The Village on Telegraph at Blake is magic. Throw in its history and the stories and faces of its businesses – even more magic.
The Village is an indoor mall that began life in 1945 as Harry Doten’s auto dealership. Doten owned and ran University Motors at C.J.’s Old Garage one building south, at 2566 Telegraph. He ran Doten Pontiac out of 2556 Telegraph and passed it on to his son.
In 1971, Larry Broding filed an application with the City to convert the building into two levels with a total of 21 small commercial spaces around a large common area. Hal Gilbert was the architect. What Broding proposed is today known as adaptive reuse, the process of reusing an old site or building for a purpose other than which it was built or designed for.
The January 14, 1972, Berkeley Daily Gazette featured a long story about what would become the Village – “Creative Shopping Mall to Have a Berkeley Flavor.”
Broding had been involved in developing a similar project one building south in C.J.’s Old Garage. With the Village, he sought to avoid the “more Bohemian atmosphere of C.J.’s which tended to scare people away.” For the new space, Broding wanted only tenants “with prior background in bookkeeping, marketing and other aspects of managing a business.”
Broding told the Gazette that his goal was to “develop Berkeley’s local color and personality” and to “rekindle the vital character of Telegraph Avenue.”
Rather than hire union carpenters, Broding hired “relatively inexperienced” hippies from the area who picked up skills as construction progressed. The crew and Broding worked off architect drawings, but made “daily and detailed alterations in every aspect of the plan.”
Original and/or early businesses included Achilles Sandals, African Bazaar, Crazy Dave’s fresh-squeezed orange juice, Dan Han, Divali Enterprises, Eurasian Imports, the Federation Trading Post (an early Star Trek-themed store), Lord of the Rings, Moon Shirt Emporium, the Naked Lady, Playback, Sitar Indian Food, and the Waterbed Cooperative. There was also a beer and wine pub, an air charter service, a waffle shop, a parachute jump school, and an artist’s cooperative. Fondue Fred came a few years later. Among the first generation of tenants was the campaign office of Ron Dellums, running for his second term in Congress.
If you are unsure as to its name, three signs tell you it is The Village.
There is a broad open entrance on Telegraph with a retractable garage door.
There is a smaller door on the Blake Street side of the building And – this three-arched brick arcade entrance at the northeast corner of the building.
Inside the entrance is an L-shaped courtyard with more-or-less random bricks on the floor. The courtyard was called “the commons” in the plans.
The basic construction of the Village is well kept up. Shiny. Happy. To my eye, it is surprisingly well preserved today, 40+ years later after “relatively unskilled” workers built it, improvising the plans as they went. Several flights of stairs lead to the upper level.
There is kitsch, a touch of it – it adds value in my book.
The Village in daytime is quaint and charming. At night – magical. Everything that looks good in the day looks great at night, sparkling with the twinkle of the strung lights. It is a different feel, dark and dark wood but colored lights and strings of white lights up the railing, brick walls soaring, shingles, the white (wrong!) ceiling and rafters. It is 1972 again. It is tonight.
The Village is a time capsule. Larry Broding’s vision as brought to life by his hippie carpenters survives and thrives. Like the headline in the Gazette said, it exudes “Berkeley flavor.” As Broding hoped, it rings with “Berkeley’s local color and personality” and “the vital character of Telegraph Avenue.”
The original 21 spaces have been consolidated. I count five restaurants and several other businesses. Each one has a story. Here are the stories of a few of the humans of the Village.
Norikonono is a restaurant serving Japanese food. Noriko and Takumi Taniguchi run it.
Noriko was born in Manchuria. She came to the United States when she was 14. In 1993, Noriko was eligible for early retirement from her job at UC. She decided to pursue her dream and bought the restaurant to run with her husband Takumi, whom she met while still living in Tokyo. They opened on April 29, 1994, the Japanese holiday (Showa Day) to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday. Now, almost 23 years later, they still live their dream. He grills, she prepares the side dishes. It is a great restaurant but that’s not the point here. The point is – it is her dream.
Noriko told Berkeleyside: “My life motto is: ‘kiyoku, tadashiku, utsukushiku soshite tsuyoku.’ What this means to me is to live pure, fight injustice and help others while keeping your love, sweetness, and politeness. But in the end, be strong enough to stand up for what you believe.” For her, standing up for what she believes in translates into “We’ll all come together to fight this new building.”
The Finfine Ethiopian restaurant is tucked in the southwest corner of the first floor. Roman Zewde opened it in 2001. She had worked in catering at the International House and for 12 years dreamed of opening a restaurant as popular as her mother’s restaurant in Adis Ababa, Ethiopia. She says that she named the restaurant after the source of the purest spring water in Addis Ababa. Her restaurant is her dream.
Lelah Heravi bought Fondue Fred’s in the late 1990s. She is Iranian, and explains that “When you live in war and you come to a country like America, you are grateful for everyday things.” She, too, has more than a purely commercial relationship with her restaurant and the Village. “We are all part of that building. That was our retirement. That was our passion. We’ve all put in so many years there.”
Roxanna Haas owns Arriba Peru on the second story. She came to the United States from Lima in 2004. She worked at the Peruvian consulate in San Francisco, dreaming of opening a Peruvian restaurant. Her dream came true on June 29, 2012. If she is forced to leave the Village, her dream will come to an end. She cannot afford the higher rents prevalent in Berkeley.
Aashish Shrestha owns Iresurect Repairs on the second floor, just to the right of the Telegraph Avenue entrance into the Village. He was born in Nepal and attended the Gamati Boarding Higher Secondary School in Katmandu. He moved to the United States in 2008, living in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana before arriving in Berkeley and opening his business in 2014. He repairs phones, laptops, and tablets. He considers himself a counterforce to the disposable economy.
Jacques Lacey is one of the owners of the Vapor Den on the first floor. When it opened on June 8, 2011, it was the first vape store in the United States. Vaping is the use of a handheld electronic device that vaporizes a flavored liquid. Lacey wouldn’t have his store anywhere else. He revels in the company of other Village tenants, especially the restaurants.
You can see – the humans of the Village add to its draw.
But – wait – there is trouble in paradise.
Plans are in the works to demolish The Village and build a 76-unit 7-story mixed-use building without parking, although each unit will have a dedicated bicycle storage space.
The prior City Council upheld the denial of landmark status for the Village despite efforts by neighbors to landmark it. I don’t know what the new City Council can or will do, but as a hopeless romantic, I wish that there were some way that this reminder of the past which so strongly conveys “Berkeley’s local color and personality” and “the vital character of Telegraph Avenue” could dodge the wrecking ball.
How about another shot at adaptive reuse, how about not destroying that which makes us different and special and Berkeley? If we aren’t careful, we’ll just be paving paradise.
How about, just maybe, going back to the 21-space configuration and leasing to artists? Why not an angel investor or even the City jumping in and buying the building, making it home for start-ups, an incubator for new and good ideas? Why not go back to the “local color and personality” vision and embrace art? Take at look at NIMBY in Oakland – see what Michael Snook has done in the name of
Tom Dalzell, a labor lawyer, created a website, Quirky Berkeley, to share all the whimsical objects he has captured with his iPhone. The site now has more than 8,600 photographs of quirky objects around town as well as posts where the 30-year resident muses on what it all means. A longer version of this post may be found at Quirky Berkeley.
