because the state superintendent was already moving ahead with a return to local control in several areas, noting last Monday’s return of community relations and governance to control of the Oakland school board, Ball said that “we are expecting a FCMAT report by the end of the year” that will contain “one other area for possible return.”  

O’Connell said on Monday that this area might be facilities management. 

But Ball failed to note that money authorized for FCMAT reports under the original takeover legislation has run out, and one of the provisions of Swanson’s AB45 is to restore that money for periodic FCMAT reports until full local control is restored. Without AB45 or some other form of legislative financial authorizations, there will be no future FCMAT reports, and no way under the SB39 takeover legislation for O’Connell to evaluate how well, or how poorly, the district is operating. 

AB45 now goes to the full Senate for consideration, where it will be floor-managed by State Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland), who wrote the original SB39 OUSD state takeover legislation in 2003. The bill has already passed the Assembly. 

The Oakland schools have been run under state receivership since complications surrounding a teacher pay raise caused the district to be unable to meet its spring 2003 payroll, forcing the district to ask for a $100 million line of credit from the state. 

Swanson’s original bill would have immediately returned local control to the Oakland schools in four of the five areas that the state-financed FCMAT has been monitoring since 2003—community relations and governance, personnel management, pupil achievement, and facilities management. The fifth FCMAT monitoring area, fiscal management, would have remained under state control under Swanson’s original bill. 

But shortly before the bill was considered in the Assembly Education Committee last April, Swanson modified AB45 after discussions with Schwarzenegger and Perata, among others, convinced him that the bill could not be both passed and signed into law in that form. Under those April modifications, local control would no longer be restored immediately, but would be restored in any one of the five FCMAT monitoring areas upon FCMAT’s recommendation. 

Under the original 2003 state takeover legislation, FCMAT could make the recommendation for restoration of local control, but the State Superintendent retained the ultimate control over whether, and when, that restoration was carried out. 

That provision in the original takeover legislation led to one of the more contentious issues of the takeover, after O’Connell failed to act on a 2005 FCMAT recommendation that local control be restored to the Oakland school board in the area of community relations and governance. O’Connell came to Oakland on Monday of this week to grant that local control restoration in that area, two days before the Senate Education Committee hearing and vote on AB45, and two years after FCMAT made its original recommendation in that area. 

Two teenagers were arrested Friday on charges of shooting a gun at passing vehicles on the 2600 block of California Street. 

Berkeley Police arrested an 18-year-old who is a student at Berkeley High School and a 15-year-old boy on charges of conspiracy, possession of a 9 mm gun, and intent to sell marijuana. Police charge that they were taking turns shooting at passing cars. 

Police believe that no one was hurt and that there wasn’t any property damage. They located the 18-year-old in a nearby home, while the juvenile was located near the scene of the crime. 

“We got calls from concerned citizens that helped us find the suspects,” said Lt. Wes Hester, spokesman for the Berkeley Police Department. “Without that, we would have not able to locate the suspects. We want to give the community a big thanks.” 

Corporal punishment 

On Sunday at 2:45 p.m., Berkeley police arrested a Berkeley woman and man for inflicting corporal punishment on their 12-year-old son on the 3200 block of California Street. The couple struck their son with a belt. The child was placed in protective custody following the incident. 

Car burglaries 

There has been a series of car break-ins surrounding Pyramid Brewery on the 900 block of Gilman Street. On Saturday, two patrons were inside between 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. When they returned to their cars, many things were missing such as a suitcase, toothpaste, and other toiletries. There are no suspects. 

Stolen food and beer 

On Friday at 9:24 p.m., an employee of Andronico’s, on the 1400 block of University Avenue, called in to report that a 21-year old Berkeley man had been caught stealing food and beer from the store. Store employees were able to recover the stolen items. Berkeley police arrested the man. 

Internal theft 

On Friday at 8:38 p.m., an employee from the Double Tree Hotel on 200 Marina Blvd. called in to report that somebody who worked there had taken $3,100 in cash from the building. It was reported that they have identified a suspect, whose description has not been released. 

More vandalism at BMHC 

On Friday at 5:13 p.m., someone called the police to report that the window at the Berkeley Mental Health Center, on the 2600 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, was broken. Investigators reported that it was a punch to the window. The crime is said to have happened between 4 and 5 p.m. No suspects have been identified. This follows two instances of arson at the center last week. 

The San Francisco Preservation Consortium appealed the San Francisco Planning Commission’s decision not to landmark the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street campus last week. 

The Planning Commission’s 4-3 vote last month not to landmark the five-building historic campus was a blow for community members and preservationists. 

After citing prohibitive maintenance costs, the university closed its Laguna Street campus in 2004 and leased it to private developers AF Evans to turn it into a mixed-use development featuring residential rental units and retail space. 

First used as a city orphanage from 1854 until the San Francisco State Normal School was established in the 1920s to accommodate public school teachers, the campus has also served as the original home of San Francisco State University. 

The San Francisco Preservation Consortium consists of neighborhood and historic preservation organizations including the Friends of 1800 and Save the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus Group. 

The association’s appeal is based on the grounds that, the Planning Department and its historic preservation consultant, the Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board (LPAB) and the State Historic Preservation Officer all agreed the former San Francisco State Teacher’s College Campus at 55 Laguna St. was eligible for listing in the California Register of Historical Resources. 

In a letter to the Board of Supervisors on behalf of the consortium, Joseph Butler, AIA Chair, stated that landmarking the site would “provide the much needed LPAB oversight to ensure this National Register-elible historical resource is protected.” 

Since the Planning Commission would be asked to certify the 55 Laguna Mixed Use Project final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in the fall, local preservationists are accelerating efforts to save the campus. 

The proposed construction would demolish Middle Hall and the administrative wing of Richardson Hall. 

In a letter to the Planning Department, Grey Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, described the site as an “early example of an urban campus.” 

“These properties have historical relevancy within the context of California’s teacher education system and architectural significance as an excellent example of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in the City of San Francisco,” his letter stated. 

The SF LPAB voted unanimously on June 20 to file a concurrent appeal of the commission’s decision. 

Warm water pool users got a look at what the proposed warm water pool at the Berkeley Unified School District’s Milvia Street site would look like on Wednesday at the Disability Commission meeting.  

The preliminary design, presented by ELS Architects, was generally welcomed by the commission as well as pool users. There was, however, one big problem: The site has no parking. 

“There is absolutely no space for it,” said ELS architect Ed Nolen, as he explained the design during Wednesday’s meeting. 

Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna said that school district parking could not be used. “They already have a parking deficit,” she said. 

ELS was hired by the city to develop a design for the relocation of the Berkeley warm water pool after the school district approved the Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan in January, which proposed demolishing the Berkeley High old gym and its warm pool in order to build classrooms and sports facilities. The plan provided for the option for city use of part of the Milvia Street property to rebuild the pool. 

Although the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) landmarked both the old gym and the warm pool last Thursday, the school district, which is not legally bound by local landmark laws, proposes to go ahead with the demolition. 

A contingent of warm pool users have opposed the demolition of the 83-year-old gym, which houses the pool, but have said they are open to alternatives if the school district tears it down. 

The proposed design, put together with input from the Warm Water Pool Task Force, is a one-story, 12,000-square-foot structure which includes a pool, deck space, lockers and equipment storage rooms. 

Berkeley residents approved a $3.25 million ballot measure in 2000 to reconstruct, renovate, repair and improve the existing warm water pool facilities. Caronna said the most recent cost estimate for pool construction was $8.4 million. 

“Depending on what the school district does, it could cost $2 million to purchase the site from them,” she said. 

Disability Commissioner Madelyn Stelmach, who was absent from the meeting, said that lack of parking was a big drawback. 

“I want to look at how to maximize making the warm pool a reality,” she wrote in a letter. “I believe any option for the warm pool will require additional funds through a bond measure. The way to improve the chances of a two-thirds voter approval is to broaden our interest base and join with those advocating an ‘aquatics center and/or refurbishing of the local pools’ ... I would encourage everyone to consider applying this plan to various settings and not just stick to the parking lot site.” 

Warm pool users said that parking problems would prevent the idea from becoming a reality. 

“Parking as an afterthought is totally illogical,” said Gary Marquard, a pool user. “It’s really more important than anything else. At present we have 18 designated parking spots which are restricted to after-school hours.” 

“As part of the negotiation with the school district, whether we purchase the land or use it, we need to discuss parking,” said John Rosenbrach, Berkeley’s warm water pool project manager. 

Disability Commissioner Dmitri Belser told the Planet that it was important to look at other sites where the pool could be relocated. 

“I just don’t know how realistic it [the proposed plan] is,” he said. “I don’t know whether it is sustainable or whether a two-thirds bond measure will help pass it. We should look at lots of different options instead of just focusing on this one answer which may not even be the answer.” 

According to Nolen, the proposed pool would be one-and-a-half times the size of the current pool, which is 75-feet long and 37-feet wide. 

“We listened to what pool users had to say about the pool,” said ELS architect David Petta. “Depth and water temperature was a big issue. We looked at a number of different options and we decided that one pool which merges the uses of two pools together is better than two different pools. We twisted and turned the design in almost every way we could and we finally settled on this plan.” 

The proposed pool entrance is on the Milvia Street side since it is a strong bicycle street.  

Water temperature would be between 94 and 95 degrees and there would be a shallow as well as a deep end. An aerobics class for kids and adults would also double up as an area to socialize. Pool steps would be wide enough for people to sit on them, and a typical pool-lift and a dry ramp would help the physically challenged with pool access. 

Petta said that it was important to build a non-corrosive structure and one that could be easily ventilated. The facility with its high ceilings and window space would help to bring in light and fresh air. The proposed plan has six individual showers and two dressing rooms for private or assisted dressing.  

“We also want it to be energy efficient,” Petta said. “Something that would leave a green footprint. The final step of the report would be to put a number to it, do a little more work on the elevations and deliver it to the city council in September. The council and the public can then decide what they what to do with it.” 

Rosenbrach added that the ballot measure would go before Berkeley voters in November 2008. “Bidding and construction would take a couple of years,” he said. “The pool will be operational in 2010.”

The public hearing at the Tuesday night City Council meeting was supposed to focus on whether the council should uphold or overturn a commission’s landmark designation of the 1939 art deco structure that houses Berkeley Iceland at Derby and Milvia streets. 

But the public in attendance, mostly members or allies of a new nonprofit corporation Save Berkeley Iceland, testified less about the site’s architectural features and more about the need to save what one supporter called a “community jewel” as a space to skate. 

Even the potential developer of the site, Ali Kashani, president of Oakland-based Memar Properties, and his supporters focused in on issues outside the question of landmarking the property, talking about the nature of the project he is proposing, that he said would include affordable housing units (required by law) and a partnership with the YMCA to consolidate its scattered programs for young low-income children. 

The council voted unanimously to delay a vote on the question, instead setting a special meeting next Tuesday at 6 p.m. for that purpose. Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said he hoped that during the week rink owner East Bay Iceland would meet with Save Berkeley Iceland supporters to carve out a mutually satisfactory agreement. 

But in a Wednesday morning phone interview, Kashani said Save Berkeley Iceland’s participation is no longer an option because he has a “binding purchase agreement” with East Bay Iceland. That agreement precludes the owners from entering into discussions with a third party, he said. 

Kashani said his proposal includes building townhouses, either rental or condominiums, and partnering with the YMCA. It is premature to talk about how a landmark designation would affect his plan to purchase the site, he said, noting there is an “inspection period” during which he can decide if he wants to move forward with the purchase. 

The stated purpose of the hearing was for the council to decide whether to uphold the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s (LPC) designation of Iceland as a landmark. The commission’s designation specifically calls for maintaining the exterior walls of the structure as well as the grass berms, which are the mounds in front of the building. 

“They don’t care about saving any more of the building than we do, unless it can be used for an ice rink,” Jay Wescott, general manager of East Bay Iceland, told the council.  

Only the west exterior wall of the building merits landmark status, Wescott said. Saving other exterior walls and the berm would make the building “unappealing to another buyer,” he said. 

While underscoring the belief that the historic site should get landmark status, Save Berkeley Iceland proponents did not deny their overriding motivation was to save the structure for ice skating. 

Tom Killilea, executive director of Save Berkeley Iceland, told the council, “It’s become apparent that the real purpose of this hearing is not strictly just a designation as a landmark of Berkeley Iceland, a historic site that is more than an ice rink. The result of your decision will determine whether Berkeley has a chance to hold onto a public commons that few other cities in this area can brag of.”  

Killilea pointed to a financial plan he had distributed to the council, showing that a nonprofit would be able to make the facility work financially, whereas a for-profit organization could not. 

Under new nonprofit management, Killilea said the facility would be more than a skating rink, adding features to become the heart of a community recreation district, partnering with the YMCA, the city’s recreation department and the schools, whose new ball fields are being built across the street. 

In a similar vein, Fran Gallati, president and chief executive officer of the Berkeley-Albany YMCA, told the council his organization was approached by Kashani. 

”He gave us an opportunity to meet our objectives at the Y,” Gallati said, explaining that the YMCA works with 500 Head Start and Early Head Start children at a number of centers. The Iceland location would give the YMCA “an opportunity to consolidate all of our sites in South Berkeley, decrease the management overhead, and improve our ability to attract and retain and pay better teachers, which is really going to make a difference with these kids.” 

While much of the discussion was on the future use of the site, speakers at the public hearing also addressed the question at hand: whether the council should overturn the Landmark Preservation Commission’s decision to designation the site as a historic landmark. 

Supporting East Bay Iceland, Mark Holbert, preservation architect and Berkeley resident, called for preservation uniquely of the building’s western façade. Requiring preservation of more than that would be “a punitive act to force a single use,” he said. 

In its designation, the LPC said the berms have a function as insulation, and included them in elements of the site to be preserved, but Holbert disagreed: “There is no evidence to support the findings that the berms are an example of the use of earth-sheltered construction,” he said. “The technique is called ‘cut and fill,’ [and] offers no more thermal value than the earth below any building.” 

Jill Korte, a member of the LPC, told the council that the structure has a “high level of integrity.” 

She said the structure is “essentially unaltered,” which is why eventual alterations should come in the context of an environmental review. (A site designated as a landmark can be demolished or altered, but requires extensive review before that can take place.) 

Leslie Emmington Jones, also an LPC commissioner, said the building represents a time when, despite the Depression of the 1930s, the Berkeley community came together to privately fund the rink for community use. “It’s a magnificent temple to public participation and public architecture,” she said.

Elmwood neighbors and merchants lost their bid to overturn zoning board approval of a proposed retail development at College and Ashby avenues at the City Council Tuesday. Opponents say the proposal for stores, a gym and large restaurant-bar is too big for the small shopping district. 

Despite their loss at council, opponents promise to challenge the development elsewhere, possibly in the courts or on the streets—or both. 

In other council business, councilmembers held a public hearing on Iceland (see accompanying story), heard a report on setting standards and fees for alcohol outlets, modified the condominium conversion law (a workshop will be held in the fall), approved a contract with the YMCA to subsidize city employee memberships, raised fees to keep up with costs for sewers, planning, animal adoption, the marina and more. 

Wright’s Garage 

The council failed to schedule a public hearing on the appeal of zoning board approval of a retail project that would re-use the former Wright’s Garage at College and Ashby avenues. 

The proposed restaurant-bar that could become one of the city’s largest full-service restaurants has brought neighbors and merchants out to council meetings since June 12 in an attempt to convince the council to hold a formal public hearing on the project with the aim of eventually reversing zoning board approvals. 

Tuesday’s vote, consistent with previous council votes, was 4-2-1 in favor of holding the public hearing, with Councilmembers Linda Maio, Dona Spring, Max Anderson and Kriss Worthington voting in support of the hearing and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstaining. Five votes are required to hold the hearing; Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Laurie Capitelli both recused themselves from the vote. 

Similar to previous meetings, dozens of people, mostly from the Elmwood Neighborhood and Elmwood Merchants’ associations, lined up at the council mic to speak about the concerns they have with the proposed project, particularly focusing on the restaurant-bar, which they say would be too large for the small district where there is already too much traffic and inadequate parking.  

In contrast to previous meetings that drew few neighbors in support of the project, several nearby residents spoke in favor of the development. 

Fred Norton lives near the proposed project on Hillegass Avenue and said that he and his wife moved to the neighborhood especially so that they could walk to shopping and restaurants. 

“Nine out of 10 people on my street support the development as Mr. [John] Gordon proposed it,” he said. 

In a phone interview Thursday morning, Raymond Barglow of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association said that the neighbors are not giving up their fight to have the project scaled down.  

The neighborhood is considering three possible strategies, he said: one is an attempt to contest the restaurant’s application for a liquor license, another is holding a regular neighborhood picket of the site, and a third would be a lawsuit, which could be based on various elements included in the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) approvals.  

The suit might contest the ZAB’s use of KitchenDemocracy.com as a measure of neighborhood and merchant support, Barglow said. Kitchen Democracy is a hills-based web site to which individuals can submit their opinions about specific city-related matters.  

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, who contributed $3,000 from his council fund for Kitchen Democracy, expressed his support for the development in a statement posted on the site, which Wozniak consistently uses to express his views. 

Councilmembers are expected to keep open minds on projects that might come before them; Wozniak had to recuse himself from participating in a vote on the project, because of his statement on Kitchen Democracy. 

The Zoning Adjustment Board’s use of Kitchen Democracy as a measure of public support is noted in the March 8 ZAB findings: “The zoning board decision states that the bar-restaurant is unique to the area, because it would include a ‘bar/lounge or gathering area.’ This type of restaurant facility is not currently provided in the district. Neighborhood and community support of a restaurant use is evidenced by the positive polling results posted on KitchenDemocracy.com.” 

In a recent letter to the mayor and council, 24-year Elmwood resident Richard B. Spohn, an attorney and former state director of consumer affairs, condemned ZAB’s use of the website, contending it is more like a blog or a chat room than a gauge of public opinion. 

The Elmwood zoning ordinance requires evidence of neighborhood and merchant support, Spohn said. 

“Who of the affected neighborhood merchants or residents know about this chat room?” he wrote of Kitchen Democracy. “When in the process of assessing resident and merchant support in the neighborhood did the ZAB declare that this chat room would be the dispositive gauge of support? Only after-the-fact, in the Findings and Recommendations, after the process at the ZAB had ended. This is an abuse of administrative and democratic processes. It is an abuse of administrative discretion. It entails a delegation of public responsibility that is impermissible and it fatally flaws the outcome.” 

Spohn goes on to say “This is a stunningly invalid foundation for the project, a serious misrepresentation and a disservice to the processes of governance of the city of Berkeley.” 

Alcohol Addressed 

Binge drinking around the campus, loitering and drug sales around liquor stores and sales to minors in restaurants were signaled out as some of the reasons the city needs operating standards for alcohol outlets—liquor stores, grocery stores and restaurants. 

At the beginning of the year, the City Council approved the concept of establishing standards and fees to pay for inspections of the outlets. At Tuesday’s meeting, Assistant City Attorney Zach Cowan came to the council to report on his work on the ordinance and ask for council input. The ordinance will be presented to council for a vote in the fall. 

Cowan said inspection costs would be about $150,000 and asked the council for feedback on how it would want the fee schedule to work—should all alcohol outlets, including restaurants, be assessed? Should there be penalties for those outlets that do not pass inspections? Should there be fines levied above inspection costs?  

Funds from fines could be used for education on alcohol-related issues and detox programs, councilmembers said. 

Among the standards suggested by Cowan were keeping windows clear so that one can see inside a store, quick removal of graffiti, adequate lighting, refusing to sell to customers who create a public nuisance and not allowing loitering inside stores where alcohol is sold. 

For problematic outlets, other conditions may be required, such as video surveillance and enrollment in a supplementary inspection program. 

Some councilmembers did not want restaurants to pay an inspection fee, but most thought it was fair, especially, as Councilmember Dona Spring said, because many restaurants regularly serve underage patrons; some wanted to be sure that fees would be equitable and that small businesses would not be overcharged; several stated their agreement with staff that reinspection fees should escalate for violators, while for the first violation they said the fee should be relatively small. 

Staff will meet with owners of alcohol outlets and community members and write an ordinance, which should be back before the council in the fall.

The UC Regents are scheduled to approve two key environmental documents Monday, setting the stage for a major expansion at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

The most significant is the environmental impact report (EIR) for the lab’s master plan for the next 18 years. The two other environmental documents pave the way for demolishing the Bevatron and building a 25,000-square-foot guest house for visiting experts and researchers. 

First on the agenda of the board’s Committee on Grounds and Buildings Monday meeting is the final draft of the lab’s Long Range Development Plan 2025 (LRDP). 

Calling for 884,000 square feet of new buildings and up to 500 new parking spaces and 860 new employees, the document also spells out the planned demolition of 272,000 square feet of existing buildings. 

While the regents will vote on a full EIR for the LRDP, the documents for the guest house consist of an environmental initial study coupled with the declaration of no significant environmental impacts. 

Construction on the guest house, a $10.9 million hotel-style building with 73 beds in 60 rooms, could begin in December, with completion planned for March, 2009. 

A third environmental document has been completed by the lab, but isn’t on the agenda—the final EIR on demolition of the lab’s Building 51 and the Bevatron, the world’s first large-scale atomic particle accelerator. 

All three documents are posted at the lab’s website, www.lbl.gov/Community/env-rev-docs.html, and the full LRDP EIR is posted at ww.lbl.gov/Community/LRDP/index.html. 

The committee meeting is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. on the UC Santa Barbara campus. 

Comments, responses 

A large part of the LRDP final EIR is composed of critical comments from the city, community organizations and members of the public concerned about the impact of both the lab’s massive expansion and its cumulative effects when added to UC Berkeley’s own plans for the nearby southeast campus. 

One issue complicating site development is the presence of toxic compounds in the soil and groundwater created by past activities at the lab.  

Listed contaminants include volatile and semivolatile organic compounds, “very small amounts of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons,” hazardous metals and tritium, a radioactive isotope of the gaseous element hydrogen. 

In response to concerns by the East Bay Municipal Utility District about possible exposures during installation of underground utilities at the site, the document promises that all the contamination sites are documented, and precautionary measures would reduce any possible exposures to less than significant levels. 

The document contains two letters outlining City of Berkeley concerns: a 29-page summary from City Manager Phil Kamlarz and a nine-page letter from Public Works Transportation Division Principal Planner Matt Nichols detailing the specifics of city transportation concerns. 

One overarching city concern is having to deal with two separate LRDPs involving developments with concentrated impacts on one finite area of the city. 

A city lawsuit is already underway and linked with actions filed by neighbors and environmentalists challenging the regents’ adoption of the final EIR for the university’s Southeast Campus Integrated Projects, which will add another third-of-a-million square feet of construction immediately downhill from the lab. 

While the lab’s EIR insists the lab and the university are separate entities, the city has raised questions, and the lab acknowledges that both UC Berkeley and the lab—a U.S. Department of Energy complex operated under contract by UC—share staff and some of the same facilities. The lab also owns two buildings on campus, the Calvin and Donner labs. 

But lab officials insist that two separate LRDPs are appropriate, and contend that nothing in the California Environmental Quality Act says otherwise. 

Multiple concerns 

Some of the questions raised by the city concern one site designated as a city landmark and buildings considered eligible for landmark status. 

The Bevatron building, which housed the world’s first large-scale particle accelerator, was rejected as a landmark by Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, but commissioners did give recognition to the site itself. Two other buildings considered candidates were already covered in the lab’s existing LRDP 2006, lab officials contend. 

As for the city’s questions about the lab’s impacts on a potential designated cultural landscape, the report contends that developments will respect the landscape and protect views to the maximum extent possible. 

While the report acknowledged the city’s contention that a catastrophic earthquake could lead to prolonged road closures, it said that “LBNL has in place policies and procedures” to maintain staff health and safety and “manage traffic through the hill site.” 

The university rejected outright the city’s contention that “significantly increasing the population in a high-geologic hazard area cannot be mitigated to a less than significant level solely through engineering.” 

As for the city’s plea for the lab to adopt the precautionary principle, the DEIR states following existing laws and regulations are adequate mitigations. 

Declaring the lab isn’t covered by the city’s Manufactured Nanoparticle Disclosure Ordinance, which requires reports on facilities making or using the microscopic technology, the lab “intends to provide on-going information of interest to the City in regard to the Lab’s work” in the nano realm. 

While acknowledging new programs will lead to significant increases in the amounts of dangerous materials stored and created on site, the lab contends existing rules and laws cover the dangers. 

Response to concerns over nanotech in a letter from Pamela Shivola, the EIR replied that the lab has safely worked with nano-sized bacteria and viruses. 

Responding to her concerns about the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute, which will be included in the Helios Building described in the EIR, the document states that a separate, full environmental review will be prepared for that building. The structure will also be built so that it won’t disturb an existing underground plume of tritium in the area, according to the LRDP EIR. 

Other worries 

In responses to concerns that the large number of faults in the lab area might trigger quakes, the report contends that the only likely surface rupture would come from the Hayward Fault itself, which is located south of the lab buildings, offering reports by the state Geological Survey as support. 

Several hundred area residents signed petitions from the Preserve the Strawberry Creek Watershed Alliance, which has called for a moratorium on building in the canyon and warned of the reported dangers of nanotech. 

Among the measures urged by the Sierra Club were: Leaving stands of trees intact and preserving the natural corridor of Strawberry Creek (a plea seconded by the Urban Creeks Council); minimizing truck traffic during construction by relocating excavated topsoil locally; using biodiesel-powered new construction equipment; shifting research toward peaceful uses of technology; disallowing any net gain in parking, and installation of a funicular railway to reduce car use. 

Gene Bernardi, a frequent lab critic, offered the simplest solution: Close it down, clean up the toxics and let the radioactivity decay in place. 

Ignacio Chapela, a UC Berkeley microbial biologist and an outspoken critic of the BP project, decried the lab’s increasing emphasis on creating genetically modified organisms in search of new fuel sources—research he said would created transgenic organisms which threatened “the entire canyon and the city and bay below.”  

Chapela also said construction of the new buildings would interfere with the use of the canyon and environs for teaching by university faculty. 

The report rejected his worries about genetically modified organisms, and said his concerns about the use of the canyon for teaching weren’t relevant to the EIR itself. 

Significant Error 

One obvious error in the document came in a response to a letter from Wendy Markel, president of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.  

Joining with the Berkeley Planning and Landmarks Preservation commissions plea to locate development elsewhere than in the hills, Markel asked what university property in Richmond could serve as an alternate location. 

“Is any of the university property in Richmond contaminated?”” she asked. 

In response, the EIR noted that the university’s Richmond Field Station “has a history of soil and groundwater contamination,” adding that “UC Berkeley is working with the California Regional Water Quality Control Board to implement a cleanup and restoration plan” for the site and adjacent marshland. 

In fact, the water board was ousted from its oversight of the field station two years ago after community protests and intervention by the Richmond City Council and Assemblymember Loni Hancock. 

The site is currently under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which recently issued letters declaring that the university had illicitly disposed of thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil when the water board was in charge. 

The university had argued against a change of oversight agencies, with two officials insisting the school had been doing an adequate job.

Few people who’ve encountered him are indifferent to Mark Rhoades, whose departure was announced this week by city Planning and Development Director Dan Marks. 

He becomes the third senior city staffer to resign in recent weeks, following the departures of Transportation Manager Peter Hillier and Housing Director Steve Barton. His resignation becomes effective Aug. 10. 

Praised by Marks as a passionate and dedicated planner and hailed by developer Evan McDonald as “a good planner” who “will be sorely missed,” Rhoades had equally vocal critics. 

To Art Goldberg, he was a “duplicitous insect,” a dubious honorific Rhoades has been known to joke about, and neighborhood activist Sharon Hudson responded to the announcement with “Oh great, and when does the party start?” 

“We will really miss his institutional knowledge, his passion about Berkeley and his passion about planning,” said Marks. 

A sometimes controversial figure who has clashed with neighborhood activists over large-scale development projects, Rhoades has spent nearly a decade on city staff and had just received a 10 percent pay boost. 

As of July 1, Rhoades was drawing an annual salary of $133,308, according to David W. Hodgkins, the city’s Director of Human Resources.  

Rhoades combined both the current and zoning aspects of the planning department along with future planning, uniting two previous positions. Marks said he didn’t know if a new employee would fill both roles. 

Though he’d known about the departure for several days, Planning Director Dan Marks said the news had come as a shock. 

In his letter to city staff, Marks said Rhoades said “he came to this decision with great difficulty after concluding that he needed to pursue employment opportunities that allowed him to spend more time with his young family.” 

Rhoades took leave after the recent birth of his second child, and since his return, the planner has talked frequently about his family and their importance to him. 

While Marks said he couldn’t confirm a report spreading along the city grapevine that Rhoades would be working on projects with developer Ali Kashani, the developer said, “Mark is talking to several people about his options and talking to me.” 

A photographer of flowers and a budding connoisseur of wines—with the help of sometimes adversary and Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman—Berkeley’s departing Planning Manager is also a self-described “change agent.” 

It was Goldberg who characterized Rhoades as “the duplicitous insect who runs the Zoning Department (a subdivision of planning) and who specializes in keeping neighbors in the dark” in a June 6, 2003 letter to the Daily Planet. 

While Marks noted that Rhoades was one of the younger members of his staff, Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman quipped that the planning manager was likely to retire because of old age: “They say one year of working in Berkeley is like eight years any place else.” 

Asked for a comment about Rhoades’ departure, Poschman would offered only that “It’s a bit poignant. Let’s leave it at that.” 

Another Berkeley political veteran, former Mayor Shirley Dean, said simply, “I’m not going to comment. It’s been some years since I’ve worked with him, and I’ll leave the comments up to people with more recent experience.” 

Steve Wollmer of PlanBerkeley.org and a neighbor of the so-called “Trader Joe’s project” at 1885 University Ave., a massive mixed-use project with apartments built over a grocery store, was less charitable. 

“He changed the ground rules for development in Berkeley. He interpreted the Zoning Ordinance in new and original ways. He’s done so much damage to the city, and now he’s going to be on the other side,” Wollmer said. “Although his heart was probably in the right place, his head was on backwards.” 

The 1885 University project is up for final consideration by the City Council Monday night, and Wollmer has raised the threat of a lawsuit if the building is approved as proposed by developers Evan McDonald and partner Chris Hudson. 

Marks said Rhoades’ departure “will be a great loss to the City of Berkeley. The department is in much better shape than when he took over four years ago.” 

Rhoades had played a major role in shaping the planning department and in bringing in new staff, Marks said. “He was a great guy to work with, and I’m going to miss him.” 

An advocate of so-called Smart Growth projects that favor concentrating development in mixed-use projects that create higher-density housing over ground-floor retail spaces along commercial corridors, he had found himself frequently at odds with neighbors who saw the projects as threats to the character of their neighborhoods. 

Will Travis, chair of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, called Rhoades “the ultimate professional,” and said his resignation “will be a big loss to the city.” 

Travis said he had always found Rhoades very helpful and constructive, and said much of the criticism came because “one of the challenges of working for the City of Berkeley is that there are a lot of policies, rules and regulations, and when Mark finds that a project meets all the policies, rules and regulations, he feels it should be approved. 

“I think a lot of people in Berkeley” feel the policies, rules and regulations mean projects should not be approved, Travis said. 

Sharon Hudson, who often found herself at odds with Rhoades, was less charitable, charging that the planner’s “arrogance, duplicity, and personal planning agenda cost the City of Berkeley and its citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold misery every year.” 

She said, “Under cover of public service, Mr. Rhoades skillfully manipulated the rules to benefit favored developers, and destroyed the trust between the citizens and their government. This is an opportunity for Dan Marks to honor his own good staff and the rest of Berkeley by replacing Mr. Rhoades with a public servant who respects the community, the truth, and the law.” 

“He’s a true believer in smart growth, and he has hired many smart growth advocates at city hall,” said City Councilmember Dona Spring. “Their impact will reverberate for years to come. The question is: should a planning staff member be such a strong advocate for one aspect of development, one which is not shared by the impacted neighborhoods?” 

Councilmember Gordon Wozniak offered a different perspective. “I will miss him. We’ll lose a lot of institutional knowledge.” 

Wozniak described Rhoades as “a very good public servant who worked very hard. I’m very sorry to hear he’s leaving. I’m impressed by some of the younger planners, but Mark’s departure will leave a very big hole. 

“It seems like a lot of people are leaving lately,” the councilmember added. 

Marie Bowman said she’s glad to see the planner’s departure. “Hopefully the city will get someone who’s a good listener and doesn’t seek to impose his own personal philosophy. I’m not surprised to hear he’s talking to Ali Kashani.” 

A veteran activist with the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, Bowman served on the city’s committee that studied the controversial density bonus awarded to developers in return for creating affordable apartments and condos. “We met for two years, then submitted our results. Mark was supposed to put it together, but instead he’s bottled it up. I suspect that’s because the developers won’t like it.” 

Darrell de Tienne, a San Franciscan who often represents developers in shepherding their projects through the Berkeley bureaucracy, said he’d sometimes had disagreements with Rhoades. 

As the representative for office builder and operator Wareham Development and the developers of the soon-to-be built nine-story-plus Berkeley Arpeggio condo tower on Center Street, de Tienne said many of the conflicts resulted from city policies. 

“I hear he’s going over to the private sector, so now he’ll get to see what the other side is like for a while,” de Tienne said. 

Rhoades didn’t return calls for comment.

Officials from Oakland’s privately operated Children’s Hospital got an hourlong angry lecture from all five Alameda County Supervisors on Tuesday morning after supervisors learned that Children’s has begun circulating petitions to put a $24 parcel tax increase on the February ballot to help finance the building of a new hospital. 

The problem? If passed, the measure would add to the bonded indebtedness of Alameda County, possibly jeopardizing the ability of the county to finance the retrofit of its own hospital, Highland.  

Supervisors said they resented the fact that neither they nor other county officials had been consulted before the petitions were put out on the street, making it appear that they were against medical services for children by now raising questions about the bond measure.  

Petition signatures were being solicited over the weekend throughout Alameda County, including the Alameda County Fair in its last two days, by the private petition signature gathering company Scott Petition Management.  

Board of Supervisors President Scott Haggerty suggested that the hospital withdraw the petitions, submit them to the Alameda County counsel’s office for redrafting, and ask the county itself to sponsor the referendum. Hospital officials said they would consider the suggestions, but made no commitments. 

Harold Davis, chairman of Children’s board of directors, apologized on behalf of his board for the hospital’s failure to involve the county in advance, saying, “There was no malice intended on our part. If there is any ill-feeling that results from this, we hope we are able to heal them. We’re in the healing business, after all.” 

And a contrite Children’s Hospital President and CEO Frank Tiedemann also tried to mollify the supervisors, saying, “I apologize if we have not communicated well. We do a good job running a hospital, but not so well in the political process. We know you have serious questions, and we will try to give them serious responses.” 

Tiedemann said that the financing problem came when Children’s determined it needed to expand its capacity to meet the area’s growing need in pediatric care, and “it was a shock to find out how expensive it would be.” 

Tiedemann put the financing of the new facility at $600 million, with $75 million from a 2004 state bond, $98 million projected from an upcoming 2008 state bond, and $100 million to $150 million in projected private sources, “leaving us short.” 

That did little to hold off the supervisors’ fire, even after Supervisor Keith Carson noted that it was Davis who had originally brought him into politics, and particularly after Tiedemann insisted that he had earlier sent a letter to all five supervisors announcing the bond measure, a letter that all five supervisors said they never received. 

Accusing Children’s Hospital of “hitching a ride on Alameda County’s debt capacity,” Carson said that “there is written language in the bond measure that entangles the county in this measure, legally and financially. If anyone thinks they didn’t have to sit down with us early on to discuss this, I don’t understand. This is arrogance. We’ve got deep concerns. Deep concerns.” 

Carson said that he set up a meeting with Children’s officials nearly three weeks ago after Haggerty learned about the petitions second hand and wrote Tiedemann, asking for an explanation. Haggerty said that Tiedemann never answered that letter. 

“At that meeting, we expressed our concerns,” Carson said, “and we were told that the petitions would be held off until those concerns were addressed. Two days later, I heard that the petitions were being circulated.” 

Carson noted that the petition did not include language that the bond money, when collected, could only be spent by Children’s to rebuild a hospital in Oakland or Alameda County, even though he said that petition gatherers in Oakland were telling potential signers that “the bond measure will ensure that Children’s Hospital will stay in Oakland.” 

Carson also criticized the fact that the ballot measure language would not prevent Children’s from using the money to build a “scaled-down version” of the hospital smaller than the current facility. 

“What caught me off guard is that this has been going on for a long while and we were not made aware of it,” Haggerty told Tiedemann. “I don’t know how you can involve the county in incurring this level of debt without bringing us to the table. This is not about the fine work that Children’s Hospital is doing. Everybody on this board appreciates that and acknowledges that and supports that. Let’s not make this about the children. We get it. We spend millions on the needs of children in this county. It’s about process. It’s about not coming to us in advance. I don’t know how you operate like this.”  

Both Supervisor Nate Miley and Alameda County Counsel Richard Winnie said they had concerns about the legality of some of the language in the proposed bond measure, and its ability to withstand a possible legal challenge either from the county or from private citizens. 

“I’ve got major concerns about this,” Miley said, “and I can’t support this bond measure until these legal issues are resolved.” 

Miley said that among other problems with the petition language, it called for the taxes in the measure to be collected by the county assessor, even though the Alameda County charter gives that authority not to the assessor, but to the auditor and the tax collector. 

“Are you trying to change our charter?” Miley asked.  

That error alone, the supervisor said, could cause the bond measure to be declared invalid by a judge following the election. 

Winnie said he has sent hospital officials a letter asking them to resolve six of those legal issues, and suggested that any meeting between his office and hospital officials to try and resolve the issue be held off until that letter is answered and those legal issues are addressed. 

“The ball is in their court now,” Winnie said.

Oakland City Attorney John Russo filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court Thursday to seek a court order compelling Waste Management of Alameda County to collect garbage that has piled up since it locked out its employees on July 2. 

Joining Russo at a news conference at City Hall that also was attended by six City Council members, Mayor Ron Dellums said uncollected garbage, recycling materials and compost “poses a clear and compelling health and safety issue,” citing potential contamination from flies and rats. 

A spokeswoman for Waste Management of Alameda County said Thursday 

that Oakland’s lawsuit was “unnecessary” because the company has already restored weekly residential garbage, yard waste and commercial waste collection services. 

Company spokeswoman Jennifer Andrews said Waste Management also  

will resume regular curbside recycling services Monday. 

“We’ve increased the number of temporary workers and are back to  

100 percent” service levels, Andrews said. 

Russo said the city has received more than 1,000 emails and phone calls from residents complaining about uncollected trash. 

He said, “We are entirely within our contract rights and California state law to demand this health and safety issue be addressed immediately. We have a duty to protect Oakland’s people and businesses. This situation has gone on long enough.” 

Russo said the city filed suit only after many formal and informal talks over ten days failed to resolve the problem. 

In the East Bay, Waste Management serves Albany, Emeryville, Oakland, Hayward, Newark, Livermore, the Castro Valley Sanitary District, Oro Loma Sanitary District in parts of San Leandro and San Lorenzo, San Ramon and unincorporated Alameda County. 

Talks for a new contract with more than 500 employees who work in the East Bay began in March. Waste Management said it locked out the employees because it feared they would go on strike. 

The company and union representatives met with a federal mediator Monday but didn’t make any progress. 

Waste Management said that it has restored full service, but City Councilwoman Jean Quan said “garbage is still not being picked up.” 

Russo said there will be a court hearing Monday on the city’s bid to get an injunction against Waste Management. 

But he said the city will drop or at least postpone its litigation if it’s convinced Waste Management has truly restored full service. 

“This is not a lawsuit I want to win—it’s a problem I want to solve,” Russo said.

Demolition of UC Berkeley’s Earl Warren Hall—an architectural tribute to the late California governor and U.S. Supreme Court chief justice—could begin as early as next month. 

Because the building housed radiological equipment and experiments for the School of Public Health, the university is looking for a company with skills in handling radioactive materials to aid in the demolition. 

According to the Request for Qualifications posted at the university’s Capital  

Projects website, demolition will begin in late August and be completed in October. 

The 80,000-square-foot building is one of the most visible to Berkeley residents, located on the crescent that faces Oxford Street at the main entrance to the campus. 

The edifice that will rise in its place, shown by university officials to the Berkeley Planning Commission last July, is a 200,000-square-foot, $160 million structure that will rise to just over 100 feet above the landscape. 

The new building will house molecular biology labs focusing on infectious diseases, degenerative diseases of the nervous system and cancer biology. Plans also call for a stem cell research facility. 

A magnetic resonance imaging facility for charting the course of human experiments is also in the plans. 

And while the old building was labeled for a jurist who did more than any other individual to advance the cause of civil rights in the nation’s legal system, its successor will be named for an industrial tycoon and high school dropout. 

The Li Ka-Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences derives is name from the Hong Kong real estate developer, container port magnate and cell phone entrepreneur who gave the university $40 million to help fund the project. 

He was named the world’s ninth richest person by Forbes Magazine Tuesday for his estimated net worth of $23 billion, up from last year’s 10th place and an $18.8 billion purse. 

The public health school itself will relocate just off campus, in a building that will replace the old state Department of Health Services complex on the east side of Shattuck Avenue between Hearst Avenue and Berkeley Way. 

Radiological consultants have until the end of the month to submit their qualifications. 

The building was formally dedicated by then Chancellor Clark Kerr in 1955, one year after Warren read out his decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, the case that declared segregated public schools unconstitutional.

The Berkeley City Council will hold a public hearing Monday to consider an appeal regarding the decision by the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) to approve the Trader Joe’s project at 1885 University Ave. 

The special council meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther KIng Jr. Way. 

ZAB voted 5-3-1 in December to approve the controversial five-story project plan, which includes 148 apartments, 14,390 square feet of retail space, 109 tenant and 48 commercial parking spaces and two truck-loading spaces at the corner of University and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

A group of neighbors were concerned about the size of the project, how the density bonus would be applied, parking and traffic issues and alcohol sales. 

Those in favor of the project said that it would reduce the number of daily car trips by a large margin and provide much-needed affordable housing in Berkeley.  

At a Jan. 11 meeting, ZAB voted to modify an existing condition on parking according to language supplied by area resident Stephen Wollmer. The modified condition states that the “residents of the project shall not be permitted to participate in the City’s Residential Parking Permit program.”  

The board also approved a use permit for beer and wine sales at Trader Joe’s, independent of the Alcohol and Beverage Control (ABC) license. 

Wollmer filed an appeal on Feb. 2 on behalf of Neighbors for a Livable Berkeley Way against ZAB’s decision to approve the proposed project and called upon City Council to minimize the  

project’s detriment to the citizens of Berkeley. 

The proposed project has been before ZAB for nine hearings and before the Design Review Committee for five. 

In a letter to the Planet, Wollmer called the proposed project “detrimental and blatantly illegal” and said it failed to conform to state law. 

Additionally, he stated: 

• It is 20,000 square feet and 25 units larger than the Zoning Ordinance allows and state law requires. 

• It ignores the Zoning Ordinance development standards for building height and setbacks. 

• Its size and design elements cause significant detriment to the surrounding neighborhood. 

• Its retail tenant will cause traffic and parking chaos in an already congested area, impacts far beyond those foreseen by a deeply flawed transportation study. 

• It sets a dangerous precedent for the city by granting density bonus units reserved by state law for affordable housing to subsidize a commercial use, here for Trader Joe’s parking lot, and conceivably in the next project for any commercial use an applicant may propose and the ZAB determines that the city needs or wants.

DAPAC members, with less than five months to finish their work on a downtown plan, are picking up the pace—scheduling two meetings in the coming week. 

The first session of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee starts at 7 p.m. Monday, opening with a recap of the group’s second public workshop, held June 16. 

Members will then tackle the nuts-and-bolts issue of drafting the individual chapters of the document, which was mandated in the settlement of a city lawsuit challenging the university’s plans for development through 2020. 

In a joint memo to committee members, Chair Will Travis, and Planning Director Mark Rhoades, Matt Taecker, the planner hired to help draft the new plan, wrote that the committee will offer neither specific implementation strategies nor detailed background statements; those will come later, under direction of the Planning Commission. 

The memo lists proposed committees for six chapters, chosen from volunteers, along with proposed dates for the two meetings slated for the preparation of the chapters. 

Following their discussion of the mechanics of drafting, members will then move on to discuss two central issues of any plan: streets and open space and land-use policies and alternatives. 

Wednesday night’s meeting begins at the same time and continues the discussion of land-use policies, along with any of the other chapters that members want to discuss. 

Both meetings will be held in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Next up on DAPAC’s agenda will be a meeting of its Transportation Subcommittee on Monday, July 23, at the same time and place. 

That agenda includes four primary topics: the role of the panel in drafting the plan’s accessibility chapter, recommendations for transportation policies, with separate discussions on bicycle policies and a possible extension of the Ohlone Greenway to the UC Berkeley campus.

In the past week, there have been two arson attempts at the Berkeley Mental Health Center at 2640 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The first attempt was on Saturday, July 7, and the second was on Monday, July 9.  

The first incident took place at 11:51 p.m. on Saturday night via an unknown liquid accelerant. There was minor damage to the side door on the Derby Street side of the facility. No suspect information was recovered. 

The second incident occurred late Monday night. A person was seen running away from the facility. They used a liquid similar to the one used on Saturday night to ignite flames in three separate areas outside the office. An extensive search was done after the incident but to no avail, said Lt. Wesley Hester, spokesperson for the Berkeley Police Department.  

Police released a suspect description: a black female with a light complexion, wearing light gray sweat top and pants, a headdress, and riding a skateboard, possibly with a backpack.

By Riya Bhattacharjee 

Berkeley will be one of 20 Bay Area stops for a bone marrow donor drive this weekend to help former UC Berkeley student Vinay Chakravarthy in his fight against leukemia. 

Vinay, a Fremont native, is a resident in orthopedics at Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts. He was recently diagnosed with life threatening leukemia which can only be treated by a bone marrow transplant.  

A graduate of Kennedy High School, Vinay completed his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and went on to pursue medicine at Boston University. 

The quest to save Vinay’s life spread beyond his family when South Asians living in the Bay Area took up the search for a bone marrow match as a challenge. 

Vinay’s diagnosis also helped to highlight the dire shortage of bone marrow donors within the South Asian community. 

According to a statement released by Team Vinay, the group of South Asians who have come together to help Vinay, statistics from the National Marrow Donor Registry indicate that out of 6.6 million donors, only 100,000 are of South Asian origin. 

Drive volunteers have urged people of South Asian origin to join in an effort to build the South Asian marrow donor registry, which could one day save lives of friends and family. 

Community members plan to hold 200 bone marrow drives in over ten states across the country after the Mega Drive. More than 13,000 people have been registered so far. 

For Vinay, 28, the fight goes on. In his most recent posting on his website www.helpvinay.org, he wrote: 

“Instead of getting depressed and down on my situation I figure this is the time we all take a deep breath and decide what our future holds for us. We can give up or we can keep going.” 

Bone Marrow Drive 

Healthy individuals, particularly of South Asian origin, between the ages of 18-60 may volunteer to be marrow donors.  

Participants should be willing to donate to anyone who needs a transplant if a match is found.  

The procedure to register is less than a minute and not invasive, just a simple cheek swab.  

July 14, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. and July 15, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., ISKCON, 2334 Stuart St., 649-8619. See www.helpvinay.org for more information. 

"Public Commons for Everyone.” Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? The slogan, adopted by Mayor Bates for his re-run of the anti-panhandling ordinance which he’d supported once before, was probably coined by his house flack Cisco DeVries, formerly of San Francisco’s Staton & Hughes political public relations firm. It acquired Orwellian overtones when it became clear that the Bates ordinance’s real purpose was to keep unattractive persons away from the public commons, particularly from shopping districts. But the council approved it, in concept at least. 

However. At the end of the Berkeley City Council’s ever-shorter work year, we now have the opportunity to evaluate what’s actually happened to the genuine concept of creating and maintaining public spaces for all to use under their watch. 

It’s a dismal record. Headed for the chopping block as we speak are Berkeley Iceland, the warm pool at Berkeley High, and the public comment period at City Council meetings.  

Here’s a little story about Iceland. A grandmother friend of mine was unexpectedly awarded the privilege of having her grandson, about ten or twelve years old, to stay with her for one whole summer. Though he’s a fine boy and she enjoys his company, she was a bit apprehensive about how to take care of him and keep him out of trouble. Someone suggested that he could learn to ice skate. She took him over to Iceland one fine morning in June, he strapped on the skates and never looked back. He got there every day when the doors opened and skated up a storm from morning to night under competent adult supervision, handily avoiding both juvenile deliquency and childhood obesity, America’s current twin horrors. And if diversity matters to you (as it should), he’s African-American, as are an increasing number of the kids who have enjoyed Iceland. Tearing down Iceland to build condos, even condos with a childcare center in the basement or a teen center on the first floor, is a very poor idea. 

And another story, this one about the warm pool. A middle-aged hiker who was run down by an off-leash dog on a trail in Mendocino ended up with a persistent knee injury which kept her from hiking for more than a year. Kaiser couldn’t help. Someone suggested the warm pool, and after about three months of simply swimming there several days a week, she was back on the trails. That was me, but it could be you, any time now. Anyone could become disabled at any moment, and disability isn’t just for wheelchair users. And let’s not count on pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by building projects to replace the currently usable pool—replacement buildings always cost more and take much longer than expected and often don’t materialize at all. The proposed plan for a warm pool without parking certainly won’t work because swimmers who are working to recover from injuries, especially those who can’t walk well but don’t use wheelchairs, will need to arrive by car. 

Then there’s the public comment period at City Council meetings. Leaving the choice of speakers up to the mayor’s sole discretion, which he’s now proposing, is begging for a lawsuit and is also wrong in principle. When we moved back to Berkeley, after more than a decade of political activism in the sincere and wholesome Midwest, we were surprised to learn that speakers at City Council meetings in Berkeley were limited to ten in number and that the mayor chose them by taking all the submitted cards in her hand and reading the ten lucky names aloud. One got the impression that cards were taken in the order received, but it soon became apparent that she selected the cards of people who supported her programs (ourselves among them in those days). It was one of those you’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore moments, the beginning of our disillusionment with much of what passed for progressive politics in Berkeley. Adding the mechanical shuffling cage was a big improvement, and the changes this year which were prompted by threats of Brown Act litigation were further improvements. The mayor’s new proposal would be a return to the bad old days of favoritism, and we don’t need that. 

What links all three of these misbegotten ventures is the current council majority’s strong impulse to turn common amenities, which serve a wide swath of the general public, over to builders who stand to make healthy profits on new building projects, regardless of whether the ultimate development serves the public interest. The profit motives behind demolishing Iceland and the warm pool, both originally built with funds provided by the people of Berkeley, are easy to spot. Ali Kashani and his associates (perhaps exiting city planning manager Mark Rhoades among them) will make nice money from whatever they plan to build on the Iceland site. A fancy new building for a swimming pool, if it ever materializes, promises big bucks for ELS Architects, beneficiaries of several Berkeley civic projects and for whatever builder is chosen for the job. Rehabilitation of existing buildings is the environmentally “greenest” alternative, but new buildings like these always provide more of the other kind of “green” for the building industry. 

And public comment slows the whole process down. It’s definitely in the interest of the building industry to fast-track projects, to stifle criticism from the public in order to start new profit centers as fast as possible. The mayor’s allegiance to accelerating building ventures has been apparent from the first days of his administration, when he convened a special task force to speed up the permitting process. As a result, at the end of this council term we now have a huge backlog of angry citizens who, despite the Planet’s best efforts, have just found out which of the public amenities they particularly cherish are scheduled for destruction. The council members as they get older can’t take late nights, but they might perhaps have considered weekly meetings, shorter vacations, or starting in the afternoon as other city councils do. They have a cushy job with an easy schedule already, and the least they could do is listen to the vox populi howling with rage in what’s left of the commons, before they turn it over to the developers.  

For more on the subject of Iceland see Randy Shaw in today's Beyond Chron: 

www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4722

President Bush increasingly inhabits a parallel universe. His Thursday press conference displayed a remarkable disconnect from the current thinking of most Americans and even of many elected officials in his own Republican party. Most Americans, from all parties, now understand that our main, our only, goal in Iraq is to get out, though there are still some differences of opinion as to the manner of our going. There has been approximately no progress toward the subsidiary goal of helping the indigenous Iraqis establish a civil society based on what in this country we call democratic values. Staying there longer won’t change much. It’s possible that immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces would exacerbate the factional war among Iraqis, but even that is not certain.  

One analysis of who’s fighting whom might show Sunni Moslems versus Shiite Moslems. Another—one which Bush appeared to believe on Thursday—would say that it’s us against al Qaeda, the same al Qaeda that destroyed the World Trade Center, possibly planned the failed bombings in the United Kingdom, and is now holed up on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But al Qaeda is a Sunni group, and if the fight in Iraq is Sunnis vs. Shiites, why are we (or at least Senator Lieberman and his friends) also threatening to invade Iran, a Shiite country? You can almost excuse Dubya for not understanding the twisted logic here, but he is the president of the United States, after all, and in the old days presidents at least pretended to understand what was going on. 

The death of Lady Bird Johnson, a smart woman who usually understood what was going on, reminded us that her husband, a smart man who also understood what was going on, had enough of a sense of self-preservation to bail when we finally managed to show him that the Vietnam War was a mistake. George W. Bush is not so smart. In his press conference on Thursday he just looked like an old guy left behind by the passage of time, the last person to hear history crashing around his ears. 

The San Francisco Mime Troupe’s summer show, which I had the privilege of seeing in preview a couple of weeks ago, focuses on what has become a widely believed analysis: vice-president Dick Cheney is really running the government these days. The fact that Cheney double Ed Holmes is one of the group’s acting principals makes this an obvious winning choice, but political observers increasingly believe that Bush is nothing more than a figurehead, the last to know what’s really happening. It’s not just inside-the-Beltway knowledge any more that Cheney’s built-in defibrillator goes off frequently, causing him to experience the equivalent of a stun-gun hit, and Holmes captures this phenomenon to great comic advantage. (See him yourself this weekend at Cedar-Rose Park in Berkeley.)  

Not addressed in the play is what might happen if Cheney were to die or become incapacitated in one of these episodes. Would Congress regain control of the country, or would there be a military coup? The chance of Bush taking charge seems increasingly remote. SFMT plays traditionally evolve over the summer season, so we might find out later.  

Another theme in the show is the gradual enlightenment of a formerly hard-boiled investigative reporter who is recalled to service, aided by his romantic relationship with a gung-ho newbie. Even the torpid U.S. press does appear to have caught on that “victory or defeat” isn’t the theme for this war, as indeed it hasn’t been for any war the United States has been engaged in since the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one. Reporters at Bush’s Thursday press conference seemed finally to smell blood, even trying for a few follow-up questions when he ducked the first ones.  

It’s profoundly disconcerting for a Berkeley viewer to compare these press conferences to meetings of the Berkeley City Council. Nobody in Berkeley expects much of Bush, but we do hope for a certain amount of competence and familiarity with the problems on the table at the local level. Tuesday night’s council meeting did not inspire confidence.  

One of the items on the agenda was a review of the action of the Landmarks Preservation Committee recognizing the Iceland building as a local historic resource. It was supported by reams of expert testimony and a staff report that backed most elements of the decision, but councilmembers seemed eager to trump up some excuse for overturning the designation. They showed themselves to be willing victims of the usual developers’ propaganda maneuvers. 

An unholy alliance between developer Ali Kashani and the YMCA health club empire proposed a new project for the site, putting on a shameless parade of Head Start advocates as purported beneficiaries. Kashani, with even less finesse than his role model Patrick Kennedy, is obviously using Head Start the way Kennedy used the Gaia bookstore to get approval for the Gaia building and the Fine Arts Theater to get approval of the Fine Arts building, neither of which ended up as tenants in the end. And perhaps old-timers might remember that the YMCA was also supposed to be the excuse for the Golden Bear building, and that didn’t happen either.  

Councilmembers and the mayor were either genuinely or willfully ignorant of the fact that according to law they may only decide at this point whether Iceland meets standards for historic designation, not whether they might like a proposed replacement project. A historic building can always be demolished by council fiat, but that decision is for the future—it can’t be made now. Even City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque, who often acts as confused as her clients, seemed to understand this legal nicety, but she was unable or unwilling to explain it in any coherent way.  

Then there was the discussion of new permits for the Wright’s Garage building on Ashby at College. The mayor presided with his usual combination of apparent boredom and procedural oblivion, his main goal obviously getting home to bed. After devoting hours in the early part of the meeting to discussing the ins and outs of rules regulating the service of alcohol, Bates, Olds and Moore disingenuously refused to vote to hold a public hearing to address Elmwood concerns about putting a big new bar on a busy corner. Linda Maio did point out that holding a public hearing would give the council a lever to work on some sort of compromise, and Kriss Worthington suggested that the Zoning Adjustments Board should be asked to try one more time for a solution, but the three holdouts stuck to their guns despite pleas from residents and merchants.  

Why does any of this matter? How could it be compared to the ongoing travesty which the Bush administration has become?  

It’s almost obscene to compare resolution of local land use issues to the pressing need for ending the Iraq war, but the underlying theme which ties the two together continues to be the future of democratic government as we’ve known it. Just as the guy at the top national level doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, the top guy at the local level doesn’t seem to be following the ball most of the time (nor do most of his colleagues.) And neither guy seems to care at all any more about constituents’ opinions on matters of public interest, nor do most Berkeley councilmembers. That’s worrisome. 

DUMBING DOWN THE MEDIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley’s editorial on the accelerating dumbing down of ever more concentrated mass media, and especially about the Chronicle’s tragic death spiral. was particularly apt as Dean Singleton and the Hearst Corporation collude to control and corrode virtually all of the print media in the entire Bay Area. 

I remember when, in 1999, the Hearst Corporation was engaging in “fancy horse trading” to sidestep vanishing anti-trust laws and essentially turn San Francisco into a one-newspaper town by buying the deYoung family’s Chronicle and paying the Fang family $66 million to take its flagship Examiner. A spokesperson for the company promised that with Hearst’s far greater financial resources, it would make the Chronicle into the “world-class newspaper that the Bay Area deserves.” At the time, I thought that that would be an historical first for Hearst; conservative editor Thomas A. Rickard once said that William Randolph Hearst had “for the time of a whole generation, debauched and defiled the intelligence of the American people,” and he was by no means alone in that assessment. Boozy media magnate Bill Hearst, Jr. contended that his “Pop” was “the greatest newsman of all times,” but Hearst has never been known for first-rate journalism and my own research into the papers that Pop acquired and degraded abundantly confirmed Rickard’s claim. Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his time. 

Instead of giving the Bay Area the excellent newspaper it allegedly deserves, a Manhattan-based corporation born in the West is now canning some of the best people on the Chron’s staff and delivering a tabloid ever more like the gee-whiz journalism that Hearst, Sr. created as his way to ever greater wealth and the White House a century ago.  

Gray Brechin 

• 

pg&e COMPLAINT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

PG&E leaves city street lights in cities on too long in the morning—long after the daylight occurs. 

At a time when we are all concerned about the chance of more electrical blackouts, this waste of electricity is a major statewide factor on which the Public Utilities Commission should take action. 

Charles L. Smith 

• 

HEALTH CARE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I must admit to not being 100 percent informed on the details of SB 840. I probably know more than most as I’ve read portions of the bill as well as various synopses of it. I do know that “health care” in this country is a sick joke. I lived for 10 years in Germany and can say this with personal authority. The only real reason to not support wholesale reform of our system is to preserve the profits. Simply put, support for the status quo is an unethical and profoundly inhuman stance to take. It may serve someone personally of course, but so do theft, assault, fraud, murder and the like. We manage to almost universally disregard the claims of perpetrators who defend their actions by claiming personal gain: “I killed him because he was inconvenient and I didn’t feel like dealing with him.” This argument is not likely to win over many juries. This is, however, exactly what our health care system is doing to us on a daily basis again and again. Virtually everyone feels it, most of us know it deeply and can relate personal tales to this effect.  

SB 840 might not be perfect, but it is so beyond the disgusting heap that we currently have and any of the other dishonest attempts to reform that I have seen. Let us move into a new paradigm here and get something fundamentally good and honest on its feet. Then we can split hairs over minor details. I am sick of arguments to delay because the alternative is not perfect. Would you tell a starving man that he must continue eating dirt because the vegetable soup isn’t fully developed and the salt may still be a bit off? Would you support legislators or a Governor who make these kinds of arguments? I won’t. The time is ripe for change so let’s go to harvest! 

Timothy Melton 

• 

PUBLIC POLICE RECORDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The recent California Supreme Court decision in Copley Press to close records and hearings about police misconduct complaints that were previously public only serves to protect a few bad officers and will undermine police-community relations. Without public access to a police department’s response to citizen complaints about serious police abuse, members of the public will always question whether misconduct complaints are being taken seriously. 

Although the effects of the closure of police misconduct records are being felt statewide, the situation in Berkeley is particularly poignant. Created pursuant to a citywide ballot vote in 1973, the Berkeley Police Review Commission was the first organization of its type in the nation. As such, it was an inspiration for many commissions that were established later.  

Here and elsewhere, the answer to the present problem is the passage of California Senate Bill 1019 (authored by Gloria Romero, Los Angeles). If passed into law, the legislation will allow for records to be reopened, and for independent review boards to again operate in the public’s view. 

Citizen trust for peace officers is critical to the smooth running of the criminal justice system. Secrecy surrounding police misconduct undermines that trust and ultimately hurts public safety.  

State Sen. Don Perata should join Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and the National Black Police Association in supporting SB 1019. 

Thomas Sarbaugh 

Corresponding Secretary, 

ACLU of Northern California 

• 

SOLIDARITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing to ask readers to extend solidarity to the recycling, clerical and landfill workers in ILWU 6 who are honoring the picket lines at Waste Management in Oakland, and do not qualify for unemployment or strike fund benefits. 

If we in the Bay Area community offer concrete financial support to enable other garbage workers NOT to cross picket lines, it may be the most significant contribution we can make to helping the labor movement survive in this difficult era, and it will show the garbage company that we won’t tolerate such abuse of union workers. Call your Supervisor and ask them to end the lockout, then send a contribution to the Hardship Fund c/o Central Labor Council, l00 Hegenberger Rd, #l50, Oakland 94621.  

Lauren Coodley 

• 

SPEAK UP, YOU SELFISH EARTH-HATERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As usual, I read with delight another missive from your frequent letter writer, Steve Geller. Surely Mr. Geller is the most subtle humorist of our generation, raising postpostmodern literary ambiguity to new heights. Mark Twain, move aside! The master has arrived! 

(Sorry Charles Siegel, your work is also very humorous, but Mr. Geller’s high head-scratching score and tone of charming naiveté make him the winner—for now.) 

Yes, indeed! Where ARE all the letters from UC’s SUV-driving commuters, who are waiting with bated breath for BRT to rescue them from their onerous daily commute? After all, BRT will save them 3.5 minutes over the current rapid bus—minus their extra walk time to the BRT stop. I daresay, if that doesn’t get them out of their cars, nothing will! So why haven’t those selfish, earth-hating bastards been speaking up? Inquiring minds want to know because in the complex answer to that question lies the real solution to making mass transit work. 

Yes, Mr. Geller, when the Planet receives about 5,000 such letters from future repentant drivers, then let’s give serious consideration to implementing BRT. 

Or alternatively, since BRT will take half the traffic lanes (not even counting the removed parking lanes), when (let’s say) 30 percent of Telegraph users are bus riders, instead of the current tiny percentage rattling around in supersized buses, then again we might consider BRT. 

I’m happy to go with either option. Are you?  

Sharon Hudson 

• 

AC’S BRT PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Although transit dependent account low vision and a long term transit advocate, I find myself in the company of pro auto, pro parking NIMBYs. AC’s BRT project is a mistake driven by availability of funding for capital projects while operations are shortchanged. Ride the Telegraph bus as I often do(it is closest to my home) and you can be the sole passenger circa 7 PM between 40th and Alcatraz. This level of usage does not justify either exclusive lanes or the elaborate “stations” proposed by AC. The recently instituted Rapid service does not operate weekends BECAUSE the riders aren’t there. (It does operate east of downtown Oakland where ridership is much heavier) If AC were serious abou speeding up buses, exclusive lanes on University would be a far better investment as the auto interference is greater and ridership higher than Tele south of Ashby. 

In the larger picture, the issue raised by Michael Katz on July 6th is far more relevant. AC and BART must be forced to again provide unlimited use joint agency passes. As riders we are not impressed by different paint schemes, we simply need to access the most convenient combination of transit modes from A to B. 

David Vartanoff 

Oakland 

• 

DELIVERY SERVICE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Would it be possible to require Trader Joe’s to provide a package delivery service within a few miles of the store? Customers would come to the store to shop on foot or bike or bus but not have to worry about carrying packages. Similar to what is available commonly in Japan. This would help cut down on the parking problems.  

Janine Brown 

• 

ICELAND  

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The editorials and letters regarding Berkeley Iceland miss the point. Almost everyone—skaters, owners, and developers— would like to save Iceland, and save the facade of the building. But who’s going to do it?  

Mr. Zamboni, the present owner tried hard and couldn’t make a go of it, and it is extremely unlikely that any new owner would have better luck. The Save Iceland group is many tens of millions of dollars from being close to buying and renovating and operating any ice rink. The City of Berkeley could buy it if it thinks saving the ice rink is so important to the city, but even they can not afford to do it. By the way, isn’t there an ice rink in downtown Oakland, about a block from a BART station? Unfortunately, it is one of life’s hard realities that times change, and ice rinks simply are not as commercially viable as they once were. So if no one can afford to operate an ice rink, the only choice is to use the property for some other purpose or leave it vacant, maybe a home for vagrants, the homeless or addicts. The only questions is who can put the space to the best use for the most residents of the city. The YMCA and Ali Kashani have submitted a proposal that would leave the front facade intact, preserved for history, while using the back, rink area for Head Start, a teen center, and affordable housing. I doubt if there is a better, more responsible choice available. Blaming them for anything Patrick Kennedy might have done is unfair and wrong. Their proposal, any everyone else’s proposal, should stand or fall on its own merits, or the building will remain a vacant, dangerous eyesore or decades. 

David Weitzman 

• 

SUMMER IN BAGHDAD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Explaining President Bush’s failure to pressure the Iraqi parliament to remain in session in August, White House press secretary Tony Snow remarked “You know, it’s 130 degrees in Baghdad in August.” Yes, Mr. Snow, we KNOW that temperatures in Baghdad reach 130 in August. So do thousands of American soldiers and marines, sweltering in unbearable heat, wearing heavy helmets and combat gear weighing close to forty or more pounds! Could the President not grant them a reprieve in August? 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

CONGRATULATIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Congratulations to Judith Sherr and the Berkeley Daily Planet for covering the Alameda County Grand Jury Report on the Berkeley Public Library, and for providing the link to the full online text (article 6-29-07). 

The Grand Jury report faulted the Board of Library Trustees (BOLT) management of the contract with the Library’s RFID vendor, Checkpoint Systems, Inc., as “laissez-faire” and “not in the public interest,” as your article said, and the Grand Jury “did indicate some concern with performance,” saying the [Library] director “is working . . . to improve the system.” 

Two points were not mentioned in the article: the Grand Jury report began by saying it received a complaint about the contract, and for this we should thank whoever sent the complaint; and second, the report did not appear to provide a comprehensive review of the system’s performance, although it clearly expressed concern, and it was not clear whether the recent report of operational problems presented to BOLT by library workers was included among the documents that the Grand Jury reviewed. 

Peter Warfield, Executive Director 

Library Users Association 

• 

EARL WARREN HALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Some of the information in the Daily Planet’s July 13 article “Wrecking Ball Scheduled for Earl Warren Hall” is in error. While Warren Hall at UC Berkeley is indeed scheduled to be replaced, demolition work will not begin this fall, as noted in your story, but in early 2008. 

The Request for Qualifications mentioned in the article is for work needed in advance of the demolition. This preliminary activity is scheduled to take place this fall, along with the underground utilities upgrades that have started. Following the demolition of the building in early 2008 the campus will construct the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences. For more on the project please see http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/05/17_lks.shtml Construction updates about this project will be posted on the web at http://www.cp.berkeley.edu/CP/Projects/LKShingCtr_WarrenHallRplc/Info.html, where there is currently some detail about the utilities work underway. Anyone with questions about the project is welcome to contact me at cshaff@berkeley.edu. 

Thank you for correcting the information, 

Christine Shaff 

Communications Manager 

UC Berkeley Facilities Services 

• 

PROTESTING MOVIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As one Charles to another, I read, with more than a little amusement, the letter from Charles L. Smith. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Mr. Smith is somewhat of a nut case. He didn’t like a film (Mr. Brooks), so he went through all the trouble and expense to make up two sandwich boards, print 200 copies of a “statement”, carefully fold the statements and then hold a one-person protest at a movie theater. (Not to mention the fact that he owns a folding machine and apparently a printing press too!) 

Sounds a tad excessive over a film he didn’t even like. He wasn’t offended by the film, he just didn’t like it. Yikes! I can usually tell within a half hour or less that I don’t like a film. One can always ask for their money back and I almost guarantee that you will get the money back. I also might bad-mouth the film to family and friends, but sandwich boards? 

I might suggest to Mr. Smith that he go to Craig’s List and post a scathing review. It’s easy and free. 

I also saw Mr. Brooks and thoroughly enjoyed it. That’s what happens. Some folks like a film, some don’t. I personally thought March of the Penguins was a terrible film, but most people loved it. Go figure. 

Charles R. Shaw 

• 

MILKING A CORPORATE COW 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If you have any hopes for the Bush administration to pullout of Iraq don’t hold your breath. Iraq has been a big milking cow, $450+ billion dollars so far and growing, for the Bush administrations “friends” so you think they are going to give that up? For example a recent documentary, Iraq for sale, revealed among many other things that the government has been paying Haliburton/KBR $100 for each bag of laundry it washes for our troops in the field. According to interviews, troops are not allowed to wash their own laundry. Let’s just work that out with some quick math: 130,000 troops in Iraq times $100 per bag of laundry works out to … let’s see … $13 million dollars paid to Cheney’s ex-company Haliburton/KBR each week. That’s $676 million per year—just for laundry. No wonder this war is so expensive. It is also easy to see how the Iraq war became the most privatized war ever. So do not fool yourself: this is not a war to fight terrorism or to spread democracy but a privatized war for corporate profit using American tax payers’ money and our soldiers’ blood.  

Thomas Husted 

• 

THE SAME OLD SAME OLD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Here we go again! The Bush administration keeps doing the same things over and over and Americans keep falling for it. Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff has a gut feeling that the U.S. is in for another terrorist attack this summer. Will the Bush administration, being forewarned, stop the disaster? 

Instead of higher gas prices this summer look for higher color-coded terror alerts based on uncorroborated intelligence from the White House. Will Chertoff’s premonition turn out to be self-fulfilling?  

Ron Lowe

On Tuesday July 17, the City Council will take up the issue of how public comment at Council meetings is structured. We will be deciding who gets to address the Council and how long they will get to speak.  

The rules for public comment drafted by Mayor Bates are unfair. They give the Mayor total discretion over who can speak and how much time is allowed per speaker, as well as over the time allotted per topic. Members of the public and Councilmem-bers deserve fairness, impartiality and certainty in knowing in advance of the meeting from whom and for how long comment will be taken.  

The Mayor’s proposal essentially allows all public comment (even during land-use public hearings) to be dictated by his own likes and dislikes. He has a past record of sometimes being quite arbitrary in the use of his discretion, both about who he allows to speak and how long he will let people speak. The people and topics he likes tend to get to speak for longer time periods than those he does not. This approach violates the spirit of fair play as well as the Brown Act. 

The re-examination of the historical 30 minutes of public comment allowed at the beginning of the council meeting was triggered by the threat of a lawsuit from BOLD (Berkeleyans Organized for Library Defense) and the First Amendment Center. At first the Mayor was experimenting with different approaches and more members of the public were getting to speak, which was all to the public good. Unfortunately now however, as the experimental phase has come to an end, the Mayor seems to be using this opportunity for improving public access as a means to hijack public comment so he can have the maximum ability to control who gets to speak and for how long. At a recent meeting, when Councilmember Kriss Worthington spoke up for people who had requested to address the council, the Mayor angrily responded by twice demanding that Councilmember Worthing-ton’s microphone be cut off. 

The Mayor has a dismal record on supporting the public’s involvement in their city government: 

1) in 2002, on the day of the election, when the Daily Californian newspaper endorsed former Mayor Shirley Dean instead of him, he threw out in the trash a large stack of their newspapers and then lied to the editor of the Daily Californian when asked about the theft; 

2) his original proposal for the “rules committee” after he was first elected gave him the power to stall, essentially to veto, any topic that he did not want on the Council agenda from either a Council-member or a Commission; 

3) two years ago he attempted to dramatically reduce the number of Commis-sions and the times they could meet—this was only defeated by a strong response from affected Commissioners; 

4) after repeatedly promising the public that he was going to make any city agreement with UC on its long-range development proposal public before it was adopted by the Council, he got the majority on the City Council to approve a secret backroom deal that was not released to the public until it was already a done deal, thereby depriving citizens of the ability to bring suit on the severely flawed Environmental Impact Report. 

Unless there is a strong response from the public, the Mayor’s proposal is likely to pass this City Council. Calls and e-mails will help stop it. Come to the meeting at 2134 Martin Luther King Way tonight at 7 p.m. to fight for the future of free speech at the Berkeley City Council. Urge the Council to set this matter for a special meeting/workshop to flush out the issues and to fully discuss the pros and cons of the alternative methods of structuring public comment proposed by Council-member Worthington and myself. (How ironic it is that we have to fight Berkeley’s Mayor for our legal right to public comment in the cradle of the Free Speech Movement?!)  

Dona Spring is a Berkeley Councilmember.

I attended the hearings on the landmark designation for Iceland, our jewel in the heart of Berkeley. Those wishing to preserve Iceland spoke spiritedly on behalf of this well-loved asset—and they were brilliant. They paid tribute with eloquence and soul.  

Perhaps most eloquent were two words spoken by a beautiful girl, who grew shy when it came her time to speak, then exclaimed with vivid simplicity, “It’s Iceland!”  

I first heard the rumor that developer Ali Kashani had an interest in Iceland at about the time that the Drayage Building was sold in 2005. Kashani was prepared to purchase the Drayage when it received the fire inspection from hell, or rather, from Fire Marshall David Orth, who found 255 bogus “code violations” where none had been found in twenty prior years.  

While the rumor of Kashani’s interest was disturbing, I didn’t believe that Iceland could be gone after in the same manner as the Drayage Building. The Drayage was a warehouse next to the railroad tracks occupied by artists of modest means, who, despite the spin and rhetoric, are treated as expendable by our city government. (For those who don’t know the outcome: the artists were evicted; another developer bought and demolished the building, and it’s now a vacant lot).  

But Iceland was a thriving institution, the best youth program this town has ever had, and was beloved by thousands of people of all income levels, all races, all ages. How could those in power think they could get away with destroying something so vibrant and so loved?  

Sadly, no deal on behalf of developers is too heinous for the Bates Regime, and Iceland was assailed with the full force of municipal harassment. Other facilities that use ammonia, much more ammonia than was contained in Iceland’s system, are left in peace. Other facilities have had ammonia leaks. But only Iceland’s cooling system was gone after and destroyed.  

In March and April of 2006, I spoke at length with a manager of the rink. He told me of David Orth treating him “like we were making weapons of mass destruction,” and about ultimately giving up: “We’ve made the decision to sell. They’ve run us out of the business in Berkeley.” He talked about meeting after grueling meeting with City officials: “We jumped through every hoop trying to resolve the situation and had no cooperation on their part.”  

The manager’s statements were confirmed by documents obtained through a Public Records Act Request (PRAR). There were notes about rink employees attending countless meetings with high level city officials including Dan Marks, Mark Rhoades, Joan MacQuarrie, Zack Cowan, and a host of others. Why were so many city employees willing to participate in this witch hunt?  

The PRAR turned up an interesting exchange between the Mayor’s aide, Cisco DeVries, and the rink owner’s attorney Rina Rickles, known affectionately as the “one-woman dream team for developers,” conferring about how to spin the closure of the rink. On January 16, 2007, DeVries suggested for the rink’s press release: “We worked closely with Berkeley’s mayor and city council members to examine a range of options, but unfortunately did not find a workable solution.”  

Why was the mayor’s office collaborating with the developers’ favorite attorney? Why wasn’t the mayor’s office trying to save the rink? And who advised the rink owners to select an attorney who is so closely associated with Berkeley’s big developers?  

The fact that Kashani is now in contract to purchase Iceland makes it clear why city officials went along with the willful destruction of a beloved institution. Patrick Kennedy reigned as Berkeley’s developer-king for almost a decade—a couple of years ago, he stepped down, and Kashani ascended the throne.  

The Save Berkeley Iceland group made the highest bid to buy the building. It is therefore inexplicable why the owners of Iceland are now, in essence, teamed up with their harassers. (To the rink owners: the City’s political machine went after your building—why are you doing exactly what they want you to do?).  

Iceland’s owners have appealed to the City Council, seeking to weaken the landmark designation, a move which Kashani appears to be banking on. That decision will come before the City Council today at 6:00 p.m. If the Council goes along with the wishes of the reigning developer-king, it’ll be a very sad day in Berkeley.  

Gale Garcia is a Berkeley resident who thinks that this time, the Bates Regime has gone too far.

One of my favorite songs from long ago begins “Why, oh why, oh why oh why did I ever leave Ohio?” 

Now in my case it was New Jersey, but the thought is apt. 

I learned that California history is taught in Berkeley schools. Not so in NJ. We learned the Revolution and all the historic sites. In my town, George Washington’s headquarters are impeccably preserved. As far as I know no one has tried to tear them down to replace them with affordable housing. 

Fortunately our skating was on a local lake that was always frozen on Thanksgiv-ing. No urge to fill it in for affordable housing has been reported. 

Now in Berkeley we have wonderful history in many buildings and in our famous university town itself, but it seems to me someone is always trying to tear down or rip out. I refer of course to our lovely and friendly treasure—Iceland. 

First, the fire department found fault with the ice-making equipment, a complaint perhaps from the adjacent affordable housing that is built too close to the rink. 

Not surprisingly, the family that owns Iceland cannot afford new ice-making equipment or even roof repairs. Not surprisingly, the affordable housing community wants to buy it, level it, and build more housing. 

The question arises: Where will these folks go to have fun? Maybe to the new baseball field that is to be fenced in for only high school baseball? Oops. Guess not.  

Or perhaps folks can take a bus to the new fields down by the freeway in Albany? 

Oops, those fields will be reserved, and who knows if the bus goes there? (Don’t get me started on the Busosauers cruising the town.) 

The question is for the silly ... er, City Council to answer: Will they uphold our Landmarks Commission’s protection of the irreplaceable skating rink and social resource or build more—largely unwanted—economy housing? 

Tune in 6 p.m. Tuesday, channel 33 and see the inevitable result or pray for a miracle.  

We have nice city parks. Why doesn’t the city buy Iceland and make it a park? Six million bucks would be a bargain for such a prize. 

No dough? I’ve heard that nearly $90 million dollars has been contributed by the city toward the new affordable housing and ecology center that is being built by private parties on the Oxford parking lot that used to support downtown businesses. 

Who wanted this? Not our citizenry. Just someone at sullied, er ... City Hall. 

Oh, I forgot, a councilman wants a new youth center in his district. Maybe that’s where the money should go.  

Things are not going well in Berkeley where the government cannot even uphold the laws that its predecessors passed. We’ve learned that, because we are a charter city, the council does not have to follow the city plan. 

We’ve also learned that the Elmwood zoning ordinance, which does not permit too much liquor service, can be blithely ignored by pro-growth politicians with friends in the development business. 

I have heard that Houston has no zoning laws, and that one can find a car lot next to a house. This is called spot zoning: no plan, just build what you want where you want with no concern for your neighbors. 

Things are not going well in Berkeley where the excuse for overbuilding on the corner of MLK and University is providing a spot for a Trader Joe’s.  

Has no one noticed the empty retail space all up and down the downtown streets? 

The mayor wants to revitalize downtown. OK, good, what would bring people down there faster than a Trader Joe’s? This plan would infuse downtown with commerce instead of overwhelming a hitherto quiet neighborhood of homes. 

And not to wonder why this item was sneaked on to a consent agenda when citizens were waiting in the wings to speak their hearts out to the council. 

While I am at it: I noticed that the Pony Rides up in Tilden have closed, and I wonder if the carousel owners have managed to reopen after a state 

inspector closed them down by requiring a protective fence that hasn’t existed for the last 50 plus years. 

Things are not going well in Berkeley.  

Talk to your councilperson if you find them willing to listen. 

If not, I just dunno. I sure don’t want to go back to Ohio, or New Jersey or especially Houston. 

George Oram is an Elmwood resident.

These essential questions are being raised more and more often, at least in California, and several local authors and filmmakers have addressed them recently in illuminating ways.  

Offering useful information are Marion Nestle in her book What to Eat, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Lisa Brenneis’ delightful film about Berkeley’s Monterey Market, Eat at Bill’s; and Emiko Omori and Jed Riffe’s prize-winning new film Ripe for Change: Agriculture, Sustainability, and the Foods We Eat. 

We’re beginning to see the frightening consequences of our disproportionate contribution to climate change. And we see unprecedented obesity in the United States, thanks to widespread consumption of processed food, high in calories from sugar and fat and low in food value. These two problems derive in part from the practices of corporate agriculture. 

The evolution of agriculture from the family farm, based on local production and consumption, to large-scale, mechanized, fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture has provided huge quantities of corn and grains, much of which is processed into packaged foods low in nutritional value or is used for animal feed. 

Industrial agriculture is a significant contributor to global climate change with its heavy use of gas, oil, and petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, including fuel for the trucks and planes that carry its products to markets around the world. Petroleum-based chemicals kill the soil and make the growers heavily dependent on their use for continued productivity.  

Is this giving us food that is healthful and nutritious, or is it the means by which giant corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Monsanto maintain their control of U.S. food production and siphon off our tax dollars by way of very generous agribusiness subsidies? 

Ripe for Change investigates this question by examining two contrasting approaches to agriculture to be found in California—the agribusiness model of huge fields planted with a single crop and heavily sprayed and watered, to produce high quantity and uniformity at low (subsidized) cost, vs. small-scale and organic farming with the goal of producing flavorful and nutritious food in ways that are sustainable, by ensuring healthy soil, careful use of water, worker safety, and prices that reflect the investment of labor and experience. The film offers comments from defenders of agribusiness as well as those who have rediscovered the reasons for a local agriculture that connects farmers with the people who depend on their produce.  

When David Mas Masumoto was ready to plow under the orchards he’d planted with his father, because their ripe delicious peaches had been displaced in the market by uniform, flavorless, undentable peaches at a lower price, his now famous essay on the dilemma struck such a chord with readers that he stepped back to reconsider just what he was doing as a farmer. 

When Alice Waters realized that we could only recover a sense of what the pleasures of good food are if we introduce children to them, her Edible Schoolyard project was born. Masumoto and Waters describe these realizations in Ripe for Change, as do others committed to providing food in ways that respect and sustain the rich soils and wonderful climate that have made California one of the world’s primary food producers. 

There are frustrating problems in our lives that are beyond our control, but we can make choices about what we buy to eat, and we’re fortunate in Berkeley to have a range of sources for fresh, local, affordable produce as well as writers and filmmakers in our midst whose work can educate us about those choices. 

Healthy Living 

As part of an ongoing effort to print  

stories by East Bay residents, The Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@ berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.

As the psychedelic ’60s morphed into the sour reality of the ’70s, many a dazed survivor was struck with the revelation that there was more to life than sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. For some, a search for enlightenment led to Buddhism, which had a particular appeal for Jewish hippie intellectual lefties—such as a fair percentage of my pals. Picking up on this trend, a local stand-up comic, Darryl Henriques, did a shtick where he inhabited the persona of the Swami from Miami, chief guru of the Bu-ish religion. 

Although quite a few friends were drawn to Buddhism in the early 1970s, my personal experience with meditation never got much past chanting the Bu-ish mantra, “Ommm Shalommm.” And despite occasional exposure to Buddhist writings and lectures, all that lingers in my brain’s recesses today is the Swami’s favorite maxim: “Yes, we are all one—but not the same one”! 

Nonetheless, I remain intrigued by the very different ways Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions handle “life’s persistent questions,” namely, those pondered by Guy Noir. And I admire my budding Buddhist buddies from the 1970s who are still trekking the Dharmic path and resisting the lure of cynical materialism. 

Two who fit this description are Barbara Gates and Wes “Scoop” Nisker. In 1983, Barbara and Scoop’s commitment to Buddhism motivated them to found Inquiring Mind, a journal “dedicated to the creative transmission of Buddhist teachings to the West.” 

Based in Berkeley, the semiannual Inquiring Mind now boasts a worldwide circulation of more than 30,000 and for 25 years has treated readers to a wide variety of Buddhist-inspired art, poetry, philosophy, psychology, politics and humor. Regular contributors include such Buddhist notables as Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield and Ram Dass. 

The journal’s most recent, Spring 2007, issue is devoted to “The Tough Stuff: Money, Sex, Power.” Browsing its graphically pleasing pages, a number of pieces caught my attention. 

One titled “The Lingerie Zen Sect” was written by Michael Attie, the Buddhist proprietor of “Playmates of Hollywood,” which bills itself as “the world’s largest lingerie store.” Attie suggests meditating in a sexually charged environment, for example the meditation hall he built above his store, releases “sexual energy” enhancing “enlightenment.” It’s a pity I never discovered this secret while growing up in a flat above my parent’s lingerie shoppe in Brooklyn. 

Another article focuses on how a need for recognition by philanthropists limits the satisfaction they obtain from their charitable acts. Learning “to love anonymity” with no expectation of being thanked, says author Bokara Legendre, made giving money away far more rewarding for her. This insight hearkens back to Maimonides, who considered anonymous donors especially worthy in his “Eight Levels of Charity” discourse. 

Both Gates and Nisker also contributed to the issue. Gates relates how she has applied a Buddhist perspective in her struggle to overcome a fear of freeway driving—a fear I happen to share. The inquiring mind that inquires too much is Nisker’s subject. He reflects on the difficulty of subduing the “thinking mind” to prevent its domination of the “other aspects of our being.” 

Inquiring Mind is distributed free of charge with the bulk of its costs funded by reader donations. 

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, a daylong party benefiting the journal will be held Saturday, July 21, at Marin County’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center. 

The festive event will feature the “Rockin’ Mantra Band,” performance artists and a host of Buddhist luminaries including Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Jane Hirshfield. In addition, the journal is sponsoring an online auction, running through July 29. You can bid on a signed illustrated letterpress print of Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” an intimate brunch with Jon Kabat Zinn or cooking and dining with Tassahara Cookbook author Edward Espe Brown. For details, please see: www.inquiringmind.com. An archive of back issues is also available at the website. 

OPINION AND NEWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a Berkeleyan interested in the history and future of the city, I often read the Planet to understand local events not covered in other publications. I am willing to tolerate some opinion leaking into the news, but I felt that Gary Brechin’s piece in Friday’s issue laid it on a little thick. In an otherwise very interesting article about the historical and architectural legacy of our city, he blasts “free market fundamentalists whose economic flimflam...triumphed” over Roosevelt’s accomplishments. Now, I’m no free-market fundamentalist, but doesn’t this style of writing fit in better on the editorial page? 

Mark Abel 

• 

NOT BORING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Rose Green’s essay “The Aging Process Beyond Four Score and Ten” was insightful, clever and, contrary to the author’s statement, not boring at all. 

Nancy Ward 

• 

TELECOM TASK FORCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The City of Berkeley invested over $200,000 in a telecom task force that held public hearings, workshops and hired expert consultants that recommended that wireless was safe and needed in Berkeley. Citizens against antennas attended these meetings and were proven to be wrong by the good scientists who live and work in Berkeley. The records of the task force are on file. See Roger Miller at Parks and Rec. 

The City of San Francisco is now making wireless available to all citizens. They will not have a digital divide. Berkeley is keeping the folks who most need access to the network deprived of access because of a few people with bad science who come to midnight meetings of ZAP. 

I listened to the ZAP hearing. I must admit that Verizon did not do its best at the hearing and the 130 postcard responses were questionable, but I assume that they thought that a city that was home to one of the best universities in the world (and had reps on the City of Berkeley’s Telecom Task Force) would have 21st century thinking. 

Denying these antennas is denying your fire and police departments access to citizen calls. Ask them about the magnets they give to residents of Berkeley to reach emergency service. The magnets have a special cell number because 911 does not work! 

Sally Williams 

Former Chair, Berkeley Telecommunications Task Force 

• 

STADIUM PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

There is a strange logic to Chancellor Birgeneau’s statement that the reason the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) is being built is “to get our athletes out of an unsafe structure” (the Memorial Stadium). If the stadium is unsafe, why does the university have anyone in such an “unsafe structure”? The university has said that 500 athletes and staff use the facility on a daily basis. Perhaps a bigger question is why does the university continue to endanger the lives of over 70,000 people during football games? The Hayward Fault runs through the center of the stadium from end zone to end zone. The elevated structure of the west side is on fill that was hydraulically placed 85 years ago. Engineering design standards for concrete structures are dramatically different today as a result of structural failures experienced in even moderate earthquakes. There were 42 people killed when the Cypress freeway collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Many more would have been killed if they hadn’t rushed home to watch the start of the World’s Series at Candlestick Park. No one died at Candlestick. It had been seismically retrofitted and was on solid ground. The Cypress structure, like Memorial Stadium, was on fill and employed obsolete engineering standards. A large magnitude earthquake could collapse Memorial Stadium resulting in the death of a number of people proportional to those using the stadium at the time of the event. 

Logically and morally the university should move the student athletes and staff to safe temporary facilities and proceed without delay to retrofit the stadium to make it safer. Temporary facilities have been found in other seismic retrofitting programs at the university. At least one season of football games will have to be held at some other stadium whenever the work is done. Why delay? The “Big One” could happen any time and seismologists have said such an event is overdue. 

Henrik Bull 

• 

UC LAWSUIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a Berkeley resident and taxpayer, I am frustrated that the City of Berkeley is continuing with its lawsuit against the university. With recent revisions to the stadium plan by the university, there will be no increase in parking spaces so the city’s lawsuit becomes moot. In addition, the university will be planting three trees (one of these as mature trees), for every tree removed. These trees only exist because the university planted them there in the first place. And while I like to avoid destroying nature as much as possible, planting three trees for every one lost will ultimately enhance the stadium and its environs. Given that a study proved that the new stadium buildings would not be on a fault line, there should be no legal issue delaying the construction and retrofit. The construction should begin as soon as possible to ensure the safety of all people who work at the Stadium and attend the sporting events at the facility. 

I hope the city will stop wasting its limited resources (I hear that it will be a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees) on this lawsuit.  

Karin Cooke 

• 

A FEW COMMENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a 36-year resident of Berkeley, I would like to pass on the following comments to Mayor Bates. His impatience to end the council meeting Tuesday, June 10 obviously rattled members of the council and denied viewers of Cable Channel 33 from knowing the results of that final vote on the Wright’s Garage issue. One can only conclude that in his haste to end at 11 p.m., he throws respect to the winds, for his fellow members of the council, citizens in attendance, as well as those viewing the proceedings from their homes. Since the issue was placed last on the agenda, with unfair consequences, the frenetic action by the mayor was not the finest example of democracy in action. It was rather an unfortunate example of el brazo fuerte. 

R.J. Schwendinger 

• 

WIN-WIN IS BERKELEY’S LOSS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Maybe some of your readers will remember the Loni Hancock and Tom Bates election promises of creating win-win solutions for Berkeley. It is not working out that way. In fact, A win for the Hancock-Bates Political Machine is a real loss for Berkeley’s citizens, all of them. 

Simply take a gander at the new California Prison bill, SB900, that Loni Hancock quietly voted for. This new prison boondoggle allocates a whopping additional $8 billion to build more prisons that benefit the prison guards and nobody else in California. The Hancock-Bates machine will spend a fortune to incarcerate California’s minority populations, while our public schools are still severely underfunded. I guess that Loni Hancock must be running for another public office and expects the prison guards’ union to pay for her campaign. Loni Hancock should have insisted on changing SB900, to include sentencing reform, special consideration for first time women offenders, and significant money for rehabilitation. SB900 allows for only a ridiculous $700,000 for rehabilitation out of the whopping $8,000,000,000 for prison cells. Unfortunately Loni Hancock went along with the flock against Berkeley’s real interests. You can read a good article about this in the May 30 Oakland Tribune. 

This is exactly the same kind of immoral politics that Tom Bates is performing in Berkeley as our mayor. It was reported in the Daily Planet, shortly after the election, that half of Tom Bates’ largest political donations came from developers. The developers have paid for Bates and he is allowing them to build any development they want. He refuses to allow the citizens of Berkeley to have environmental impact reports (EIR). All other California cities allow their citizens to have EIRs for projects. These EIRs demonstrate the negative parking and traffic impacts that will be caused by any development. Then the city has the right to have the developer pay to mitigate these negative impacts. This is the type of good environmental development done all over California. The Bates-Hancock political machine refuses to allow Berkeley’s citizens to have these environmental protections. Loni Hancock and Tom Bates are environmental hypocrites. Berkeley ends up subsidizing the same developers who pay for Bates political campaigns. 

This week, the Hancock-Bates machine will allow another developer to build a large scale project in Berkeley without an EIR. This is the so-call Trader Joe’s project at the intersection of University Avenue and MLK Way. It will cause massive traffic and parking problems. Bates will make sure that the developer does not have to pay to mitigate these problems. You, the citizens of Berkeley, will pay. In fact, The sole owner of Trader Joe’s is a German billionaire. You will be subsidizing him. There are plenty of good places to put a Trader Joe’s in Berkeley, such as the now-empty Longs Drugs at the corner of University and San Pablo avenues. It has plenty of on-site parking and easy access from three directions. 

Now, I finally understand the Loni Hancock and Tom Bates win-win promise. Loni Hancock wins, Tom Bates wins, the prison guards win, and all the local developers, who contribute to their campaigns, win. You, the citizens of Berkeley, lose. 

Barry Wofsy 

Milvia-Martin Luther King Alliance 

• 

HAL CARLSTAD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Kudos and thanks to the June 19 Daily Planet story by C. Jones regarding my friend and Berkeley Teachers’ Union/AFL-CIO, colleague since 1967. For those of you who haven’t heard, a huge Memorial Service will be held this Sunday, July 15 at 2:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church in Berkeley, with a reception following at the Berkeley Fellowship of UUs (BFUU.org) at Cedar and Bonita streets at 4:30 p.m. 

Hal, 12 others and myself were nicknamed “The Chadwick 13” and have the T-shirts to prove it—police were called by the National Board of Pacifica and Hal was arrested in the first wave, June 21, 1999, the first of a string of dozens of arrests. Cynthia Johnson, Hal’s partner of 12 years, and I were arrested in the second wave, later that day. We had pro bono lawyers and the trespassing lawsuit was dropped just days before the scheduled jury trial. During those summer months Hal gave tireless volunteer hours mostly at his BFUU for strategy/support meetings with anyone who showed up. Hal was a gentle yet ardent spokesperson for the “KPFA Struggles.” 

Hal’s commitment to peaceful non-violent protest was evident as the many times he and the late Father Bill O’Donnell (of St. Joseph’s Church) vigilled at San Quentin against the California Death Penalty along with former pastor of BFUU, Rev. Paul Sawyer, now retired and living in Southern California. 

Hal’s personal advice to me about my home, garden, adult disabled son, activism in general and walking-one’s-talk in particular is something I shall miss. His family and friends will undoubtedly carry on his proud populist-like traditions. I remember a ballroom dancing class my late husband Bert and I took with Hal and a dozen Berkeley folks. He could often be seen dancing at Ashkenaz. He was active for many years in Coop-Camp Sierra. 

As a retired teacher and school librarian myself the Dr. Seuss quote comes to mind: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened!” Hal Carlstad: Presente! 

Sylvia P. Scherzer 

Albany 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We’ve heard a lot about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in this letters section—from people like me who are promoting the project (because we want fewer cars on the roads), and people like Mary Oram who would like to kill the project (because they want to keep car lanes and abundant parking). But we’ve heard nothing from the people who really are the key to the success of the BRT. I’d like to see a letter here which reads something like: “Fellow environmentally-concerned residents of Berkeley: I now drive alone in my SUV to my job on the UC campus. When the BRT starts running, I plan to leave my SUV at home and ride the nice new bus to work.” In Berkeley, is this kind of person only a fictional character, from the imagination of transit advocates? 

Steve Geller 

• 

CORPORATE MEDIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let me tell you why I appreciated your editorial regarding shortcomings of the “corporate news media.”  

I settled in Berkeley 50 years ago and although I moved away when I retired I didn’t move very far and I still think of Berkeley as home.  

I bought a four-bedroom house in south Berkeley from the owner in 1959 for $4,000 and this, for me, encapsulates the enormity of the changes that have taken place.  

Back then I could chose from five daily newspapers: The Berkeley Gazette, the Oakland Tribune, and three from San Francisco— the Examiner, the Call-Bulletin, and the Chronicle. Newspaper such as yours didn’t exist. Only the Chronicle survives, a cover for numerous slick inserts, advertising vehicle for Macy’s and a journalist-weakened skeleton of its former self. Joan Ryan and Ruth Rosen are gone while Debbie Saunders survives. “They’ve cut down all the trees and left only the monkeys.”  

Turn to television and “corporate news media” is little short of insidious—bland entertainment and advertising bits disguised as news. 

Your editorial introduced several modalities—hard, soft, homogenized and hyper-localized news. But in substantive terms most of what’s available is manipulative, insipid and mendacious—not news at all but soft propaganda. Which makes your “at home” coverage all the more refreshing. Thank you. 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

• 

EVICTING DISABLED, ELDERLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Are the new housing commissioners going to be held legally liable for Berkeley’s rush to evict its disabled and elderly? This is being accomplished by forcing huge, illegal rent jackups only on to the disabled and elderly, a clear violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. By not spreading any possible financial burden equally to all Section 8 households, so no one can be evicted, the city is breaking state, municipal and federal laws. The City Council, city manager, and city attorney will probably be named in at least one of the three investigations of Berkeley Housing misuse of funds. Approximately l,000 disabled and elderly are still facing $60 and $50 a month rent raises plus extra utilities burdens that no other, even able-bodied Berkeley citizens are asked to shoulder. Today Berkeley is ushering in the most shameful and largest homelessness wave in its history Approximately l,000 people living in 750 homes are being torn from their homes as we speak. The Rent Board and Center for Independent Living are strangely silent on this Sec. 8 matter. Because they haven’t come for your home yet is no guarantee that lawlessness will not continue to prevail. The laws that Berkeley is breaking will be obviously no protection to you either. What does dragging citizens from their homes remind you of while others silently stand by?  

Gaylen Stuart-Black 

Berkeley Citizens for Fair Housing  

• 

TRADER JOE’S PROJECT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I write this letter with a resigned heart, as I know that in many ways the decision to approve the project currently under consideration for 1950 MLK has already received tacit approval. It received such approval when the developers continuously submitted designs that blatantly violated the zoning code and yet were not given clear direction from the Planning staff to reduce the height, increase open space, and seriously review the traffic impact on the community. It received this tacit approval when a prominent member of the ZAB was removed just prior to voting on this project, after voicing concerns publicly that echoed the sentiment of many Berkeley residents. It received this tacit approval when it became known as the “Trader Joe’s” project, as if the rigorous use permit review to approve a high volume grocery and liquor store was merely a formality obstructing improved quality of life for our downtown. 

This project claims a right to many zoning code and use permit waivers by virtue of it’s proximity to downtown, while not actually being located in the downtown. Like a raging inferno it allows downtown development standards to jump the fire break and leap across the street to threaten a quiet residential neighborhood which features a variety of historical buildings, modest rental cottages and single family dwellings. This project epitomizes why we have zoning codes, which are intended to soften the transition between high density mixed use housing and the lower density neighborhoods which abut them. Sadly, those zoning codes have not been enforced in this situation. 

As much as we all want to see a decline in automobile use in Berkeley, the reality is that this Trader Joe’s location is going to contribute to huge traffic backups on MLK, as shoppers enter and exit the underground parking lot on Berkeley Way. Currently, the police, fire and ambulance services use both Hearst and MLK extensively as alternate routes to Shattuck and University avenues. I predict that many Berkeley hills residents will drive to Trader Joe’s on a regular basis, and that MLK north of University will be even more choked with vehicles every weekday afternoon. This grocery store would be an asset for downtown, but not in this location. I hope the mayor and council consider the long-term implications for all of Berkeley when they make their decision about this project, which violates our zoning codes, will cause extensive traffic congestion, and throws a quiet residential neighborhood into the shadow of a downtown behemoth. I urge them to send this one back to the drawing board. 

Kristin Leimkuhler 

• 

IMPACT ON SENIOR CENTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am concerned that the proposed Trader Joe’s at University Avenue and Martin Luther King will have an extremely negative impact on the North Berkeley Senior Center. Eight street parking places will be eliminated and shoppers at Trader Joe’s will use much of the existing street parking. 

At the present time, many seniors as well as students of Berkeley Adult School do not use the Center because of transportation and parking problems. Medical personnel, entertainers and others who offer programs at the Center find parking difficult. The problem will be greatly exacerbated by the planned Trader Joe’s. Approximately 200-plus seniors and students use the center every day. There are 15 parking spaces in the lot behind the Center, two permanently designated for Meals on Wheels vans and two for seniors with handicap placards. A fair number of seniors are disabled, partially sighted, frail and elderly. 

I have heard it is anticipated shoppers at the planned store will bike and walk in. I don’t think this is realistic. I shop at El Cerrito Trader Joe’s where there are acres of free parking and shoppers pour out with loaded grocery carts. I suggest we ask Trader Joe’s for their projections for the University Avenue/Martin Luther King site. I respectfully request the mayor and council put the considerable talents and good will of Berkeley city government to work on finding a solution to repairing the current accessibility problems of the center, as well as anticipating the negative impact this Trader Joe’s might have on the senior and student community.  

Catherine Willis 

• 

DETRIMENTAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The proposed development at the corner of MLK and University Avenue violates both Berkeley’s Zoning law and the Strategic Avenue Plan, yet somehow is still under consideration. Citizens of Berkeley expect fair and even handed enforcement of zoning laws. Neighbors close to this proposed project have voiced objections and in my view have a right to see the law enforced fairly. 

The proposed project is obviously detrimental to both neighbors and the city’s character overall—it is too big, too bulky, it would increase population density, increase traffic, increase parking problems. 

It is not that I dislike Trader Joe’s in particular, but this location is a bad choice for any high-density development due to its effects on neighbors. What is so bad about keeping the present building with its modest density use and satisfactory parking for customers?  

Selective enforcement of the law, meaning exceptions granted to the detriment of the less politically powerful, is a sine qua non of corrupt government. In the interest of at least giving the appearance of not being corrupt, I hope the mayor and council will do everything within their ability to stop this project by enforcing the zoning laws. 

Walter H Wood 

• 

DOG PROBLEM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are facing a dog problem in Berkeley. During summer we run a summer program for school-age children. In some neighborhoods we find our that our neighbors forget to leash their dogs and blithely bring their dogs into the schoolyard. Some children get scared and shout for help. The other day I was walking to my school and found two large dogs running alongside without a leash. I was in a hurry to get to work. I requested the owner to mind her pets but she pretended not to hear. I had to cross the street to the farther sidewalk to make it safely to my destination. That same day some other dogs were running loose on the sidewalk and after a while a man walked into the schoolyard with two dogs. A few scared children climbed up on the picnic table and shouted for help. I wonder if Berkeley has a city ordinance to stop pet owners from compromising the safety of pedestrians and of school children on a school playground.  

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

• 

NEGATIVE ADVERTISING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One of the kinds of pamphleteering I have done is tell persons going to a movie what I think of that movie. I did this with the movie titled Mr. Brooks. 

I printed 200 copies of my statement (titled “Mr. Brooks is a Very Bad Film”), folded them with my folding machine, made two sandwich boards and went back to the theater, where I stood in front and handed out leaflets. 

It was a great success. Some of the employees of the theater came out to get copies. I am certain that the producer of the movie got a copy of my leaflet.  

A week later when the movie was shown at a theater near my home, I tried a different tactic. I made up another sandwich board and parked my car as near to the theater as I could, the three signs on it so that passersby could see them. I just sat in the car and watched. I changed two of the signs so they were seen by more persons. People driving by, passengers in buses, and persons on the sidewalk saw my signs. One lady took my picture. 

Just before the movie was to start, I took one of the signs and stood near the entrance to the theater. Several persons asked me why I didn’t like the movie. A few said they had read the reviews and would not see the movie. 

While I was there, very few persons bought tickets. 

Again, the employees of the theater took notice of my efforts.  

I believe this is one of the first times my pamphleteering has been used by persons who have seen a movie and made an effort to tell others about it. 

Charles L. Smith 

Those of us who advocate “smart growth”—siting new and denser housing near jobs, academic centers, services, etc., and on transit corridors—have a responsibility to help ensure that such developments are assets, not detriments, to their neighborhoods.  

On Monday, July 16, the Berkeley City Council will hold a public hearing to consider the largest mixed-use project ever proposed outside downtown. One hundred forty-eight units of housing and a Trader Joe’s market are proposed for the vast (by midtown Berkeley standards) site now adorned by Kragen Auto Parts, its long-vacant neighbors, and their parking lot. In its prior incarnation as the U-Save Market, this was the setting for Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” as well as the subject of a swell Robert Bechtle painting called ’60 Chevies. No, I’m not proposing another landmark designation. It’s hard to imagination a development that wouldn’t improve this site. Or is it?  

The proposed development has substantial virtues. It addresses significant housing and retail needs. Kirk Peterson’s historicist design goes a long way toward achieving a congenial aesthetic interface with the neighborhood and has improved profoundly over earlier versions. But even the City Council should have little trouble discerning that this one has a way to go before it enhances, rather than encumbers, its site. 

The council should get a big clue to the proposal’s corpulence from the fact that squeezing it in would require major alterations to all three adjacent streets as well as a whopping three variances from our Zoning Ordinance. The streets would see alterations at the University-MLK intersection, a new stoplight at MLK and Berkeley Way, removal of all on-street parking on MLK between University and Hearst as well as several spaces on Berkeley Way, and—at neighbors’ insistence—installation of a full traffic barrier across Berkeley Way west of the site. The proposal exceeds our zoning’s 50-foot height limit and is five stories high where four are allowed.  

Could anyone—say a smart growth zealot who’s a regular Trader Joe’s shopper—believe that 48 TJ parking spaces could be adequate? Remind that innocent that because the project removes 10 on-street spaces, the net gain in new spaces for TJ would be a grand 38, while well-used on-street parking for the North Berkeley Senior Center, for neighboring businesses, and for nearby residents would disappear. The San Francisco Trader Joe’s at Masonic and Geary, with many more than 48 spaces, suffers strangling backups due to inadequate parking.  

The design provides only a single entrance/exit for TJ’s lot (Andronico’s, Monterey Market, Berkeley Bowl, etc., all have at least two) and turns rational planning on its head by situating that access on Berkeley Way, the only one of the site’s three bounding streets that is solidly residential. The design isolates a little Victorian house on the TJ side of the Berkeley Way traffic barrier and spews the full deluge of TJ traffic just a few feet from that house’s driveway. Berkeley Way neighbors also get the entrance and trash room for 64 of the project’s households.  

At least some of these impacts are avoidable. If the residential entrance and trash room were consolidated with their counterparts on the MLK edge of the building, the traffic barrier could be moved east of the little house on Berkeley Way, preserving its connection with its neighborhood. The project would force the removal of all on-street parking on MLK but lacks an off-street vehicle port for resident drop-offs and deliveries on that busy block. There is space for such a port if the design loses a small retail space at the corner of MLK and Berkeley Way.  

The ticking time-bomb embodied in this proposal is its request for 25 more housing units than are required by state law or permitted by Berkeley’s Zoning Ordinance, with no increase in the number of affordable units. Planning becomes meaningless if legislated standards are ignored when a developer requests it and a compliant staff accedes. It makes cynics of those good citizens who have invested their time in setting those standards and encourages the kind of knee-jerk resistance to change that thwarts and delays good proposals. 

There is no doubt that the job of accomplishing large-scale infill development is difficult. And in a world suffocating under suburban sprawl and a rapidly degenerating atmosphere, there should be no doubt that it is important. Those who do that job and the public officials who guide them will serve our communities best if they insist on projects that will make all of us smart growth advocates. If we want community support for new development, that development must support our community, respecting the comfort, safety, and amenities that make that community livable.  

The City Council hearing on this project will be Monday, July 16, at 7 PM, at Old City Hall, 2134 MLK Jr. Way. Citizens can write the Council via e-mail care of clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us. 

Rob Browning is a Berkeley resident and business owner in the University/MLK neighborhood. 

Anything that helps “Save Iceland” and specifically reopen it ASAP, including its landmarking, is on the mark and hopefully neither a day late nor a penny short. 

Everything that Berkeley the town and gown most prides itself on—diversity, love of developing our youth of today into national and international leaders of tomorrow, peace and harmony, physical exercise in a sport and art, getting young people off of the streets, employing them (as staff), walking or briefly driving to a central location... Iceland is all of that. I cannot bear to use the past tense, as the myriad of children I brought there several times a week for many years are still heartbroken, as am I. 

We all loved to skate there, we loved the staff, we loved the disco weekends, we loved the classes and summer camps, we loved the holiday celebrations, all of it. In the many years we skated there, we saw nothing but peace and love. The biggest battle was bragging rights over who skated the best, and Alphonzo, a wonderful early 20-something role model to all the kids, always won hands down. 

We burned hundreds of thousands of calories; the bottom line was really a slender bottom as opposed to the childhood obesity and early preventable chronic disease epidemic we as a nation now face. What the city and university missed “grokking” were the intangibles: How could we have let Iceland close? Is that the freedom of the marketplace, or is it that we merely give lip service to the values we say we hold most dear toward our young people, including UC Berkeley students, who loved late night “curling”—a game played without iceskates and brooms on the ice or something like that—and the UC hockey team so ably led by Cyril, who also voluntarily trained any kid who wanted to learn the fundamentals of ice hockey. 

And let’s not forget the mostly young female staff of instructors, both group and one on one. I saw them take innumerable kids who clung to the side of the rink and couldn’t fathom how they could ever even glide unassisted and turn them into unbelievable graceful whizzes, boys and girls, in less than a year. 

The grown-ups in the St. Moritz skate club would come over to me and offer to teach me tricks, nuances, moves, exercises and more as I made my way around the ice, remembering the self-taught few things I could do from my childhood that were now clumsy and rusty lurchings compared to the kids I saw blossom from their classes and lessons. Marlene had been skating for 16 years and shared all of her knowledge with me as just one person on ice to another. I have seldom met as many gracious and as graceful people as the new friends I made at Iceland. I am sure the constant coterie of parents knitting, reading and clucking their little charges forward to the ice from the cafeteria, at which point the teachers would take charge, still miss each other and the Saturday morning group classes that seemed to stretch on all day as open skate took over. And please don’t forget the birthday parties that took over the cafeteria and still left room for onlookers to be offered homemade refreshments. I have to admit, even a less than healthy Cup of Noodles never tasted as good as at Iceland, after a sweat-inducing one or two hour skate to pop music. 

Bring back Iceland now so we can be true to who we think we are, if there is a civic “we” left. And if you or your family have never been there, ask someone who has, and you will get a feel and flavor of what you are missing. Again, hopefully it is not too late. If we landmark it, we can reopen it. If we reopen it, the staff will come back. If the staff comes back, the old and new skaters will be very happy. How difficult can this be in a town with a university that both pride themselves on a totally can-do attitude? 

Iceland is our Hogwarts; let’s all work to bring it back. 

Wendy Schlesinger is chairman of the Gardens on Wheels Association, dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood obesity.

It comes with a $400 million dollar bill 

And empty seats they’ll never fill. 

It’ll give us the cut-through traffic blues 

And much less parking to use. 

Merchants are even starting to frown 

In fear of business leaving town. 

Diesel smoke will be dispersed 

That’s bound to make your asthma worse. 

You like big trees? They might meet their doom 

‘Cause private bus lanes need lots of room. 

What’s this impending calamity? 

A transit boondoggle named BRT. 

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s no surprise— 

It’s hardly been publicized, 

‘Cause it’s better to finish all your plans 

Before the public makes its demands. 

One needn’t ever be too endearing 

When practicing social engineering. 

Is this the best way to move people fast? 

It’s the fossil-fuel technology of the past! 

A diesel dinosaur roaring to and fro, 

AC Transit’s braggadocio. 

BRT actually won’t make people drive cars any less— 

There are too many needs it doesn’t address 

And too many places it doesn’t go, 

So new ridership will barely grow. 

And it may even foul up your bus commute 

Because they’ll put fewer stops along the route. 

You see, stops just slow up the buses’ speed— 

Passengers are a big nuisance, indeed. 

And after all this, BART will still be quicker, 

Plus everyone knows their seat cushions are thicker. 

AC Transit could get more folks on the bus 

By making transfers less onerous. 

Proof-of-payment would sure save time, 

And we’d all prefer a bit less grime. 

And if they really want to make riders cheer 

Those Van Hool buses should disappear! 

The ride is so rough and the seats so high, 

Tough luck if you’re no longer young and spry. 

You’ll be bounced and jounced and thrown around 

As you lunge for a handhold that’s nowhere to be found, 

And no matter how many folks get cracks in their spine 

Those are the buses they’ll use for the BRT line. 

Don’t bother complaining—they just don’t care! 

And I hope you know BRT won’t help clear the air. 

Oh, you’ve heard it’ll reduce greenhouses gases? 

Nope—the EIR here shows failures, not passes. 

Their big diesel buses will spew out plenty of soot, 

Most of all near the spots where the stations are put. 

So who’s behind this dim-witted plan? 

Regional agencies who claim they can 

Issue commands by royal decree 

To massively increase our density. 

That’s what’s really going on here, 

But they don’t want that to reach your ear. 

Top-down backroom planning is IN 

And we citizens take it on the chin 

As developers take out huge new loans 

For “Transit-Oriented Development zones,” 

Where zoning laws can be ignored 

And condos that are multiple-floored 

Rise ten, fifteen, twenty stories tall 

‘Til our quality of life shrinks to nothing at all. 

And what of the neighbors who’ll suffer these ills? 

Why, let them all move to the Berkeley hills! 

BRT suits UC, there is no doubt 

So they can build even bigger and further out, 

Until they take over the entire East Bay 

And drive every last family away. 

Smart Growth groupies, too, have begun to drool 

Hoping BRT will cement their rule. 

And they’ll all march together with fierce intent 

On the road to redevelopment. 

What about us—do we have any rights? 

Are we nothing but opportunity sites? 

Will we let these arrogant zealots steal 

Our future in a backroom deal? 

For far too long, we’ve been left in the cold 

While our democracy is bought and sold— 

It’s our human rights we must redeem 

So let’s tell this unelected regime 

Of ABAG and ACCMA and MTC 

And our self-serving University:  

Your plans to grow forevermore 

Frighten us to our very core. 

Nature always trumps human pride— 

Unending growth is suicide. 

And when Mother Nature issues her decrees, 

They really bring you to your knees! 

We must keep Berkeley truly livable; 

Failure would just be unforgivable. 

If we don’t want our neighborhoods destroyed 

All our voices must be employed— 

So hands off our homes and shops 

This is where the mad bus stops. 

We’re not gonna take this BRT guff; 

This time we’ve really had ENOUGH. 

(ABAG is the Association of Bay Area Governments. ACCMA is the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency. MTC is the Metropolitan Transit Commission.) 

Doug Buckwald is a longtime Berkeley resident who regularly rides AC Transit, BART, and SF Muni.

Some mornings my 18-year-old son tells me his dreams. “I dreamt I got some new multi-vitamins, and that I was locked up in a glass deli case,” he says matter-of-factly. He unscrews the cap from one of his orange prescription pill bottles while he talks. His eyes look guarded. He looks tired. 

I take my coffee from the microwave and blow on it. The steam on my face feels good. It seems I always have dark circles under my eyes lately. Nowadays I hardly ever sleep through the night without waking up at least once—I wake up sweating, I wake from a dream, I wake up worried. Not about war or global warming or our country’s corrupt leaders, but about other things, the little things that comprise my days. Why won’t anyone publish my newest essay? Does my 10-year-old daughter really need her own cellphone? Will I ever want another boyfriend? How come my electric bill is so high? Will my son try to kill himself again? 

In my family, it sometimes seems like my son and I are bonded by our moodiness; our need for validation. I used to take antidepressants. They helped take the edge of things, but they also made me feel kind of flat all the time, so I stopped.  

“Happiness is a choice,” a friend said to me recently—a sort of simplistic, New Age-y concept I’ve been thinking about ever since. I imagine a metaphorical switch being flipped; suddenly all my money worries and other stressors dissipate like fog lifting. 

Last year my son’s depression took a serious turn when his suicidal thoughts became more than ideation. Luckily his attempt was unsuccessful. Now, he takes multiple medications to help balance his shifting moods, which are far more volatile than mine ever were. 

This year I celebrated my 50th birthday a few weeks before he turned 18, and I am only now realizing the significance of these major birthdays falling within a month of each other. As I approach the second half-century of my life with a rather jaded viewpoint—keeping my head above water emotionally, but not exactly swimming in enthusiasm, my son is just starting to test the waters. The medications he’s on are keeping him stable, yet I find myself both afraid of where he’d be without them, and hopeful he won’t need to be on them for years to come.  

My 10-year-old daughter comes from an entirely different gene pool than my son or me—she’s adopted. Early in the morning she’s always the first one up. She tosses clothes around her room before deciding on her outfit for the day, then grabs herself some fruit or a bagel for breakfast. On some days she’ll even deliver me a hot mug of coffee in bed. (My part-time and freelance gigs occasionally allow me the luxury of sleeping in.) “I love you, Mom,” she’ll say before hurrying out the door to her bus stop. “You’re the best,” I tell her sincerely. Her always-sunny spirit is the antithesis to my son’s dark side; her lively social life the opposite of my quiet, predictable one.  

Some days I let the coffee grow cold on my bedside table and fall back sleep. 

Happiness is a choice. If only it were that easy. I thought about that again after I finally rolled out of bed at ten this morning and reheated my cold coffee. (My son, between semesters at Berkeley City College now, will sleep even later if I let him.)  

When he’s finally up he tells me his dream and then I tell him mine, an equally weird one. After he swallows his medications I say off-handedly, “Happiness is a choice, you know.”  

“Bullshit,” he says. 

I’d dreamt I was being stalked by a short, heavy stranger. I don’t know what he was planning to do to me, but every time he got too close, I couldn’t breathe. 

I finished my coffee and started to write this story. I wonder if I’ll feel happier if it gets published.  

OPEN CALL FOR ESSAYS 

Healthy Living 

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, the Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.

The week before the Fourth of July we were up at Lassen Volcanic National Park watching the traffic at Hat Lake. The place was jumping.  

A male western tanager, resplendent in red and yellow, came down to the lake’s edge to drink. Audubon’s and Wilson’s warblers flashed in and out of the young lodgepole pines. A dipper made repeated shuttle flights from its nest below the highway bridge, alternately ducking underwater to forage or swimming like a little duck as it retrieved insects—mayflies?—from the lake’s surface. Another hard-working parent, a male white-headed woodpecker, commuted between its tree-cavity nest and some beetle-rich dead snag nearby. Tree swallows skimmed low over the lake, and noisy young spotted sandpipers chased each other around the beaver lodge. 

No beavers, though. The last time we were there, we watched them late into the buggy twilight as they cruised the lake they had made, or at least augmented. This time the dam was in poor repair, and the lodge was surrounded by mud. We blamed that on the dry winter, but were still worried about the beavers. Later a ranger-naturalist told us they were gone. One had been found dead on the highway last year; another on a hiking trail—disease, old age, who knows. 

Maybe another pair will wander up from the Warner Valley and take over the franchise. If not, the lake will inexorably change, and the results of all that dedicated beavering will be gone. And everything in and around it—the tanagers, the woodpeckers, the mayflies, the pines—will be affected, one way or another. 

Some years back, before he took on organized religion, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Extended Phenotype. A phenotype is the physical manifestation of a genotype—the ensemble of physical traits that the genome codes for. Dawkins’ point was that you have to think of behavior as part of that ensemble, which is fair enough with beavers. Their dam-building drive is so hard-wired that if you play the sound of running water for captives, they’ll pile up sticks and brush in front of the speaker. 

Beyond that, Dawkins’ notion of the phenotype also includes the built environment that results from an organism’s behavior—the dam, the pond, the lodge. 

We tend to think of our species as the only one that leaves a significant mark on the world, for better or worse. Far from it: beyond the engineering of beavers, consider the cities of the termites or the coral polyps, the soil moved by pocket gophers. All of us, man to microorganism, shape our various environments.  

And our environments shape us back. Another book from the ’80s, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist, tried to make that point, albeit with too much Marxist jargon for most tastes. (With us, there’s another layer when culture feeds back into the genome, as when Northern European and East African cattle herders independently—by separate genetic pathways—evolved adult lactose tolerance.) 

Woodpeckers—to pick just one of the cast of characters at Hat Lake—are builders and shapers in their own right. Their nesting cavities provide housing for a whole community of hole-nesting birds: chickadees, nuthatches, flycatchers, swallows, wrens. A woodpecker neighborhood tends to have high avian diversity. Small mammals like flying squirrels also  

adopt old woodpecker nests. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Working in Lassen National Forest, not far from where we were, Kerry Farris and Steve Zack of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Martin Huss of Arkansas State University made an interesting discovery about woodpeckers. They mist-netted white-headed, hairy, and black-backed woodpeckers, swabbed their beaks, and cultured the contents of the swab in a petri dish. Half a dozen species of filamentous fungi, some known wood-decayers, were identified in the culture.  

The woodpeckers seem to be carrying around little fungus colonies, inoculating the ponderosa pine snags where they feed with organisms that hasten the decay of the dead wood, making the birds’ foraging routines a little easier. Other cavity nesters like red-breasted nuthatches and mountain chickadees had their own fungus cultures; a control group of non-cavity-nesters—warblers, kinglets, tanagers, finches—did not. 

The jury is still out on whether what’s going on with the woodpeckers and the fungi is dedicated mutualism or opportunistic hitchhiking, and who is part of whose extended phenotype. The more you look at the interface of ecology and evolution, the more complicated it seems to get. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan, 

A male white-headed woodpecker at Hat Lake, Lassen Volcanic National Park. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

We continue to have odd and inexplicable gaps in our ability to discuss race and racism in an adult way in this country. 

Watch the Turner News Network (TNT) broadcasts of National Basketball Association games, and you’ll see pre-game and halftime banter between anchor Ernie Johnson (White) and color analysts (no pun intended) Kenny Smith (African-American) and Charles Barkley (African-American) that manages to throw in running jokes about race that manage to offend few, if any, of the multiracial viewing audience. 

The same is true for the Fox Sports Network’s “Best Damn Sports Show, Period,” which features a cast that is usually equally divided between whites and folks of color who bring in issues of race, from time to time, in their discussions as if it is not a dirty subject to be stuck between the pages of an old magazine that you read, by yourself, while sitting on the toilet. 

Strangely, though, turn on the average boxing match, and you begin to see the strain of our attempts to appear to be color-blind in the midst of a multi-colored world. Commentators sometimes talk about particular attributes that they believe are applicable to Mexican or Latin fighters, but put one of those Mexican fighters in a ring with an African-American opponent, both with red trunks on, and those same commentators will only be able to identify who they are talking about by bringing out the 25-pound version of the American Heritage Dictionary to find the 300 various shades of red, all to keep from saying “Hernandez is the Mexican kid and Sanders is the black guy.” 

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why it’s such a problem for them to say it. 

Same thing is true for many post-civil rights era newspaper articles, which often seem to go out of their way to mention race. 

That appears to be the case in an otherwise excellent article on the Waste Management sanitation workers lockout in the Chronicle on Thursday (“Waste Deep: Collection Erratic” by reporters Henry K. Lee, Justin Berton, Joe Garofoli, and David R. Baker). The article presents facts that tend to show that Waste Management’s replacement workers are favoring some neighborhoods over others in their pickup. The problem is the interesting way the reports describe, or don’t describe, those neighborhoods. 

“Tidy East Bay neighborhoods where garbage service is provided by the company that has locked out its drivers were still tidy Wednesday,” the article begins, “something that couldn’t be said for some scruffier areas where pickups were days overdue.” 

The “scruffier” neighborhoods, we later learn, are the Fruitvale, East Oakland and West Oakland, we learn, while the “tidy” neighborhoods are Albany, Emeryville, Livermore, San Ramon, Castro Valley, and the “largely middle-class Temescal and Montclair parts of Oakland.” The reporters also describe the neighborhoods as “poorer” or “wealthier,” but never tell us what is immediately in the minds of many readers, that while there are a lot of people of color in the “tidy” neighborhoods, the “scruffier” neighborhoods pointed out in the article are largely African-American or Latino, or both. 

The income levels of the neighborhoods are mentioned for the obvious reasons, the Chronicle and the reporters making the point that since Waste Management does not have enough replacement workers to fully serve its entire area, the company appears to be favoring the wealthy over the poor in making the decision over which pickup areas will be left out. Montclair Village Shopping Center mentions having its garbage continue to be picked up twice a week, while sections of West Oakland and the East Oakland flats had no weekly pickups at all. 

“This is about money and power and clout,” the article quoted one Albany resident as saying. “Look around this neighborhood. There’s Wall Street Journals on the doorsteps here. I’m just guessing that if the people in charge of picking up the garbage are going to decide where not to pick it up, it’s going to be in neighborhoods where people don’t vote, they don’t complain and they don’t have clout.” 

Could the Chronicle reporters find no one who might also suggest that the dumpsters in the fourplexes around 98th Avenue and Bancroft were not being picked up because the area is both low-income and black? 

But despite all our efforts to push it to the background, race and racism—particularly anti-black and anti-Latino racism—continues to be a simmering, boiling, volatile issue in the Bay Area and beyond, living just under the surface of all of our issues, threatening at any moment to—like the dream deferred in the Langston Hughes poem—to burst out and explode. 

That was the case at this week’s Oakland City Council Community and Economic Development Committee meeting during a discussion about small and minority-owned business subcontracts with the Fox Oakland restoration project. 

As reported in the Thursday Tribune (“Tempers Flare As Oakland Officials Nearly Go To Blows”), Darrel Carey, the president of the East Bay Small Business Council, criticized developer Phil Tagami for what Carey described as minimal efforts to make sure small and minority-owned businesses got those subcontracts. 

Tagami denied the allegations, and when he later stalked out of the meeting saying that “this is a shakedown!” Carey accused him of shaking down and stealing from Oakland for years, and followed him outside the hearing room. Councilmember Larry Reid had to run behind the two men and hold Carey off while Tagami stormed away from Ogawa Plaza. 

I haven’t studied the report that was submitted with the Community and Economic Development Committee item and I haven’t had the chance to talk with either Carey or Tagami, so I can’t say, yet, how much of these particular allegations are true. 

But I can say that in the post-Proposition 209 days—Prop. 209 being the 1996 California voter initiative Constitutional amendment that outlawed “Discrimination or Preferential Treatment by State and Other Public Entities”—many East Bay public entities have complained that they have been largely unable to steer a fair portion of their contract dollars to representative numbers of their own constituents, many of whom are either Latino or African-American. And that has caused a growing anger and resentment in areas of the Latino and African-American communities, as well as frustration among city and school officials. 

That has been most apparent at the Peralta Community College District, which is charged, in part, with preparing a large Latino and African-American student population for the job market, but which cannot force companies receiving millions of dollars in contracts from the district to hire those Latino and African-American students once those students have graduated from Peralta. 

Raising the issue repeatedly in the last several years, Peralta trustees have been told by the companies and Peralta’s own diversity hiring consultants that there are many, convoluted reasons why this is so, but the bottom line is that too many black and Latino Oakland youth remain unemployed or underemployed, while tax money raised from Oakland residents goes east of the hills or across the bay to employ workers living in those communities. 

You may argue whether this is right or wrong, that’s your choice. We ought to be having that argument…ummm…discussion. But do you think that because this rarely gets framed as a discrimination-against-black or discrimination-against-Latino issue in the local newspapers or the television stations that these black or Latino kids, or their parents, aren’t noticing? 

We continue to have odd and inexplicable gaps in our ability to discuss race and racism in an adult way in this country. 

Many are paying for those gaps right now. Many more will pay, before it’s all over. And before it’s through, my guess is that will probably be on a less-discriminatory nature than we’re currently seeing. 

Around the turn of the 20th century, Berkeley was promoted as a City of Homes. In 1905, the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, California published an illustrated booklet bearing this title and featuring various private residences. But the concept of home would soon change. The San Francisco earthquake and fire brought a flood of refugees into the East Bay, and many real-estate entrepreneurs quickly rolled up their sleeves to meet the housing demand. 

Alongside a record number of new single-family homes built from 1906 on, large apartment buildings appeared for the first time. These were usually elegant structures offering the latest amenities, such as steam heat, hot water on demand, modern kitchens and bathrooms, and space-saving wall beds. 

On May 19, 1906, barely a month after the earthquake, the Oakland Tribune published a drawing of an enormous new apartment building with the following caption: 

The new Stevens apartment house for Berkeley […] covers a space of 60 x 240 running from street to street with large open space on each side for sun and light. There will be thirty-six apartments of three rooms and store room and bath each, all fitted with folding beds built in and new kitchen improvements and everything that can be done for the comfort of the tenants in the way of labor-saving contrivances. 

The hot water system is the one used for heating and supplying of water at all times. There are two stacks of fireproof and earthquake-proof chimneys; radiators are placed in each room and bath, instead of mantels. Gas and electric heaters are in the kitchen and bath rooms. The whole building will be a model of its kind. The frame is to be made with continuous posts from foundation to roof. The floors to be unusually well fastened to same and the floor to be diagonally braced as well as doubled, so as to fully provide against any jar by earthquake. 

The walls and floors are of slow-burning construction. There will be a large public dining room on the first floor with kitchen store rooms, laundry, etc., complete; also here are situated the big furnaces that supply the building. They are to be built from fireproof vaults of reinforced concrete. Newsom & Newsom of 526 Larkin Street, San Francisco, are the architects. 

Three days earlier, the Berkeley Reporter provided additional details: 

An apartment house, which will cost in the neighborhood of $70,000 and will contain 155 rooms, is about to be erected by Mrs. A.C. Stevens, the well-known capitalist and enterprising woman of this city. […] The Lafayette will be the largest building of its kind in Berkeley […] the architects state that the structure is the longest for which they have ever drawn plans, outside of one erected at the [1894 San Francisco] Midwinter Fair. 

Mary Woodbury Stevens (1859–1945) was indeed an enterprising woman. The wife of Nova Scotian evangelist Ansley Chesley Stevens (1856–1936), she was a major landowner in Berkeley. In 1907, when the Lafayette Apartments were under construction, Mrs. Stevens owned seven properties in town. The following year, her holdings had increased to a dozen. 

One wouldn’t think of a missionary’s wife as a capitalist, but Mary Stevens was born to money. A native of West Springfield, MA, Mary was the daughter of Edward W. Southworth, who with his brother Wells founded the Southworth Paper Company, which exists until today. The Southworths were descended from Constant Southworth, offspring of a long line of English knights. Constant, whose mother had married William Bradford, Governor and historian of the Plymouth Colony, came to Massachusetts in 1628 and would become one of its prominent citizens. 

The Southworth family valued education. Two of Mary’s brothers studied in Germany, one of them going on to study medicine. Two other brothers were students at Yale, where they were members of the powerful and secretive Order of Skull and Bones. Mary received her education at the exclusive Miss Porter’s School for Girls in Farmington, Conn. 

In 1893, Mary married Ansley Stevens, probably in Boston. The two appeared in Berkeley in 1902, and until 1910 lived at 2157–59 Addison Street, on the current site of University Hall’s parking lot. The house was torn down in the 1920s. 

When completed in 1907 or ’08, the Lafayette Apartments had two addresses: 2314 Haste St. and 2315 Dwight Way. Although the College Homestead Tract south of the campus had been substantially built up by the first decade of the 20th century, the block where the Lafayette was sited was an exception, having contained until then only one house—an early shingled residence fronting on Ellsworth Street. Until the mid-1920s, the lots around the Lafayette were vacant, fulfilling the early promise of “large open space on each side for sun and light.” 

The completed building was somewhat less elaborately ornamented than the sketch published in the Tribune. Between the drawing board and construction, the balustraded roof parapet and the pediments on the long lateral walls were discarded, leaving relatively plain elevations with four pairs of Corinthian pilasters. Two overblown façades, complete with pediments, gigantic mock Corinthian columns, and clumsy tiered balconies, were tacked onto the street elevations. The architects, Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, were never known for restraint. The brothers are best remembered for having designed America’s most famous Queen Anne edifice, the extravagant (some say outlandish) Carson Mansion in Eureka. Not for nothing did Willis Polk dub them “the Gruesomes.” 

The Lafayette’s pastiche neoclassical elements were executed not in stone but in redwood, and the pizzazz wasn’t limited to the exterior. Inside, the building was finished in white pine and redwood paneling. Apartment doors were inlaid with translucent glass. A large, skylit rotunda with a spiral staircase occupied the center of the building, and hand-turned banisters adorned the stairs. 

Boasting the latest amenities, including a private telephone exchange, the Lafayette attracted desirable tenants: professionals, managers, merchants, clerical workers, and teachers, including the mother, sister, and brother of Berkeley Mayor Samuel C. Irving. Owners Mary and Ansley Stevens lived here from 1910 until 1915, when they disappeared from town, presumably to spread the gospel abroad. Eventually they settled in Oakland, where Mary purchased the Dunsmuir Apartments at 1515 Alice Street. Reverend Stevens was variously listed as superintendent of the Berkeley Free Bible & Tract Society and general superintendent of the East Bay District United Evangelistic Mission Association, the latter located at 594 31st Street. 

As late as 1924, Mrs. Stevens was still the owner of the Lafayette. Soon, her building would be flanked by four other large apartment houses, constructed in the vacant lots on either side. First came the Mira Monte at 2322 Haste St., which began advertising furnished and unfurnished apartments in January 1925. It was followed in January 1928 by the Elsmere at 2321 Dwight Way. The six-story Picardo Arms, 2491 Ellsworth St., opened in November 1928, and the nameless 2320 Haste St. was completed ten months later. 

All the newcomers were attractive, the most elegant of them being the Picardo Arms, designed by the prolific architect Herman Carl Baumann (1890–1960), who would soon create the Art Deco Bellevue-Staten on the shore of Lake Merritt. Having survived as a distinguished marker on the Southside, the Picardo Arms recently lost all its original windows to vinyl blight. 

Considerably less refined, the three-story Elsmere offered the newfangled attraction of a large cement courtyard with 22 individual garages. The 24 furnished apartments included Frigidaire refrigerators, Spark lid-top ranges, and Marshall & Stearns wall beds. In a novel cross-marketing maneuver, the manufacturers of these appliances and other contractors and suppliers associated with the Elsmere all took out ads on the same Tribune page that announced the opening of the building. 

The owner of the Elsmere was Louis Saroni, a well-known sugar wholesaler and former candy manufacturer. The son of German-Jewish immigrants, Saroni (1856–1936) relocated his business from San Francisco to Oakland in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. His son, Albert B. Saroni, married into the Zellerbach family and took over the sugar business, while the father invested in East Bay real estate. 

Whether before or after he built the Elsmere, Saroni acquired the Lafayette Apartments from Mary Stevens. He was already advanced in years, and the Depression no doubt contributed to the Lafayette’s state of neglect. In 1935, the building was in violation of several articles in the city code, and Saroni wanted it off his hands. The recently formed University of California Students’ Cooperative Association (UCSCA) signed an advantageous long-term lease and renamed the building Barrington Hall. The conversion from apartments to student co-op entailed removing the kitchens from 45 units and opening up the ground floor to create a lobby. 

World War II brought about a decline in male student enrollment, while housing was needed for the Richmond shipyard workers. In 1943, following much official pressure brought to bear on UCSCA, the U.S. Navy leased Barrington for five years. In December of that year, the Navy spent $76,000 to modernize the building and convert it back into apartments. In the process, all ornamentation was stripped away, leaving a plainly utilitarian structure. 

In 1948, while the building was still occupied by the Navy, the Saroni family offered to sell the residuum of Barrington Hall’s lease to the co-op (now USCA) for $16,000. This windfall enabled USCA to spend $15,000 on altering the building one more time, converting the apartments into co-op use. 

By the 1980s, Barrington Hall had become USCA’s most notorious co-op. Neighbors complained it was a “noisy, unsafe, unsanitary, rat trap.” After the San Francisco Chronicle focused its attention on heroin use at Barrington, USCA lost its insurance coverage. Subsequent investigation revealed that dozens of habitual heroin users and dealers lived in the house. Continuing trouble and a costly lawsuit finally led to the hall’s closure in 1990. 

The building has since been leased to a contractor who operates it as a rooming house called Evans Manor. While the four neighboring apartment buildings retain much of their original appearance, Evans Manor is a charmless hulk, albeit one redolent of glory in the hearts of old Barringtonians. 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Located next to the Lafayette, the Elsmere at 2321 Dwight Way included built-in garages when it opened in 1928. 

I’ve talked about a couple of ethical aspects of gardening over the past two weeks: ethical suppliers and basic kindness to plants, the reason I don’t buy Arizona desert species for my shady, poorly drained Berkeley garden.  

But wait; there’s more!  

(Gardening can get to feeling like being a Catholic in the ‘50s: no matter what you do, it’s morally suspect. Some of us remember the “fault” of scrupulosity. If you’re too careful about never doing anything wrong, that’s wrong too. Think too much about this stuff, you’ll end up catatonic. A commenter on Twisty Faster’s ovular blog I Blame the Patriarchy countered paralytic perfectionism. One’s patriarchy footprint, like one’s carbon footprint, exists no matter what, but it’s useful to reduce its size. So stop fretting, start learning, and garden on.) 

What we plant and where we plant it matters also because of two almost-contradictory points.  

The first and most obvious is that we shouldn’t plant invasive exotics. Reams and volumes have been devoted to this point, but still the “really, this variety hasn’t been proven invasive yet” broom and “oh, it’s not so bad on the coast” pampas grass and German ivy and Algerian ivy and Japanese dodder—the yellow stuff that eats entire trees—gets sold and bought, and planted.  

Planting invasives is no more responsible than a night at the bathhouse without condoms. “Invasive” means wildland-invasive, not garden-invasive; the latter’s a mere inconvenience, though it is certainly reason for suspicion.  

More subtle is the idea that maybe we shouldn’t plant natives, either—if they’re close enough relatives of our native neighbors to interbreed with them, but distant enough in other ways to mess with the local gene pools. For example, California poppies from the south of the state might have heritable differences from those native here; we just haven’t noticed those differences yet.  

The wild strawberries native to Strawberry Creek are legendary for their taste, though I doubt there are any of the originals left there. Most of what you can buy (or find) is insipid. They look the same, though.  

Coastal wild California poppies look different to us, yellower than the straight-orange “standard” poppy. For all we know, northern and southern, or Contra Costa and Marin, or Berkeley hills and South Bay orange poppies might look different to, say, certain native bees; they might have markers visible only in the ultraviolet range. They might smell different to other olfactory receptors. It might matter. We don’t know.  

With that in mind, Native Here Nursery in Tilden Park labels its plants with their points of origin, in careful detail, sometimes as fine as the north side of some hill vs. the south side. If someday we find out that there are differences that matter, such plants will have kept their ancestry whole, ready for the future. 

Native Here Nursery 

101 Golf Course Road, Berkeley 

(510) 549-0211 

Fri.: 9 a.m.-noon; Sat. 10 a.m.-1 p.m. 

Tilden Park, across from the entrance to the Tilden Golf Coursewww.ebcnps.org/nativehere.html 

Twisty Faster 

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Do you know The Consultant’s Song? It goes: Maybe it’s this way, or maybe it’s that way and I get paid’O in either case’O. 

I’m a consultant of sorts and there is nothing more irksome to me than having to say, “I don’t know.” Now, I realize that this can be a true statement (and ‘No’ is a complete sentence, right) and can even be the most accurate assessment of my findings at some point but I just don’t like it. 

I get paid to provide answers and to try to fill in dark areas. So, when I’m forced to say, “Hey, I can’t see this and I don’t know if it’s good or bad,” it really bugs me. I feel like a cheat. Nevertheless, there are times when I just can’t see things that I’d really need to see in order to make meaningful statements about such-and-such a thing (say a drainage system). If someone had merely snapped a picture or two during the process and kept them around, the verification process would be so much easier. 

I get handed permits on a pretty regular basis and asked to draw some conclusion based on what these cards and forms say. Let me tell you, the data is pretty lean on permits and other municipal records. If there are stamped drawings, well, that’s a different matter. They’re a much better indicator, although there’s no way to be sure that things were done according to plans, and as you might suspect, it’s quite common for things to be anywhere from a little to way different from the plans.  

Now, show me a photo of an open trench bearing pipes, gravel and drainage-fabric and I can begin to say some things about what I’m looking at. Give me 10 photos of the same thing and it’s gets better. Show me a picture of the bubble on the level on the pipe in the trench and I’m all smiles. I’d be downright proud of the homeowner or builder and would sing it loudly. I’m no longer forced to say that I have no idea how well this “supposed” French drain is going to work. I can make a fair guess. 

Back in my remodeling days, I took a lot of pictures of jobs I worked on. These served multiple functions. Firstly, if the city inspector ever claimed to have not seen the inside of a wall we’d closed up, I could grab my file and show them a picture of what the rough plumbing and wiring in that wall looked like. This was always met with agreement and satisfaction (although I don’t recommend reliance on this). 

If we were trying to remember where we put a particular thing in a wall in a later phase of work (such as a pipe or wire), we could pull out the pictures. Clients loved the set of extra prints I’d lay on ‘em during or after work. It showed confidence on my part, gave them something to show their friends (doesn’t everyone like to look at remodels in progress?) and gave proof of the work when selling the house. I’m sure you can think of other cases in which these might prove tremendously valuable. 

As someone who sees things after the fact, I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me to be handed a file, filled with photos of the remodel I’m being asked to look at. My first assumption is that the builder or homeowner is thinking about the future. Most people seem only to be thinking about that day (or minute). But the act of photographing implies a larger mind-set. They’re also thinking about the next person, not just themselves. They’re including unmet friends in their process and helping the next person to manage what might be a difficult situation. If you know the layout of the drainage system, you may well be able to perform a repair without tearing the whole thing apart. If you have photos of where the pipes and wires were located in a wall, you might be able to make one small hole rather than tear out a wall of sheetrock. 

It’s many a day when I’m looking at a crawlspace filled with newly-placed plywood panels designed to protect the occupants from the shaking earth. Sadly, what’s behind these well-nailed panels is often critical and largely invisible. A set of photos of the bolting behind, say 3 or 4 of these would be enough to satisfy my inner curmudgeon on most days and will likely do the same for future buyers and many city officials. Again, the more photos the better. 

The cost of photos is very, very small. Today, I leave the house with two cameras. A really nice one that I keep hidden away for special stuff and a tiny, used, eBay, fixed-focus, Fuji with enough memory for 122 photos at 1/3 of a Meg (these make sharp 4x6 pictures). Now, I don’t care if you want to shoot film but, if you have a computer, you can store way more photos than you’ll ever need at almost no cost. There is NO excuse not to take pictures. The average remodel runs into many thousands of dollars. A disposable camera costs 5 bucks and might turn out to be a very important thing when they switch site inspector on you or when a buyer starts asking about what’s behind that wall or how deep you poured the concrete under the hot-tub. 

If you’re a homeowner working with a contractor, go take a bunch of pictures of the work every day when you come home. They’ll help if a dispute arises and provide good evidence of the work for the future. If you’re a builder, you’re missing out on one of the best marketing tactics known to woman or man by not photographing your work and keeping photos to show prospective clients. If you buy a little photo album and show before and after pictures of three of your jobs including all the bolting and wiring stuff that some people like to see, you can raise your rates. Photos are worth thousands of words. They’re also worth thousands of dollars when selling a house, sitting in court or selling your wares.  

Now, if you could just get the plumber to smile. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

At a retrofit seminar last weekend, I saw a photo of a braced chimney that had fallen in an earthquake, just like its un-braced neighbors.  

The point being made was that bracing a chimney is a waste of money—if you have a masonry chimney, you can pretty much count on it falling in a serious quake. 

So, you can spend a bunch of money and have it removed and replaced with a wood-framed chimney and metal flue, or you can make real sure that you are not outside under the chimney when it falls. 

If you’re there when the shaking starts, move to another spot!  

Wishing you a safe home and peace of mind.  

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service.  

Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

TUESDAY, JULY 17 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Burdened Dreams” Paintings and sculpture by Marty McCorkle and Victoria Skirpa opens at Float Gallery, 1091 Calcott Place, Unit #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Storytellers Bob and Liz tell tales for all ages at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Diana Abu-Jaber reads from her new novel “Origin” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jeffrey Broussard & The Creole Cowboys at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Dya Singh at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

George Costileros Trio at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Herb Gibson at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Barrio Cuba” at 7 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 620-6555. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive reads from his new book “You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Samantha Schoech and Lisa Taggart, editors, read from “The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image” at 7:30 p.m. at Diesel, 5433 College Ave., Oakland. 653-9965. 

Ellen Sussman describes “Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Café Poetry with Paradise at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Whiskey Brothers Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Loose Wig Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Bernard Anderson & The Old School Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Buxter Hoot’n at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The Energy Trio, funky jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lower Class Brats, Career Soldiers, The Ghouls at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $7. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Marc Carey at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 19 

THEATER  

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 7 p.m. at Montclair Ball Field, 6300 Moraga Ave., Montclair. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Women by Women: The Dynamic Feminine Aspect” works by Jennifer Downey and Susan Matthews. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, State of California Office Building Atrium, 1515 Clay St., Oakland. Exhibit runs to Aug. 31. 622-8190. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Shipibo-Conibo Song Cloths from the Amazon” A lecture at 7 p.m. at Gathering Tribes, 1573 Solano Ave. 528-9038. 

Poetry Flash with Luis Garcia and Maurice Kenny at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

Bruce Riordan on “Global Warming Impacts on the Bay Area” a slideshow and lecture at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jason Roberts describes “A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lloyd Gregory at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

“Voices in the Virtual World” Oaktown Creativity Center House Choir at 8 p.m. at 447 25th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10. 568-6920. 

Ed Gerhard at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Stephanie Crawford & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Therese Brewitz at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Brian Kenney-Fresno, 20 Minute Loop, Midline Errors at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Eleggua, percussion from Venezuela with African roots, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mose Allison Trio at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, JULY 20 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “All in the Timing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org  

Altarena Playhouse “Oh My Godmother” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

California Shakespeare Theater “Man and Superman” by George Bernard Shaw at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through July 29. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Woodminster Summer Musicals “West Side Story” at 8 p.m. through July 22 at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $23-$36. 531-9597. www.woodminster.com 

FILM 

International Working Class Film Fest “The Scavengers” and “Central Bakery” at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net  

Movies About Movies “Hearts of Darkeness” at 3:30 p.m. in the Community Meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6139. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Music that Cooks Steve Taylor-Ramírez, neo-folk, blues and Latin-hillbilly roots, in a benefit concert to feed the homeless at 7:30 p.m. at College Ave. Presbyterian Church, 5951 College Ave., Oakland. Donation $5-$10.  

The Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of S.F. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jeff Stein Group at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Rachel Efron & Her Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Broun Fellinis, The Funkanauts, Winstrong & The 7th Street Sound and others at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15, or $12 with donation of a canned good. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jessie Turner at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Blame Sally at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Brothers Goldman, funk, blues at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Elizabeth August and friends at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Push to Talk, The Attachments, The Makes Nice, Poor Bailey at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Phobia, Intronaut, Book of Black Earth at 7:30 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Jayson Bales at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Sugar Shack at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mose Allison Trio at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 21 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Burdened Dreams” Paintings and sculpture by Marty McCorkle and Victoria Skirpa. Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Float Gallery, 1091 Calcott Place, Unit #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

Art in the Garden featuring Richmond and East Bay artists Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 2p.m. at Annie’s Annuals, 740 Market Ave., Richmond. 215-1326. 

FILM 

Old Oakland Outdoor Cinema “Ray” with screenwriter James L. White at dusk at Ninth St., between Braodway and Washington. 238-4734. www.filmoakland.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jane Powell on the “Smart Growth” agenda and true green alternatives to enhance respect for neighborhood character, at 1 p.m. at Faith Presbyterian Church, 430 49th St. at Webster, Oakland. Free, donations accepted. 655-3841. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Aïda” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $15-$40. 925-798-1300. 

Many Faiths, Many Forms: A Sacred Dance Concert at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church in the Sanctuary, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $8.50-$15 adults. 849-0788. www.sacreddanceguild.org 

Meidoko “Unearth” Japanese drumming with electronic instrumentation at 8 p.m. at Capoeira Arts Cafe, 2026 Addison St. Cost is $10.  

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Kalbass, Haitian at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Jon Roniger and Jacob Wolkenhauer at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Sugar Shack at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Carol McComb & Kathy Larisch at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Max Chanowitz Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Nicole McRory at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Buxter Hoot’n, Loretta Lynch at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Kasey Knudsen Sextet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SUNDAY, JULY 22 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 2 p.m. at Mosswood Park, MacArthur and Broadway, Oakland. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Second Bay Area Baby Beats with Sterling Bunnell, Marsha Campbell, Joie Cook, Deirdre Evans and Chris Trian, H.D.Moe and Mark Schwartz reading from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-3402. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Midsummer Mozart, Program I featuring pianist Janina Fialkowska at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church. Tickets are $30-$60. 415-627-9145. www.midsummermozart.org 

Summer Jazz with Robert Stewards at 3 p.m., The History of Jazz with Randy Moore at 4:30 p.m. at Open Jam Session at 5 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Golden Gate Branch, 5606 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 597-5023. 

“Stars and Pipes Concert” at 3 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway, Oakland. 444-3555. 

“Dietrich & Piaf, The Intimate Song” with Ellen Brooks and Shannon Nicholson at 7 p.m. at Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High St., Alameda. Tickets are $18-$20. Reservations recommended. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Terrance Kelly at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Rahmil & Barley at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Americana Unplugged: Redwing Bluegrass Band at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Joe Young/Hamir Atwal Group at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Barbara Dane at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MONDAY, JULY 23 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Color & Light” Photographic art by Bill Hannapple opens at The LightRoom Gallery, 2263 Fifth St., through Aug. 24. 649-8111. www.lightroom.com 

“Shaped by Water” Abstract landscape paintings by Jane Norling opens at the EBMUD Gallery, 375 11th St., Oakland. 287-0138. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marc Freedman describes “Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Richard Denner and David Mansfield Bromige at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express open mic theme night on “folktales” at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Musica Ha Disconnesso traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

John McCutcheon at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

Anthony Blea y su Charanga “A Night in La Havana” at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

For the last two weeks, Maestro George Cleve has been teasing Mozart aficionados with hints of what they can expect at this year’s upcoming 33rd Annual Midsummer Mozart Festival.  

A week ago Sunday, 150 fans were treated to a cornucopia of smoked salmon, brie cheese, Joseph Schmidt truffles and a delicious Gundlach Bundschu Pinot while members of the Festival Orchestra regaled them with a variety of duets, trios and quartets in an idyllic garden setting of roses, hummingbirds, violets and finches.  

Last Wednesday, the whole Ensemble previewed the opening piece of this year’s first program at a Noontime Concert at the historic St. Patrick’s Church at Yerba Buena Gardens. 

For the garden party there were contemporary transcriptions for flute and violin of arias from The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute including some of the bird catcher Papageno’s most beloved songs; two movements from the intense, late Divertimento for String Trio, a masterpiece and, sadly, his only string trio; and the two movements of his brief 3rd Flute Quartet, whose second movement Mozart later transmuted into the sixth of his magnificent Gran Partitas. Flutist Maria Tamburino was outstanding, as always, in the duets and the quartet. 

At St. Patrick’s, the orchestra performed the Divertimento for Two Horns and Strings in B flat, which was probably composed to celebrate Mozart’s sister Nannerl’s name day on July 26, 1776. When Mozart penned this, he was 20, his sister was 25 and the United States was three weeks old. 

These performances in gardens and churches return this great composer’s music to the kind of informal and occasional settings in which they were first played. 

This is not to say that Mozart was never played in concert halls in his own lifetime, but almost all of his music was written for some specific event: the sacred music was presented as part of a service at a church or cathedral; the operas premiered in theaters as the equivalent of our Broadway musical openings; many of the piano sonatas were written as practice pieces for his students; the serenades and divertimentos were the background music to graduations and weddings; the Masonic pieces were played in the Lodge and at memorials for departed brothers; arrangements of Bach and Handel were done for the musical get-togethers in the home of his patron, Baron von Swieten. It would be easy to multiply examples.  

The first program of the festival, which runs from July 19-22, will feature the aforementioned Divertimento for Oboe, 2 Horns and Strings in D major. Mozart composed this work in the same month that he composed the Haffner Serenade and its accompanying march, the opening pieces of the festival’s second program. The strings called for in the title are a quartet, not the full ensemble, so this is an intimate chamber piece.  

The Piano Concerto No. 22 in E flat major, featuring internationally renowned pianist Janina Fialkowska, was the first of three that he wrote over a fourteen-week period for performance at Lenten concerts in 1786. Although No. 23 is the most famous, there is nothing shabby about any of them. The final rondo allegro of No. 22 begins with a child-like theme that becomes a happy march when picked up by the full orchestra.  

The Bassoon Concerto in B flat major, featuring Rufus Olivier, principal bassoonist with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet, like all the wind concertos, is less well-known than the keyboard and violin concertos. It is a treat to hear Mozart composing for a more unusual horn sound. Like Shakespeare, he gets inside the personality of the voice for which he is writing and gives the bassoon a profound set of wordless arias full of lovely melodies and some amount of virtuosic gymnastics. 

Symphony No. 34 in C major is a transitional work, the last before the final six great symphonies. Scattered among the earlier numbers, none of which have a minuet movement, are such masterpieces as Nos. 25, 29 and 31, and the Paris Symphony. No. 34 is the last of these charming, early, small-scale gems.  

The second program of the festival, which runs from July 26-29, will begin with the March in D major, K.249, and the Serenade for Orchestra in D major, “Haffner,” featuring violinist and concertmaster Robin Hansen. Although the serenade and the later symphony of the same name were written for the Haffner family, there is no musical connection between them. The serenade was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Marie Elisabeth Haffner and contains some exquisite solo violin writing by Mozart. 

“Chi sà, chi sà, qual sia?” aria, K.582 and “Vado, ma dove?” aria, featuring lyric mezzo-soprano Elspeth Franks, both have texts by Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s great Italian librettist of the Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni. Neither of these pieces, though, is from a Mozart opera. Instead, they were written in 1789 for insertion into an otherwise forgotten opera by Martin y Soler featuring Louise Villeneuve. The emotionally charged Mozart arias would have spiced up an otherwise dull opera while also displaying the strengths of Villeneuve’s voice. The following year she was the first Doribella in Cosi fan tutte. 

This year’s Midsummer Mozart Festival concludes with the glorious Mass in C Major “Coronation,” sung by Cantabile Chorale. Two of Mozart’s greatest masses, the C minor and the famous Requiem, are incomplete, so the Coronation Mass is the only one of his sacred masterpieces that Mozart finished. It takes its name from the fact that Salieri, his supposed enemy, directed a performance of this mass at the 1791 coronation of Leopold II. Mozart applied all the resources he would have brought to an opera to this Latin text church composition. The soprano solo parts function as beautiful arias. 

We are often reduced to inadequate adjectives when we attempt to describe music, but the compositions of Mozart include masterpieces as great and greater than those of any other European classical composer.  

Yet even his lesser works have an inherent perfection that is unparalleled in the work of any other composer. Once they are begun, they have an inevitability that is the sign of their genius. George Cleve is one of the great living interpreters of Mozart and whether he chooses to open up some small unknown treasure otherwise ignored or to revisit a familiar masterpiece and give it new life, he always presents something revelatory about the work of this divinely gifted composer. 

The four performances of the first program take place on July 19 at 7:30 pm at St. Joseph Cathedral Basilica, San Jose; on July 20 at 8 p.m. at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco; on July 21 at 6:30 p.m. outdoors at Gundlach Bundschu Winery, Sonoma; and on July 22 at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Berkeley.  

The four performances of the second program take place on July 26 at 7:30 p.m. at Mission Santa Clara, SCU Campus, Santa Clara; on July 27 at 8 p.m. at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco; on July 28 at 6:30 p.m. outdoors at Gundlach Bundschu Winery, Sonoma; and on July 29 at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Berkeley. 

For tickets and information about the Midsummer Mozart Festival call (415) 627-9145 or see www.midsummermozart.org 

To the strains of “Makin’ Whoopie,” the Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious ensemble (Steve Budd, Elissa Dunn, Leon Goertzen, Jon Lutz and Monica Coretes Viharo) hits the stage with a round-robin confession, disguised as a survey: The Last Sinful Thing You’ve Done—ran over a frog, poked a badger with a spoon, talked to my ex under an assumed name, shoplifted an onion, mooned the Pope, touched myself and thought of Prince Gomovilas, had a secret orgasm onstage (“Just now?”) ... and the humor gets equally bad in proportion to the sins. 

But Bad is Good at impact, at least “in Brief”—brief also meaning the scanty attire of the four burlesque dancers (Jessica Kiely, Helen Nesteruk, Monica Santiago and Rachel Throesch) who punctuate the sketches with high-spirited, oldtime risqué’ dance numbers, whether as sailors or nuns in high heels, sometimes vaguely Busby Berkeleyish, in Helen Nesteruk’s choreography. 

The sketches range all over, though the theme seems to be pushing the envelope. There’s the jilted high school sweetheart who calls “1-800-SUICIDE,” cinched up with her ex’s necktie, ready to end it all—only to be asked out by the “older guy” who answers her plea for help. Or the poor jerk who gets off at the wrong underground stop, only to find himself trapped, still living, in a downsizing corporate Hell (“Haven’t had a Divine Comedy [code name for a live one] in centuries!”)—followed by the burlesque dancers in a catfight betwixt angels and devils. 

The most successful—and audibly appreciated—sketch features a wife’s dismay at her husband bringing home a dead clown. There’s time for a door prize for survey completions, though the prize turns out to be another bad gag: a condom, chocolate kisses and chocolate coffee beans ... “Are you of age, Joseph?” the winner is queried. 

Below LaVal’s Northside pizzeria, and offering student discounts to an already reasonable price, the audience is made up in great part of students and younger spectators. But last Friday, a good percentage were middle-aged and older—some obviously repeat customers, to judge by the Impact T-shirts. 

The show’s staged briskly enough, by Dawn Monique Williams, yet the performers have the opportunity to be personable. All-in-all, Impact serves up what they promise—and, as they note, “Nowhere else in the Bay Area can you eat pizza and drink beer while you’re watching a play.” Equity companies note: the gauntlet is down.  

Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious  

La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. 

through Saturday 

Tickets $10-$14 

464-4468 

The week before the Fourth of July we were up at Lassen Volcanic National Park watching the traffic at Hat Lake. The place was jumping.  

A male western tanager, resplendent in red and yellow, came down to the lake’s edge to drink. Audubon’s and Wilson’s warblers flashed in and out of the young lodgepole pines. A dipper made repeated shuttle flights from its nest below the highway bridge, alternately ducking underwater to forage or swimming like a little duck as it retrieved insects—mayflies?—from the lake’s surface. Another hard-working parent, a male white-headed woodpecker, commuted between its tree-cavity nest and some beetle-rich dead snag nearby. Tree swallows skimmed low over the lake, and noisy young spotted sandpipers chased each other around the beaver lodge. 

No beavers, though. The last time we were there, we watched them late into the buggy twilight as they cruised the lake they had made, or at least augmented. This time the dam was in poor repair, and the lodge was surrounded by mud. We blamed that on the dry winter, but were still worried about the beavers. Later a ranger-naturalist told us they were gone. One had been found dead on the highway last year; another on a hiking trail—disease, old age, who knows. 

Maybe another pair will wander up from the Warner Valley and take over the franchise. If not, the lake will inexorably change, and the results of all that dedicated beavering will be gone. And everything in and around it—the tanagers, the woodpeckers, the mayflies, the pines—will be affected, one way or another. 

Some years back, before he took on organized religion, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Extended Phenotype. A phenotype is the physical manifestation of a genotype—the ensemble of physical traits that the genome codes for. Dawkins’ point was that you have to think of behavior as part of that ensemble, which is fair enough with beavers. Their dam-building drive is so hard-wired that if you play the sound of running water for captives, they’ll pile up sticks and brush in front of the speaker. 

Beyond that, Dawkins’ notion of the phenotype also includes the built environment that results from an organism’s behavior—the dam, the pond, the lodge. 

We tend to think of our species as the only one that leaves a significant mark on the world, for better or worse. Far from it: beyond the engineering of beavers, consider the cities of the termites or the coral polyps, the soil moved by pocket gophers. All of us, man to microorganism, shape our various environments.  

And our environments shape us back. Another book from the ’80s, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist, tried to make that point, albeit with too much Marxist jargon for most tastes. (With us, there’s another layer when culture feeds back into the genome, as when Northern European and East African cattle herders independently—by separate genetic pathways—evolved adult lactose tolerance.) 

Woodpeckers—to pick just one of the cast of characters at Hat Lake—are builders and shapers in their own right. Their nesting cavities provide housing for a whole community of hole-nesting birds: chickadees, nuthatches, flycatchers, swallows, wrens. A woodpecker neighborhood tends to have high avian diversity. Small mammals like flying squirrels also  

adopt old woodpecker nests. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Working in Lassen National Forest, not far from where we were, Kerry Farris and Steve Zack of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Martin Huss of Arkansas State University made an interesting discovery about woodpeckers. They mist-netted white-headed, hairy, and black-backed woodpeckers, swabbed their beaks, and cultured the contents of the swab in a petri dish. Half a dozen species of filamentous fungi, some known wood-decayers, were identified in the culture.  

The woodpeckers seem to be carrying around little fungus colonies, inoculating the ponderosa pine snags where they feed with organisms that hasten the decay of the dead wood, making the birds’ foraging routines a little easier. Other cavity nesters like red-breasted nuthatches and mountain chickadees had their own fungus cultures; a control group of non-cavity-nesters—warblers, kinglets, tanagers, finches—did not. 

The jury is still out on whether what’s going on with the woodpeckers and the fungi is dedicated mutualism or opportunistic hitchhiking, and who is part of whose extended phenotype. The more you look at the interface of ecology and evolution, the more complicated it seems to get. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan, 

A male white-headed woodpecker at Hat Lake, Lassen Volcanic National Park. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

TUESDAY, JULY 17 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Arrowhead Marsh at the Martin Luther King Regional Shoreline. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join us on a series of monthly excursions exploring our Regional Parks. For information and to register call 525-2233.  

The Pit Stop: Peaches & Barbecue at the Tuesday Berkeley Farmers’ Market from 3 to 7 p.m. at Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org/bfm  

Prospective Parenting for the LGBT Community at 6:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 415-981-1960. stephanie@ourfamily.org 

Feng Shui Your Mind with Maureen Raytis, acupuncturist, and Jill Lebeau, psychotherapist at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression” with Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive, at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698.  

Harry Potter Jeopardy Children up to the age of 15 can show off their Harry Potter knowledge at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

Family Math and Science Night for children aged 7-10 and their families at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JULY 19 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Summer Family Film Festival Children’s film at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr., 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

“Global Warming Impacts on the Bay Area” a slideshow and lecture with Bruce Riordan at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways Bookstore, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

“Alternatives to the Automobile in Berkeley” A public meeting to discuss ways the city can meet the greenhouse gass emissions reduction target, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-7081.  

Estate Planning Essentials for the LGBT Community at 6:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 415-981-1960.  

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. nam 

aste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, JULY 20 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

International Working Class Film Festival with “The Scavengers” and “Central Bakery O, Dridi” at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Get a Clue at Your Library with musician Gary Lapow at 10:30 a.m. at South Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 1901 Russell St. 981-6260.  

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, JULY 21 

Trails Challenge in the Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Bring water, lunch, sunscreen and sturdy walking shoes for this 4.5 mile excursion with steep ups and downs. For meeting place call 525-2233. 

Fresh Tracks in Point Pinole on a easy-paced 1.5 mile walk along the shoreline park preserved by dynamite. Walks begin at 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. For information and meeting place call 525-2233. 

Trees are Treasures Learn about the diverse species of trees in Tilden Park on a 2 mile walk. Meet at 2:30 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Chapel of the Chimes Historical and Botanical Tour of this Julia Morgan landmark and its maze of gardens, alcoves, chapels and more, from 10 a.m. to noon at 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 228-3207. 

Art Deco Tour of Uptown Oakland Meet at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Oakland Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, for atour of Oakland’s Deco buildings including the Floral Depot, Fox Theater, I Magnin, Breuners and more. 415-982-3326. www.artdecosociety.org 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Introduction to Alameda County Bioregional Ecology A workshop in the Sausal Creek Restoration Area discussing interrelationships, and practicing hands-on learning techniques and restoration. Meet at Sausal Creek restoration area in Dimond Park at 8:30 a.m. Bring a bag lunch, good walking or hiking shoes, and work gloves. Cost is $35-$50, limited scholarships and work exchanges available. To register call 415-285-6556. www.planetdrum.org 

Standing Together for Accountable Neighborhood Development with author Jane Powell on the “Smart Growth” agenda and true green alternatives to enhance respect for neighborhood character, at 1 p.m. at Faith Presbyterian Church, 430 49th St. at Webster, Oakland. Free, donations accepted. 655-3841.  

“Animals, Sea Creatures and Animation” Paintings, sculpture, digital and fiber art and more, in a benefit for Hopalong Animal Rescue. Meet the artists, and join in art projects from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2053 Ashby Ave. 644-4930.  

SolarCity Informational Meeting Find out if your home or business is a good candidate for solar power, at 10 a.m. at Live Oak Park Rec Center in North Berkeley. 888-765-2489. www.solarcity.com 

Kite-Making in conjunction with the summer reading of “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor community room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6275. 

El Cerrito Historical Society meets at noon in Huber Park, 7711 Sea View Drive, El Cerrito. Please bring a salad, a main dish, or a dessert. 526-7507. 

Weeding Work Party on Cerrito Creek to remove thornless blackberries and cape ivy on the south bank. Meet at 10 a.m. at Adams St., one block west of San Pablo, on the Albany/El Cerrito border, just north of Carlson. 848-9358.  

California Historical Radio Society Open House from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the old KRE radio Station Building, foot of Ashby. Best access is via 67th St. in Emeryville. 524-6798. 

Report on Health Care in Cuba with KPFA’s Emiliano Echeverria, at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $8-$10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Nutrition Education and Food Demonstration on how to prepare simple, quick and nutritious family meals from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at San Pablo Liquor & Grocery, 2363 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. Free. 444-7144. 

Fast Pitch Softball for Adults at noon on Saturdays in Oakland. For information call 204-9500. 

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club meets at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JULY 22 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Family Birdwalk Learn birding basics during a 3 mile walk through a variety of habitats in Point Pinole, from 10 a.m. to noon. For information and meeting place call 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Butterflies and Butterfly Gardening for the whole family from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Dog Park Behavior Training from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Ohlone Dog Park, Grant St. and Hearst Ave. Second class July 29. Cost is $25 for both sessions. Registration required. 845-4213. www.ohlonedogpark.org 

Progressive Democrats of the East Bay Annual Potluck Picnic & Politics from noon to 4 p.m. at Codornices Park, Euclid & Eunice, across from the Rose Garden. All welcome.  

Local Medicinal Herbs and Your Health Learn the benefits of herbs and their use in western herbal medicine from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St. Bring small pots and hand shovels and leave with an easy to grow medicinal herb. Cost is $15 sliding scale, no one refused for lack of funds. 548-2220, ext. 242. 

How to Inspect a House A workshop for homeowners, prospective buyers and property sellers to learn how to get the most out of a home inspection from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Building Education Center, 812 Page St. Cost is $85. To register call 525-7610. www.bldgeductr.org 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to repair a flat, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Bring you rbike and tools. 527-4140. 

Tour of the Berkeley City Club, Julia Morgan’s “little castle” at 1:15, 2:15, and 3:15 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. Free, donations welcome. 883-9710. 

Social Action Forum on international environmental concerns at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Lime, Peach and Pear Tasting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sandra Guimares and Roselene Costa on “Beyond Psychotherapy” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JULY 23  

Peace Corps 50+ An infomation session and volunteer panel at 6 p.m. at Rockridge Public Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 452-8444, nbosustow@peacecorps.gov 

Preserving California’s Japantowns Community meeting on the Historic Japantowns of Berkeley and Oakland at noon at Berkeley Methodist United Church, 1710 Carleton St. Community members are invited to bring historic photos and stories that document community life. 540-6809. 

LGBT Family Picnic from noon to 3 p.m. at Lake Temescal, Park View Picnic Area, 6500 Broadway Terrace, Oakland. Bring your own picnic food and blankets. 415-981-1960. stephanie@ourfamily.org 

Family Sing-a-long at 6:45 p.m. at the Fourth Flr. Children’s Library, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

Sing-a-long Circles in the Oak Grove from 4 to 6:30 p.m. at the threatened Oak Grove in front of Memorial Stadium, Piedmont Ave., just north of Bancroft. 658-9178. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Berkeley Housing Authority meets Tues., July 17, at 6:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers. 981-6900.  

City Council meets Tues., July 17, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., July 18, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601. 

Commission on Aging meets Wed., July 18, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5344.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed., July 18, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., July 19, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7415.  

Commission on Labor meets Thurs., July 19, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., July 19, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010.  

FRIDAY, JULY 13 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “All in the Timing” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $12. 525-1620.  

Altarena Playhouse “Oh My Godmother” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through Aug. 11. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822.  

California Shakespeare Theater “Man and Superman” by George Bernard Shaw at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through July 29. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Crowded Fire Theater “Anna Bella Eema” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through July 15. Tickets are $10-$20. 415-439-2456.  

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031.  

Woodminster Summer Musicals “West Side Story” at 8 p.m. through July 22 at Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, 3300 Joaquin Miller Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $23-$36. 531-9597.  

EXHIBITIONS 

National Juried Fine Craft Exhibition Opening reception at 6 p.m. at the ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Exhibit runs through Aug. 18. 843-2527. 

Paola Pastore “Reverse Collages” Reception at 2 p.m. at Alta Galleria, 2980 College Avenue, #4. 421-1255. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Donna Lane and Judy Juanita read their poetry at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave., at Hearst. 841-6374. 

Hailey Lind reads from “Brush with Death” at 7 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 228-3207.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ariel String Quartet perform music of Haydn, Dvorak, Suprynowicz, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremon, at Ashby. Tickets are $12-$15. 848-1228. giorgigallery.com 

“Home Sweet Home” A musical exploring the themes of grief and loss. Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance, 729 Heinz St., #4. Tickets are $8-$12. Not suitable for children under 13. homesweethometickets@yahoo.com 

The Hipnotic Blues Band with Eldridge “Big Cat” Tolefree and Tia Caroll, at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place at Washington Ave., Point Richmond. Free. www. 

pointrichmond.com/prmusic/ 

Lost Legends, Freddie Roulette at 9:30 p.m. at Baltic Sq. Pub, 135 Park Place, Pt. Richmond. 235-2532. 

Alfonso Maya, Mexican trova, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Sylvia Cuenca Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jazzschool Summer Youth Program Concert at 6:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Free. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Phenomenauts, Maldroid, The Struts, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Patrick Bernard Concert” ancient mantra and dance at 8 p.m. at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way at 6th. Tickets are $20. 496-6047. 

Anton Schwartz, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Hawaiian Generations: George & Keoki Kahumoku, Dennis & David Kamakahi at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Nomadics, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mushroom, Bart Davenport, Ruthann Friedman at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Radio Suicide, The Michetons, Fight Me Juliet at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Embrace the End, Spires, Times of Despiration at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Blackberry Soup at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Destino Wolf at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Jane Moheit at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JULY 14 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Moshi Moshi! Bridging Cultures through Art” Japanese and American art inspired by cross cultural influences. Reception at 3 p.m. at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond, and runs through Aug. 10. 620-6772. www.therichmondartcenter.org 

“Tsunami Affected Lives: Moving Beyond Disaster” Photographs by Adrienne Miller Opening party at 3 p.m. at La Peña. Exhibit runs to Aug. 31. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Dance Elixer “Land” A multi-media installation and performance at 3 p.m. at Oakland Art Gallery, 199 Kahn’s Alley at the Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. 637-0395.  

Huichol Indian Yarn Paintings Exhibition from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Gathering Tribes, 1573 Solano Ave. 528-9038. 

“The Wrong Friends” Sculpture and drawings by Charlie Milgrim and “tropicalismo” works by Cassandra Auker, opening reception at 7 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St., Oakland. 910-1833. 

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717.  

Women’s Will “Romeo and Juliet” Sat. and Sun. at 1 p.m. in John Hinkle Park. 420-0813.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“From War to Peace: An Offering of Poetry and Music to Soothe a Suffering World” with Jan Dederick, Elisabeth Eliassen, Jeremy Cohne and others at 7 p.m. at 1300 Grand St., Alameda. Sponsored by the Alameda Public Affairs Forum and the Alameda Chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Free, donations accepted. www.alamedaforum.org 

Bay Street Arts and Music Festival with live music and children’s activities Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Bay St., Emeryville. 655-4002.  

Dana Lyons, singer-songwriter at 7:30 p.m. at Green City Gallery, 1950 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $8-$12. Benefit for Bay Localize. www.baylocalize.org 

Dekapitator, Fueled by Fire, Hatchet at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10-$12. 763-1146.  

Orquestra Karabali, salsa, at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

Gateswingers Jazz Band, traditional jazz at 8 p.m. at Central Perk, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 558-7375.  

Gail Dobson & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Friends of the Old Puppy at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $10. 558-0881. 

Samba Ngo at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

Mere Ours and Kate Isenberg at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

Captain Seahorse at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Sisters Morales at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Misner & Smith, Americana, bluegrass, folk, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

George Cotsirilos Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Michelle Pliner at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Nicole McRory at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Jimbo Trout and the Fishpeople, SecondsOnEnd, Howdy at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Never Healed, 86 Mentality, Set to Explode at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JULY 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Bridge to Sakai: Japanese Arts and Crafts of Today” Part of the Berkeley/Sakai Sister City cultural exchange. Artist reception at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. 644-6893.  

“Near and Far” Photographs by Doug Donaldson. Artist reception at 4 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany.  

THEATER 

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 2 p.m. at Cedar Rose Park, 1300 Rose St. 415-285-1717.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lisa Margonelli on “Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline” A special event at 5 p.m. at Bridgeway Gas Station, Ashby and Claremont. 704-8222. 

Thomas Perry reads from his new suspense novel “Silence” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Sylvia Gretchen, translator on “Now That I Come to Die” by 14th cent. Tibetatan Master Longchenpa at 6 p.m. at Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Place. 843-6812. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Summer Jazz with Melvin Butts at 3 p.m., The History of Jazz with Randy Moore at 4:30 p.m. at Open Jam Session at 5 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Golden Gate Branch, 5606 San Pablo Ave., Oakland. 597-5023. 

Jazz at the Chimes with Slammin’, all-body band, at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10. 228-3218. 

Music for Soprano and Friends at 3 p.m. at All Souls Episcopal Church, 2220 Cedar St. at Spruce. 848-1755. 

Dance Theatre Arts of Hayward “Putting It Together” at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12-$15. 581-4780. 

Kenny White at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Palindrome at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Rita Hosking and Cousin Jack at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

The Sam Goldsmith Ensemble at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Shivoham, Kirtan rhythms, at 3 and 6 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$20. 525-5054.  

Ellis Island Old World Folk Band at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. 

Redhouse, The Waco Kid, Prismatica at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

MONDAY, JULY 16 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Alan Bern reads from his poetry at at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Ellen Klages reads from her new novel “Portable Childhoods” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with Leah Steinberg at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Dazzling Divas, sopranos Eliza O’Malley, Pamela Connelly and Tara Generalovich and mezzo soprano Kathleen Moss at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Peter Apfelbaum Sextet at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. 

Samba Mapangala at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$20. 238-9200. 

TUESDAY, JULY 17 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Burdened Dreams” Paintings and sculpture by Marty McCorkle and Victoria Skirpa opens at Float Gallery, 1091 Calcott Place, Unit #116, Oakland. 535-1702. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Storytellers Bob and Liz tell tales for all ages at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Diana Abu-Jaber reads from her new novel “Origin” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jeffrey Broussard & The Creole Cowboys at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Dya Singh at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

George Costileros Trio at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Herb Gibson at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18 

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Barrio Cuba” at 7 p.m. at Richmond Public Library, 325 Civic Center Plaza, Richmond. 620-6555. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive reads from his new book “You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression” at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Samantha Schoech and Lisa Taggart, editors, read from “The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image” at 7:30 p.m. at Diesel, 5433 College Ave., Oakland. 653-9965. 

Ellen Sussman describes “Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Café Poetry with Paradise at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Whiskey Brothers Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Loose Wig Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Bernard Anderson & The Old School Band at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

La Verdad at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Buxter Hoot’n at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mikie Lee and Amber at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

The Energy Trio, funky jazz, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lower Class Brats, Career Soldiers, The Ghouls at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $7. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Marc Carey at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JULY 19 

THEATER  

San Francisco Mime Troupe “Making a Killing” at 7 p.m. at Montclair Ball Field, 6300 Moraga Ave., Montclair. 415-285-1717. www.sfmt.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Women by Women: The Dynamic Feminine Aspect” works by Jennifer Downey and Susan Matthews. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery, State of California Office Building Atrium, 1515 Clay St., Oakland. Exhibit runs to Aug. 31. 622-8190. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Shipibo-Conibo Song Cloths from the Amazon” A lecture at 7 p.m. at Gathering Tribes, 1573 Solano Ave. 528-9038. 

Poetry Flash with Luis Garcia and Maurice Kenny at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

Bruce Riordan on “Global Warming Impacts on the Bay Area” a slideshow and lecture at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jason Roberts describes “A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Lloyd Gregory at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

“Voices in the Virtual World” Oaktown Creativity Center House Choir at 8 p.m. at 447 25th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10. 568-6920. 

Ed Gerhard at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Stephanie Crawford & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Therese Brewitz at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Brian Kenney-Fresno, 20 Minute Loop, Midline Errors at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Eleggua, percussion from Venezuela with African roots, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mose Allison Trio at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Promising “more song-and-dance than a Bush Administration press conference,” the San Francisco Mime Troupe will be Making a Killing this weekend, for free, at Cedar Rose Park, a block from Cedar and Chestnut Streets. 

The tale that will unfold under the open skies follows two Army newspaper reporters assigned to grind out a puff piece on an Army-funded hospital in Iraq. What they find, when the facts unravel, is “corruption, death, music and mayhem,” as Dick and Condi cook the intelligence back in D.C.—and a military-industrial-cum-Neo-Con cabal block any fact-finding on the ground in Iraq. 

The Mime Troupe is celebrating its 48th summer in the parks with this play by Michael Gene Sullivan (with Jon Brooks), whose adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 has been touring nationally and internationally, staged by film actor Tim Robbins for L.A.’s Actors Gang. There’s a two-and-a-half minute YouTube segment on the Troupe’s website (sfmt.org). Directed by Ellen Callas, with music and lyrics by Pat Moran, the cast features old favorites like the author, Velina Brown, Victor Toman, Ed Holmes, Lisa Hori-Garcia and Kevin Ralston. 

Other local performances will include Thursday, July 17, at the Montclair Ballfield (music at 6:30 p.m.); Sunday afternoon, July 22, at Oakland’s Mosswood Park; Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 8 and 9, at Lakeside Park on Lake Merritt (music at 6:30 p.m.); and back to Berkeley for Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 11-12, in Live Oak Park. For more information, see www.sfmt.org.

It has been 35 years since the Berkeley Museum brought New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Sculpture of Matisse,” to the Bay Area. The current show as SFMOMA permits us to re-examine the great painter’s three-dimensional work. The museum’s press release speaks of his “sculptural masterpieces.” 

It was in painting, however, that Matisse created magnificent masterpieces. The show brought his Blue Nude (1907) from Baltimore to compare it with the bronze Reclining Nude of the same year. The painting is a 20th century Odalisque. But unlike its classic predecessors, this figure is sensuously contorted and its exaggerated physical features, outlined in heavy blue lines, reveal the painter’s intense feeling for the subject as well as his sense of physical structure. 

In 1907 also the painter made the exquisite small bronze, Reclining Nude 1 (Aurora) with even greater distortions of the body. Later he recalled: “I took up sculpture because what interested me in painting was clarification of my ideas, I changed my method, and worked in clay in order to have a rest from painting, in which I had done absolutely all I could for the time being. That is to say it was done for the purpose of organization, to put order into my feelings and to find a style to suit me, Whe I found it in sculpture, it helped my painting.”  

Among his later works in sculpture is the series of low reliefs, the Backs, in which the artist made his most important contributions to modern sculpture. Produced over a period of 21 years (1909-30), it shows a progression in concentration on the essential formal structure. 

Starting with a fairly realistic version that was still modeled in the manner of Rodin, Matisse progressively simplified the figure, so that in Back ulnone the woman’s long hair acts as a division between two columns in this monumental work. Nevertheless, the planar character and its balance and order shows that this work was done with the sensibility of a painter, who mastered drawing with pen, pencil or cut paper, as well as sculpture to infuse new ideas into his work as a magnificent painter.  

In great contrast to Matisse’s modernist sculpture, the museum shows work by the post-modern German artist Felix Schramm, whose Collider, 18 feet high and 35 feet long cuts across two galleries. Made of drywall, wood and paint, it ruptures the museum space. The viewer has to move under, through and around the piece to take it all in. 

The work is in the Dada tradition (yes, Dada has become a tradition now) and deals with disorder and destruction. It immediately reminds the viewer of the transgressive work of the 1970s by Gordon Matta-Clark, which was seen in a retrospective at the Whitney Museum this spring, but is not mentioned in the brochure of the Schramm exhibition.  

Matta-Clark actually hacked into existing walls and floors of derelict buildings and eventually split a house apart. Whereas Schramm devastates the pristine white cube of the museum gallery, the more radical earlier artist operated entirely outside the traditional framework. 

It would seem that in the 1970s a more radical approach to art (as to politics) was within reach.  

MATISSE: PAINTER AS SCULPTOR 

June 8 - Sept. 16  

NEW WORK: FELIX SCHRAMM 

June 28-Sept. 30 

Photograph Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cone Collection  

Reclining Nude I (Aurora), 1907, by Henri Matisse.

This Friday Trinity Lyric Opera opens its second season with Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land at its new home in the Castro Valley Center for the Arts.  

The Tender Land—a title taken from its love duet between a wandering laborer and a Midwestern farm girl—is aptly named. For this work is a perceptive and nostalgic look at the lives of the common man and woman at a moment in American history. Inspired by James Agee and Walker Evans’ book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a photographic record of Southern sharecroppers during the Depression, Copland and his librettist shifted the opera’s focus to a Midwestern family during the 1930s.  

The opera opens with Ma Moss singing of the cares of keeping a family together with two bits of metal—her needle and thimble. Her daughter Laurie graduates the following day and she will be the first in the family to finish high school. The story centers on the conflict that Laurie’s growing up brings those who love her. For the Moss family is conservative, hard working and impoverished, filled with fears of loss and the outside world. Laurie’s need to be free is in opposition to her family’s integrity. 

The Tender Land was never a huge success, and most of Copland’s statements about the opera seem apologetic. In a 1980 NPR interview he commented: “I don’t think the libretto was that fascinating from a theatrical standpoint.” The opera was meant “not for the Met but for lyric theater with more modest pretensions.” 

In his autobiographical writings, Copland seems to fault the music for lack of complexity: Tender Land “is not the kind of work to be pulled apart for study of its counterpoint and harmony ... The music is very plain, with a colloquial flavor, mostly diatonic and orchestrated simply.” 

Copland, who was never comfortable with the operatic form and referred to it as “la forme fatale,” missed the strengths of his own achievement—and the strengths of his librettist, his then-partner, dancer and painter Erik Johns, writing under the pseudonym of Horace Everett.  

The straightforward story in which the dreaded and feared never become realized—no one dies of tuberculosis or flings herself from the rooftops—is written in American vernacular, but not without lyrical elegance: 

The sun is coming up as though I’ve never seen it rise before.  

The day is bright and clear.  

The door I just came through has opened on a new place, a new earth. 

But the libretto’s greatest virtue lies in the ease with which it allowed Copland to set the words into a continuous lyrical flow containing both his characteristic tunefulness and an orchestral expansiveness woven with subtle dynamics and harmonies. This largeness in the music reflects the original quality of Evans’ photos and brings to the opera that sense of unending time and space intrinsic to the American heartland. Johns described The Tender Land as “in the nature of an operatic tone poem.” 

Copland was also able to weave the characters’ complexities into his music—from the quiet opening phrases, during which Laurie’s sister plays with her dolly and through which shimmer the long rays of sunlight on prairie life, to the dissonant moments when Laurie, having risen before dawn to escape with Martin, realizes that she must change her life on her own. 

During the rehearsal on Tuesday, I saw that Trinity Lyric Opera made several excellent decisions for this production. First of all, the singers are wonderful. Marnie Breckenridge makes an exquisite Laurie, her purity of voice is ideal for the innocent girl, and her acting is superb. She is supported by equally fine singers: mezzo-soprano Valentina Ozinski as Ma Moss, tenor Wesley Rogers as Martin, baritone Brian Leerhuber as Top, and bass Kirk Eichelberger as Grandpa, among others. 

Further, director Olivia Stapp has staged this opera with great sensitivity. The actors’ movements flow as naturally as the music, and her understated approach never lapses into the cute or folksy but rather imbues the opera with a kind of graciousness that respects the characters’ struggles.  

But perhaps the most interesting artistic choice was the use of Evans’ photos. Projected at the sides of the stage, these beautiful black-and-white photographs not only describe the Depression-era world of the opera, they make an incisive statement about American attachment to the land. For in the faces of the beleaguered poor, what shows is not only duress but a kind of openness—a landscape of vastness that is reflected in fields of corn, a kettle, a spool of thread, and that becomes iconic in the pale blue-eyed gaze of a young boy. 

Whatever Copland may have felt about his opera, this is a production worth seeing. It isn’t saturated with excessive emotions, but it is tender. And in being so it reaches into the heart in ways that we seldom have the opportunity to experience.  

THE TENDER LAND 

Presented by Trinity Lyric Opera at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 14; Tuesday, July 17 and Friday July 20; and at 2 p.m. Sunday July 22. Maestro John Kendall Bailey gives a talk one hour prior to each performance.  

Castro Valley Center for the Arts 

19501 Redwood Road, Castro Valley. 

Easily accessible by freeway and BART.  

$10-$40, bargain matinee seats available for Sunday matinee. www.trinitylyricopera.org. 

It’s a perverse world that lets the name of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami remain obscure to the vast Western film-going public. He is considered by many to among the three or four greatest artists in cinema today, the creative force behind some of the most thoughtful and compelling films of the past 25 years. 

Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum are celebrating his career with an exhibition of his work entitled “Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker,” consisting of screenings of his movies at PFA and an exhibition of his photography at BAM. The films series runs through Aug. 30; the photography exhibit is on view through Sept. 23.  

Much of Kiarostami’s cinema consists of contemplative, intelligent films that probe into the thoughts and souls of his characters, using non-professional actors selected for their faces and for their innate character. He began his career making documentaries about the lives of children in Iran, later fusing documentary work with fiction in the creation of dynamic hybrid films. But it was with 1999’s Taste of Cherry that Kiarostami firmly cemented his international reputation, becoming the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival.  

Taste of Cherry, showing Aug. 11, is a slow, meditative film about a man, Mr. Badii, trolling through the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to help him committ suicide. He has dug a hole in a dusty mountainside and intends to take an overdose of sleeping pills and settle into the pit one night, never to wake up. But he worries that he might survive, and so he goes looking for someone who will agree to check on him in the morning and either rescue or bury him. 

The film consists primarily of Badii driving around Tehran in his beat-up Range Rover, scanning the faces of work-soliciting day laborers, of scroungers and hitchhikers and passersby, looking for a sympathetic and competent assistant. He finds three prospects along the way: a young soldier, a middle-aged seminarian, and an aging taxidermist. Badii engages in long discussions with each as they drive along, contemplating life and death and trying to persuade them to help him. 

It is a thoughtful tale infused with philosophical dialogue and simple symbolic devices. We never learn the secret of Badii’s despair, for it is irrelevant. What Kiarostami is really aiming for is allegory. Badii, in the form of his passengers, is taken from youth through old age, from fear and naiveté to religious conviction to aged wisdom and practicality. All the while the truck slowly navigates meandering, desolate roads on its way up the mountain. 

The film closes with an ambiguous shot of Badii withdrawing into the hole, closing his eyes and receding into darkness as a storm gathers above him. Kiarostami gives no signal as to whether Badii lives or dies, and some critics have questioned this decision. But there really is no other appropriate conclusion; the ending can only be ambiguous, as this is not simply the story of Badii’s suicide attempt but a discussion of suicide in general, and specifically in a religious society that forbids it. It is likewise just as much a story about the passengers that share Badii’s Range Rover and the ways in which his plan forces them to confront their own beliefs and values, as well as an invitation to ponder such thoughts ourselves, thereby making us complicit in the exercise. “I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer,” Kiarostami told film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden we have a hundred films.”  

There has always been a contingent of directors who have fought against the inherent passivity of the cinematic experience. Live theater requires audience participation in the suspension of disbelief in the face of fabricated sets, as well as the necessity of response via laughter or applause. In its golden age in the 1930s and ’40s, radio, the so-called “theater of the mind,” enlisted the imagination of the listener to fill in the gaps left by the lack of visuals. Even silent film required the use of that imagination, requiring audiences to imagine voices and sound effects to accompany the action on the screen.  

But full-color, sound-era cinema supplies nearly all that is necessary, and thus the experience requires far less of the viewer. Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry instead asks the audience to take part, to contemplate the value of life, the nature of suicide, and the search for meaning in the face of despair.  

But what critics of the film have found most baffling about it is the coda which follows Badii’s ambiguous fate. After 890 minutes of meditative imagery and philosophic discussion, the appearance of behind-the-scenes footage is jarring. We see the lead actor passing a cigarette to Kiarostami, technicians positioning microphones, and a group of soldiers from an early scene in the film are given the OK to call it a day and relax. At first it may seem like an ironic distancing measure, a shallow gesture to simply remind the audience that, after all, it’s just a movie. But the coda is far more compelling and profound than that, for it serves as a life-affirming counterpoint to the bleakness that preceded it.  

The presence of soldiers in the shot recalls Badii’s earlier reminiscence about his military service, where he met his closest friends and took part in a group dynamic, as opposed to the action of the film, in which he is largely alone, and never in the company of more than one person at a time. What Kiarostami shows us with this final scene is the reality behind the story of Badii—that filmmaking is a communal experience, consisting of comrades taking pleasure in community, in art, in craft, and in the simple act of lounging together in the grass, with shots of the soldiers taking a break from their soldiering, enjoying each other’s company beneath blooming trees and clear skies. Yet all this takes place to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s recording of “St. James Infirmary,” a song about impending death. It is a gentle reminder, an endorsement of the views of Badii’s final passenger, that simple moments are what defines a life. “Would you give up the taste of cherries?” he had asked Badii, and here Kiarostami gives us that taste, demonstrating in effect that there is much to be appreciated in this life if one is willing to reach for it, and than even a despairing conversation along a dusty road in a beat-up Range Rover is an experience not to be missed. 

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI:  

IMAGE MAKER 

Through Aug. 30 at Pacific Film archive; through Sept. 23 at Berkeley Art Museum. www.bampfa.edu.  

Photograph: Homayoun Ershadi as Mr. Badii in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Berkeley was promoted as a City of Homes. In 1905, the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, California published an illustrated booklet bearing this title and featuring various private residences. But the concept of home would soon change. The San Francisco earthquake and fire brought a flood of refugees into the East Bay, and many real-estate entrepreneurs quickly rolled up their sleeves to meet the housing demand. 

Alongside a record number of new single-family homes built from 1906 on, large apartment buildings appeared for the first time. These were usually elegant structures offering the latest amenities, such as steam heat, hot water on demand, modern kitchens and bathrooms, and space-saving wall beds. 

On May 19, 1906, barely a month after the earthquake, the Oakland Tribune published a drawing of an enormous new apartment building with the following caption: 

The new Stevens apartment house for Berkeley […] covers a space of 60 x 240 running from street to street with large open space on each side for sun and light. There will be thirty-six apartments of three rooms and store room and bath each, all fitted with folding beds built in and new kitchen improvements and everything that can be done for the comfort of the tenants in the way of labor-saving contrivances. 

The hot water system is the one used for heating and supplying of water at all times. There are two stacks of fireproof and earthquake-proof chimneys; radiators are placed in each room and bath, instead of mantels. Gas and electric heaters are in the kitchen and bath rooms. The whole building will be a model of its kind. The frame is to be made with continuous posts from foundation to roof. The floors to be unusually well fastened to same and the floor to be diagonally braced as well as doubled, so as to fully provide against any jar by earthquake. 

The walls and floors are of slow-burning construction. There will be a large public dining room on the first floor with kitchen store rooms, laundry, etc., complete; also here are situated the big furnaces that supply the building. They are to be built from fireproof vaults of reinforced concrete. Newsom & Newsom of 526 Larkin Street, San Francisco, are the architects. 

Three days earlier, the Berkeley Reporter provided additional details: 

An apartment house, which will cost in the neighborhood of $70,000 and will contain 155 rooms, is about to be erected by Mrs. A.C. Stevens, the well-known capitalist and enterprising woman of this city. […] The Lafayette will be the largest building of its kind in Berkeley […] the architects state that the structure is the longest for which they have ever drawn plans, outside of one erected at the [1894 San Francisco] Midwinter Fair. 

Mary Woodbury Stevens (1859–1945) was indeed an enterprising woman. The wife of Nova Scotian evangelist Ansley Chesley Stevens (1856–1936), she was a major landowner in Berkeley. In 1907, when the Lafayette Apartments were under construction, Mrs. Stevens owned seven properties in town. The following year, her holdings had increased to a dozen. 

One wouldn’t think of a missionary’s wife as a capitalist, but Mary Stevens was born to money. A native of West Springfield, MA, Mary was the daughter of Edward W. Southworth, who with his brother Wells founded the Southworth Paper Company, which exists until today. The Southworths were descended from Constant Southworth, offspring of a long line of English knights. Constant, whose mother had married William Bradford, Governor and historian of the Plymouth Colony, came to Massachusetts in 1628 and would become one of its prominent citizens. 

The Southworth family valued education. Two of Mary’s brothers studied in Germany, one of them going on to study medicine. Two other brothers were students at Yale, where they were members of the powerful and secretive Order of Skull and Bones. Mary received her education at the exclusive Miss Porter’s School for Girls in Farmington, Conn. 

In 1893, Mary married Ansley Stevens, probably in Boston. The two appeared in Berkeley in 1902, and until 1910 lived at 2157–59 Addison Street, on the current site of University Hall’s parking lot. The house was torn down in the 1920s. 

When completed in 1907 or ’08, the Lafayette Apartments had two addresses: 2314 Haste St. and 2315 Dwight Way. Although the College Homestead Tract south of the campus had been substantially built up by the first decade of the 20th century, the block where the Lafayette was sited was an exception, having contained until then only one house—an early shingled residence fronting on Ellsworth Street. Until the mid-1920s, the lots around the Lafayette were vacant, fulfilling the early promise of “large open space on each side for sun and light.” 

The completed building was somewhat less elaborately ornamented than the sketch published in the Tribune. Between the drawing board and construction, the balustraded roof parapet and the pediments on the long lateral walls were discarded, leaving relatively plain elevations with four pairs of Corinthian pilasters. Two overblown façades, complete with pediments, gigantic mock Corinthian columns, and clumsy tiered balconies, were tacked onto the street elevations. The architects, Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, were never known for restraint. The brothers are best remembered for having designed America’s most famous Queen Anne edifice, the extravagant (some say outlandish) Carson Mansion in Eureka. Not for nothing did Willis Polk dub them “the Gruesomes.” 

The Lafayette’s pastiche neoclassical elements were executed not in stone but in redwood, and the pizzazz wasn’t limited to the exterior. Inside, the building was finished in white pine and redwood paneling. Apartment doors were inlaid with translucent glass. A large, skylit rotunda with a spiral staircase occupied the center of the building, and hand-turned banisters adorned the stairs. 

Boasting the latest amenities, including a private telephone exchange, the Lafayette attracted desirable tenants: professionals, managers, merchants, clerical workers, and teachers, including the mother, sister, and brother of Berkeley Mayor Samuel C. Irving. Owners Mary and Ansley Stevens lived here from 1910 until 1915, when they disappeared from town, presumably to spread the gospel abroad. Eventually they settled in Oakland, where Mary purchased the Dunsmuir Apartments at 1515 Alice Street. Reverend Stevens was variously listed as superintendent of the Berkeley Free Bible & Tract Society and general superintendent of the East Bay District United Evangelistic Mission Association, the latter located at 594 31st Street. 

As late as 1924, Mrs. Stevens was still the owner of the Lafayette. Soon, her building would be flanked by four other large apartment houses, constructed in the vacant lots on either side. First came the Mira Monte at 2322 Haste St., which began advertising furnished and unfurnished apartments in January 1925. It was followed in January 1928 by the Elsmere at 2321 Dwight Way. The six-story Picardo Arms, 2491 Ellsworth St., opened in November 1928, and the nameless 2320 Haste St. was completed ten months later. 

All the newcomers were attractive, the most elegant of them being the Picardo Arms, designed by the prolific architect Herman Carl Baumann (1890–1960), who would soon create the Art Deco Bellevue-Staten on the shore of Lake Merritt. Having survived as a distinguished marker on the Southside, the Picardo Arms recently lost all its original windows to vinyl blight. 

Considerably less refined, the three-story Elsmere offered the newfangled attraction of a large cement courtyard with 22 individual garages. The 24 furnished apartments included Frigidaire refrigerators, Spark lid-top ranges, and Marshall & Stearns wall beds. In a novel cross-marketing maneuver, the manufacturers of these appliances and other contractors and suppliers associated with the Elsmere all took out ads on the same Tribune page that announced the opening of the building. 

The owner of the Elsmere was Louis Saroni, a well-known sugar wholesaler and former candy manufacturer. The son of German-Jewish immigrants, Saroni (1856–1936) relocated his business from San Francisco to Oakland in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. His son, Albert B. Saroni, married into the Zellerbach family and took over the sugar business, while the father invested in East Bay real estate. 

Whether before or after he built the Elsmere, Saroni acquired the Lafayette Apartments from Mary Stevens. He was already advanced in years, and the Depression no doubt contributed to the Lafayette’s state of neglect. In 1935, the building was in violation of several articles in the city code, and Saroni wanted it off his hands. The recently formed University of California Students’ Cooperative Association (UCSCA) signed an advantageous long-term lease and renamed the building Barrington Hall. The conversion from apartments to student co-op entailed removing the kitchens from 45 units and opening up the ground floor to create a lobby. 

World War II brought about a decline in male student enrollment, while housing was needed for the Richmond shipyard workers. In 1943, following much official pressure brought to bear on UCSCA, the U.S. Navy leased Barrington for five years. In December of that year, the Navy spent $76,000 to modernize the building and convert it back into apartments. In the process, all ornamentation was stripped away, leaving a plainly utilitarian structure. 

In 1948, while the building was still occupied by the Navy, the Saroni family offered to sell the residuum of Barrington Hall’s lease to the co-op (now USCA) for $16,000. This windfall enabled USCA to spend $15,000 on altering the building one more time, converting the apartments into co-op use. 

By the 1980s, Barrington Hall had become USCA’s most notorious co-op. Neighbors complained it was a “noisy, unsafe, unsanitary, rat trap.” After the San Francisco Chronicle focused its attention on heroin use at Barrington, USCA lost its insurance coverage. Subsequent investigation revealed that dozens of habitual heroin users and dealers lived in the house. Continuing trouble and a costly lawsuit finally led to the hall’s closure in 1990. 

The building has since been leased to a contractor who operates it as a rooming house called Evans Manor. While the four neighboring apartment buildings retain much of their original appearance, Evans Manor is a charmless hulk, albeit one redolent of glory in the hearts of old Barringtonians. 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Located next to the Lafayette, the Elsmere at 2321 Dwight Way included built-in garages when it opened in 1928. 

I’ve talked about a couple of ethical aspects of gardening over the past two weeks: ethical suppliers and basic kindness to plants, the reason I don’t buy Arizona desert species for my shady, poorly drained Berkeley garden.  

But wait; there’s more!  

(Gardening can get to feeling like being a Catholic in the ‘50s: no matter what you do, it’s morally suspect. Some of us remember the “fault” of scrupulosity. If you’re too careful about never doing anything wrong, that’s wrong too. Think too much about this stuff, you’ll end up catatonic. A commenter on Twisty Faster’s ovular blog I Blame the Patriarchy countered paralytic perfectionism. One’s patriarchy footprint, like one’s carbon footprint, exists no matter what, but it’s useful to reduce its size. So stop fretting, start learning, and garden on.) 

What we plant and where we plant it matters also because of two almost-contradictory points.  

The first and most obvious is that we shouldn’t plant invasive exotics. Reams and volumes have been devoted to this point, but still the “really, this variety hasn’t been proven invasive yet” broom and “oh, it’s not so bad on the coast” pampas grass and German ivy and Algerian ivy and Japanese dodder—the yellow stuff that eats entire trees—gets sold and bought, and planted.  

Planting invasives is no more responsible than a night at the bathhouse without condoms. “Invasive” means wildland-invasive, not garden-invasive; the latter’s a mere inconvenience, though it is certainly reason for suspicion.  

More subtle is the idea that maybe we shouldn’t plant natives, either—if they’re close enough relatives of our native neighbors to interbreed with them, but distant enough in other ways to mess with the local gene pools. For example, California poppies from the south of the state might have heritable differences from those native here; we just haven’t noticed those differences yet.  

The wild strawberries native to Strawberry Creek are legendary for their taste, though I doubt there are any of the originals left there. Most of what you can buy (or find) is insipid. They look the same, though.  

Coastal wild California poppies look different to us, yellower than the straight-orange “standard” poppy. For all we know, northern and southern, or Contra Costa and Marin, or Berkeley hills and South Bay orange poppies might look different to, say, certain native bees; they might have markers visible only in the ultraviolet range. They might smell different to other olfactory receptors. It might matter. We don’t know.  

With that in mind, Native Here Nursery in Tilden Park labels its plants with their points of origin, in careful detail, sometimes as fine as the north side of some hill vs. the south side. If someday we find out that there are differences that matter, such plants will have kept their ancestry whole, ready for the future. 

Native Here Nursery 

101 Golf Course Road, Berkeley 

(510) 549-0211 

Fri.: 9 a.m.-noon; Sat. 10 a.m.-1 p.m. 

Tilden Park, across from the entrance to the Tilden Golf Coursewww.ebcnps.org/nativehere.html 

Twisty Faster 

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Do you know The Consultant’s Song? It goes: Maybe it’s this way, or maybe it’s that way and I get paid’O in either case’O. 

I’m a consultant of sorts and there is nothing more irksome to me than having to say, “I don’t know.” Now, I realize that this can be a true statement (and ‘No’ is a complete sentence, right) and can even be the most accurate assessment of my findings at some point but I just don’t like it. 

I get paid to provide answers and to try to fill in dark areas. So, when I’m forced to say, “Hey, I can’t see this and I don’t know if it’s good or bad,” it really bugs me. I feel like a cheat. Nevertheless, there are times when I just can’t see things that I’d really need to see in order to make meaningful statements about such-and-such a thing (say a drainage system). If someone had merely snapped a picture or two during the process and kept them around, the verification process would be so much easier. 

I get handed permits on a pretty regular basis and asked to draw some conclusion based on what these cards and forms say. Let me tell you, the data is pretty lean on permits and other municipal records. If there are stamped drawings, well, that’s a different matter. They’re a much better indicator, although there’s no way to be sure that things were done according to plans, and as you might suspect, it’s quite common for things to be anywhere from a little to way different from the plans.  

Now, show me a photo of an open trench bearing pipes, gravel and drainage-fabric and I can begin to say some things about what I’m looking at. Give me 10 photos of the same thing and it’s gets better. Show me a picture of the bubble on the level on the pipe in the trench and I’m all smiles. I’d be downright proud of the homeowner or builder and would sing it loudly. I’m no longer forced to say that I have no idea how well this “supposed” French drain is going to work. I can make a fair guess. 

Back in my remodeling days, I took a lot of pictures of jobs I worked on. These served multiple functions. Firstly, if the city inspector ever claimed to have not seen the inside of a wall we’d closed up, I could grab my file and show them a picture of what the rough plumbing and wiring in that wall looked like. This was always met with agreement and satisfaction (although I don’t recommend reliance on this). 

If we were trying to remember where we put a particular thing in a wall in a later phase of work (such as a pipe or wire), we could pull out the pictures. Clients loved the set of extra prints I’d lay on ‘em during or after work. It showed confidence on my part, gave them something to show their friends (doesn’t everyone like to look at remodels in progress?) and gave proof of the work when selling the house. I’m sure you can think of other cases in which these might prove tremendously valuable. 

As someone who sees things after the fact, I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me to be handed a file, filled with photos of the remodel I’m being asked to look at. My first assumption is that the builder or homeowner is thinking about the future. Most people seem only to be thinking about that day (or minute). But the act of photographing implies a larger mind-set. They’re also thinking about the next person, not just themselves. They’re including unmet friends in their process and helping the next person to manage what might be a difficult situation. If you know the layout of the drainage system, you may well be able to perform a repair without tearing the whole thing apart. If you have photos of where the pipes and wires were located in a wall, you might be able to make one small hole rather than tear out a wall of sheetrock. 

It’s many a day when I’m looking at a crawlspace filled with newly-placed plywood panels designed to protect the occupants from the shaking earth. Sadly, what’s behind these well-nailed panels is often critical and largely invisible. A set of photos of the bolting behind, say 3 or 4 of these would be enough to satisfy my inner curmudgeon on most days and will likely do the same for future buyers and many city officials. Again, the more photos the better. 

The cost of photos is very, very small. Today, I leave the house with two cameras. A really nice one that I keep hidden away for special stuff and a tiny, used, eBay, fixed-focus, Fuji with enough memory for 122 photos at 1/3 of a Meg (these make sharp 4x6 pictures). Now, I don’t care if you want to shoot film but, if you have a computer, you can store way more photos than you’ll ever need at almost no cost. There is NO excuse not to take pictures. The average remodel runs into many thousands of dollars. A disposable camera costs 5 bucks and might turn out to be a very important thing when they switch site inspector on you or when a buyer starts asking about what’s behind that wall or how deep you poured the concrete under the hot-tub. 

If you’re a homeowner working with a contractor, go take a bunch of pictures of the work every day when you come home. They’ll help if a dispute arises and provide good evidence of the work for the future. If you’re a builder, you’re missing out on one of the best marketing tactics known to woman or man by not photographing your work and keeping photos to show prospective clients. If you buy a little photo album and show before and after pictures of three of your jobs including all the bolting and wiring stuff that some people like to see, you can raise your rates. Photos are worth thousands of words. They’re also worth thousands of dollars when selling a house, sitting in court or selling your wares.  

Now, if you could just get the plumber to smile. 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

At a retrofit seminar last weekend, I saw a photo of a braced chimney that had fallen in an earthquake, just like its un-braced neighbors.  

The point being made was that bracing a chimney is a waste of money—if you have a masonry chimney, you can pretty much count on it falling in a serious quake. 

So, you can spend a bunch of money and have it removed and replaced with a wood-framed chimney and metal flue, or you can make real sure that you are not outside under the chimney when it falls. 

If you’re there when the shaking starts, move to another spot!  

Wishing you a safe home and peace of mind.  

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service.  

Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

FRIDAY, JULY 13 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

“The San Luis Obispo Experience and A New Vision for Center Street” with a delegation from an Luis Obispo speaking on their Mission Street project, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium. 419-0850. 

Fundraiser for the Free Gaza Movement with Paul Larudee at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitaruian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $10-$100, no one turned away. 236-5388. 

International Working Class Film Festival with class struggle films from Australia at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

CopWatch Conference, Fri. eve. through Sun. at Laney College, Oakland. For details see www.copwatchconference.org 

“The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma” A documentary at 7 p.m. at The The Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at Alcatraz, Oakland. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2000 Shattuck Ave. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com Code: CITYOFBERKELEY.  

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. 548-6310. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

SATURDAY, JULY 14 

Peach Tasting, including other stone fruits from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. and MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. 

Open the Farm Meet and greet the animals at the Little Farm as you help the farmer with morning chores, at 9 p.m. at the Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 6-9 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Feast for the Beasts Come to the Oakland Zoo at 9 a.m. for breakfast for the whole family. Bring apples, grapes, lettuce and carrots for the animals. Cost is $6. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Burgers & Backyard Bites” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro, Oakland. Cost is $45 plus $5 materials fee. Registration required. 531-COOK. www.compassionatecooks.com 

Walking Tour of Oakland City Center Meet at 10 a.m. in front Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

The Great War Society meets to discuss “French War Aims in WWI” with Robert Denison, at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

Family Sundown Safari at 5 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo. A hands-on program for children 3 and up to explore the Valley Children’s Zoo. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

Succulents for Bay Area Gardens at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave., off 7th St. 644-2351. 

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JULY 15 

Bay to Barkers Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society’s annual dog walk/run, including many activities for canines from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Registration is $25 in advance, $30 on the day of the event. 845-7735, ext. 13. www.berkeleyhumane.org 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

Fun on the Farm Day Sing traditional songs, help grind corn and see how wool is turned into yarn from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Little Farm, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship Pancake Breakfast from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on board the ship. Take Hwy 580 to Richmond and exit at Canal Blvd. Cost is $6, children under 6 free. 526-7377. 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m.at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby & Stuart. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. 526-7377. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Bike Tour of the Port of Oakland on a leisurely 5-mile ride. Meet at 10 a.m. at the 10th St. entrance to the Oakland Museum of California. Reservations required. 238-3514.  

Parent-Child Self-Protection Workshop on everyday safety skills from 10 a.m. to noon in Berkeley. Cost is $60, no one turned away. Location details upon registration. 831-426-4407. 

East Bay Atheists will show the documentary “Jesus Camp” at 1:30 p.m. in the 3rd flr meeting room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 222-7580. 

Homemade Pet Foods from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware.  

Social Action Forum with Eric Moon of the American Friends Service Committee at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “the Four Catalysts of Being” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JULY 16 

“The Wells Fargo History Museum, 1852 to the Present” a Brown Bag Lunch with curator Anne Hall at 12:30 p.m. at the Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Community and Student Anti-War Group Come to an organizing meeting at 7 p.m. at Café Med, Telegraph Ave. to plan the upcoming concert-peace rally at Peoples Park in the middle of September and other fall activities. 658-1451. www.peoplesparkcommunity.org 

Sing-a-long Circles in the Oak Grove from 4 to 6:30 p.m. at the threatened Oak Grove in front of Memorial Stadium, Piedmont Ave., just north of Bancroft. 658-9178. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the West Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus To schedule an appointmento to www.BeADonor.com (Code: UCB). 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

TUESDAY, JULY 17 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Arrowhead Marsh at the Martin Luther King Regional Shoreline. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Return of the Over-the-Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older who are interested in nature study, history, fitness, and fun are invited to join us on a series of monthly excursions exploring our Regional Parks. For information and to register call 525-2233.  

The Pit Stop: Peaches & Barbecue at the Tuesday Berkeley Farmers’ Market from 3 to 7 p.m. at Derby St. at MLK, Jr. Way. 548-3333. www.ecologycenter.org/bfm  

Prospective Parenting for the LGBT Community at 6:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 415-981-1960. stephanie@ourfamily.org 

Feng Shui Your Mind with Maureen Raytis, acupuncturist, and Jill Lebeau, psychotherapist at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 18 

South Berkeley Assessment of Library Needs with Noll & Tam Architects who have been hired to investigate possible spaces for the library at the Ed Roberts Campus, at Board of Library Trustees meeting at 7 p.m. at South Branch Library, 1901 Russell Street at MLK, Jr., Way. 981-6107. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression” with Matthew Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive, at 7 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698.  

Harry Potter Jeopardy Children up to the age of 15 can show off thie\\eir Harry Potter knowledge at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

Family Math and Science Night for children aged 7-10 and their families at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JULY 19 

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS. 

Summer Family Film Festival Children’s film at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd flr., 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223.  

“Global Warming Impacts on the Bay Area” a slideshow and lecture with Bruce Riordan at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways Bookstore, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Estate Planning Essentials for the LGBT Community at 6:30 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. RSVP to 415-981-1960.  

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. nam 

aste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Mon. July 16, at 7 p.m. for a public hearing on Trader Joe’s/Kragen development and demolition permit for 2701 Shattuck. 981-6900. 

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Mon. July 16 and Wed., July 18, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Berkeley Housing Authority meets Tues., July 17, at 6:30 p.m. in City Council Chambers. 981-6900.  

City Council meets Tues., July 17, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., July 18, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601. 

Commission on Aging meets Wed., July 18, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5344.  

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., July 19, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7415.  

Commission on Labor meets Thurs., July 19, at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., July 19, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010.  

Tuesday’s review of Crowded Fire Theater Company’s Anna Bella Eema at Ashby Stage mistakenly attributed last year’s production of The Typographer’s Dream to Crowded Fire. The play was actually produced by Encore Theatre and remounted at Ashby Stage in association with Shotgun Players.