People's Park in Berkeley, California, USA, is a park off Telegraph Avenue, bounded by Haste and Bowditch streets and Dwight Way, near the University of California, Berkeley. The park was created during the radical political activism of the late 1960s.
Today, People's Park is a free public park. Although open to all, it is mainly a daytime sanctuary for Berkeley's large homeless population who, along with others, receive meals from East Bay Food Not Bombs. Public toilets are available, and the park offers innovative demonstration gardens, including organic community gardening beds and areas landscaped with California native plants, all of which were created by volunteer gardeners. Students use the basketball courts. A wider audience is attracted by occasional rallies, concerts, and hip-hop events conducted at the People's Stage, a wooden bandstand designed and built on the western end of the park by volunteers organized by the People's Park Council. Nearby residents, and those who try to use the park for recreation, sometimes experience conflict with the more aggressive homeless people in People's Park.
The mythology of the park is an important part of local culture. The local South Campus neighborhood was the scene of a major confrontation between student protesters and police in May 1969. A mural near the park, painted by Berkeley artist O'Brien Thiele and lawyer/artist Osha Neumann, depicts the shooting of James Rector, a student who died from shotgun wounds inflicted by the police on 15 May 1969.
Read more about People's Park: Early History To May 1969, 15 May 1969 – "Bloody Thursday", 1970s, People's Park Annex/Ohlone Park, Subsequent History, Current Events, Bulldozing of The West End
Famous quotes containing the words people and/or park:
“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewed and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)