Insurrection City: the radical beginnings of Ohlone Park

On October 22, the nonprofit homeless advocacy organization Where Do We Go? (WDWG) set up camp in Ohlone Park, the fourth in an ongoing series of occupations protesting the city’s enthusiastic assault on unhoused people in the wake of the Grant’s Pass decision. The group has vowed that “for every encampment swept in Berkeley, a new one will open in a more publicly visible space.” Speaking about their decision to occupy Ohlone Park—taken directly in response to the city’s threats to sweep the Second & Page Street encampment—WDWG spokespeople pointed to the park’s “historic significance,” reviving the name activists had given it in May 1969: Insurrection City.

Although it may be better known as the home of one of the first dog parks in the United States, Ohlone Park (and, to a lesser extent, the four-and-a-half mile Ohlone Greenway that extends northwest from it) was born out of the tumult of the People’s Park movement. The story of People’s Park, born in blood 55 years ago and still fighting for its life today, should be familiar to readers of Street Spirit. 

In April 1969, fed up with a UC-led urban renewal assault on the Southside neighborhood designed to drive cultural and political radicals away from the university and its environs, a motley crew of hippies and revolutionaries seized a vacant lot off Telegraph Ave, turning it into a guerrilla park. The lot was owned by the university, who had themselves seized it through the power of eminent domain. Once, a number of houses providing cheap rent to poor Berkeley students and other residents stood on the land. When the UC took it over, they razed the houses. Officially, the area was to be turned into an intramural playing field (don’t believe the hype that it was meant to become student housing). Instead of the field, the university left the neighborhood with an unmaintained dirt lot. For over a year, neighborhood residents and Avenue shoppers used it as an informal parking lot. 

While People’s Park began as a direct rebuke to the state by committed radicals, it was quickly embraced by the community as a whole. Its founders were amazed and delighted by the crowds of “straight” people who joined the “freaks” in digging, planting, and building the new user-designed park. With the exception of the more anti-countercultural corner of the Maoist movement, everyone agreed: the park was “living socialism.” Unfortunately, not everyone agreed that that was such a good thing. On May 15, the UC reclaimed the territory with a spectacular display of violence, opening fire on crowds of demonstrators, leaving 128 wounded, one blinded, and one mortally wounded. To “restore order,” Governor Ronald Reagan deployed the National Guard. Berkeley was now under military occupation.

Three days after “Bloody Thursday,” rumors swirled that 25-year-old James Rector had succumbed to his injuries. Police had shot Rector in the belly while he watched the scene unfold from the rooftop of Granma Books, a radical bookshop. Thousands of protestors defied the occupation’s ban on public gatherings and swarmed Herrick Hospital where Rector was being treated, confronting some 500 guardsmen who ringed the building. After keeping vigil for Rector, whom the crowd learned was still alive, they marched north. 

Marchers soon arrived at a vacant lot in North Berkeley, a huge strip of land on Hearst Avenue owned by BART. The agency had cleared the land years before to construct an elevated train track, but voters had insisted on a tunnel instead. Construction of the tunnel between the Downtown and North Berkeley stations was completed in the mid 1960s, and the tunnel was then backfilled. For a few years, the enormous vacant strip had been the subject of minor local controversy. BART intended to sell the land to developers for a high-rise apartment building, but neighbors wanted a park. In the meantime, much like the land that became People’s Park, the dirt lot festered.

The crowd that massed on the strip knew exactly what they thought should be done, and they came prepared. As soon as they arrived, marchers began planting shrubs and flowers, dubbing the land “People’s Park Mobile Annex.” True to form, policemen ripped the plants out as quickly as they had been planted. Along with the National Guard, they chased the crowd out of the “park”—which had been returned to its pure, vacant state—and spent the rest of the day pursuing the demonstrators into the hills and back out again. Rocks were thrown, clubs were brandished, and 22 people were thrown in jail.

Despite assurances that he was “in fair condition and improving steadily,” James Rector died the following night. Over the next several days, memorial marches were repeatedly attacked, as police lobbed gas grenades from their patrol cars and the National Guard blanketed large parts of Berkeley in teargas from the sky. On May 25, the movement held a memorial service for Rector in Tilden Park. Summing up the mood of the gathering, anti-war leader Frank Bardacke spoke: “There is no better way to die than among friends, among brothers, among comrades. There’s no better way to die than that because there’s no better way to live than that…We’re not afraid to live, and so we’re not afraid to die.” The group marched from the hills into Downtown, where the services continued under the auspices of the Berkeley Free Church. After lengthy recitations, the Church led the crowd in an invocation of the saints, calling out for the intercession of Saint Martin Luther King, Saint Bobby Hutton, and Saint Che Guevara.

In honor of Rector, the mourners again marched north to BART’s vacant Hearst Strip. The Free Church and its minister Dick York led the procession, providing people with tools and sod. Arriving at the strip, the group immediately set to work building a second People’s Park. This time, perhaps due to the solemnity of the occasion, the police didn’t interfere. By evening, “people were watering a wide strip of newly laid lawn, children were swinging on playground equipment firmly embedded into the soil, bushes and small trees were being carefully planted, and gallons of pork stew were bubbling over a roaring fire in the barbecue pit.” Although the name People’s Park Annex stuck, someone painted a new name for the park on a fence, which was quickly adopted by the movement’s more militant wing. “Insurrection City” was a tongue-in-cheek mutation of “Resurrection City,” the name of the Poor People’s Campaign’s 42-day tent occupation on the National Mall in the summer of 1968 (the Poor People’s Campaign was to have been the next major action led by Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed one month before it began).

As landlords, BART proved to be less hostile to the movement than the University of California had been. Seeking to avoid the bloodshed and controversy of People’s Park, the transit agency almost immediately agreed to lease the land as a park to the City of Berkeley for $1 a year. Insurrection City became the launching pad for actions in the final weeks of the original People’s Park movement. After a 30,000-strong Memorial Day march, often considered the movement’s height, park militants celebrated with a wild party in the Annex. “People were stoned. There was righteous acid. And fine grass. A mysterious offering of twenty cases of wine. People fucked,” wrote a participant who called herself Country Girl, “Bonfires burned symbolically, flames often leaping for 20 feet or more into the pitch black night. Music was supplied by everyone. Guitars, banjos, harps, flutes, wine jugs, kazoos, and a few hands.”

Six days later, a torchlit night march started from the Annex to reclaim People’s Park. Before it reached the fence, police attacked, scattering marchers in all directions. Back in North Berkeley, cops ran amuck through Insurrection City, uprooting plants, breaking trees, smashing bottles, destroying playground equipment, beating a journalist, and in a particularly infamous incident, smashing a dog’s leg with a rifle butt. Disgusted by the police’s behavior, a veterinarian performed emergency surgery on the dog for free that night. The next morning, people set to work building the park all over again.

It remained in a state of legal limbo for the next decade, as debates continued over the future of “Hearst Strip,” much to the chagrin of the park’s neighbors, among whom there was little doubt: they wanted to keep the park. Throughout the 1970s, with the threat of bulldozers vaguely looming, the park thrived, remaining user-developed and community-controlled. After a four-way fight with BART, the Peralta Community College District, and real estate developers, the dogged persistence of the neighborhood finally won out. In 1977, the city announced plans to “develop” a park on the land. For a few years, the park bore the official name “Hearst Strip Park.” The park’s community bulletin board thought otherwise, with large letters proclaiming the space “People’s Park Annex” into the 1980s. In 1981, it was officially renamed in honor of the Ohlone people at the urging of a group of North Berkeley neighbors. 

Today, Ohlone Park is a charming, peaceful public green space. That People’s Park Annex has been allowed to persist and thrive while the first People’s Park has spent decades struggling for its existence owes much to the relatively reasonable approach taken by BART as compared to the UC Regents’ warpath mentality and obsession with settling old scores. It surely owes more, however, to the different kinds of communities who have made use of the two parks over the years. Few residents of the neighborhood’s $1.5 million homes might suspect that chants of “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse Tung, ruling class is on the run” and “Smoke dope, get high, all the pigs are gonna die” once echoed through its trees. “This park is fine for people living down here,” one of Insurrection City’s founders told the press in 1969, but “we still will fight until we get the People’s Park back.” Ohlone Park was born as a sortie in a war over whether public space would be controlled democratically or according to the whims of property owners. There has never been a more vital time than now to pose that question again.