People's Park - 1970s

1970s

After the peaceful march in support of People's Park on 30 May 1969, the university decided to keep the 8 foot tall perimeter chain-link wire fence and maintain a 24-hour guard over the site. On 20 June, the University of California Regents voted to turn the People's Park site into a soccer field and parking lot.

In March 1971, when it seemed as though construction of the parking lot and soccer field might proceed, another People's Park protest resulted in 44 arrests.

In May 1972, an outraged crowd tore down the perimeter chain-link wire fence surrounding the People's Park site after President Nixon announced his intention to mine North Vietnam's main port. In September, the Berkeley City Council voted to lease the park site from the university. The Berkeley community proceeded to rebuild the park through user-development, mainly with donated labor and materials. Various local groups contributed to managing the park during rebuilding.

In 1979, the university tried to convert the west end of the park, which was already a no-cost parking lot, into a fee lot for students and faculty only, excluding community members. Significantly, the west end of the park was (and remains) the location of the People's Stage, a permanent bandstand that had just been erected on the edge of the lawn within the no-cost parking lot. Completed in the spring of 1979, it had been designed and constructed through user-development and voluntary community participation. This effort was coordinated by the People's Park Council, a democratic group of park advocates, and the People's Park Project/Native Plant Forum. Park users and organizers believed that the university's main purpose in attempting to convert the parking lot was the destruction of the People's Stage in order to suppress free speech and music, both in the park and in the South Campus neighborhood as a whole. It was also widely believed that the foray into the west end warned of the dispossession of the entire park for the purpose of university construction. A spontaneous protest in the fall of 1979 led to an occupation of the west end of the park that continued uninterrupted throughout December 1979. Park volunteers tore up the asphalt and heaped it up as barricades next to the sidewalks along Dwight Way and Haste Street. This confrontation led to negotiations between the university, on the one hand, and the park users and activists, on the other. The park users and activists were led by the People's Park Council, which included park organizers and occupiers, as well as other community members. The university eventually capitulated. Meanwhile, the occupiers, organizers and volunteer gardeners transformed the former parking lot into a newly cultivated organic community gardening area, which remains to this day.