UC Berkeley took the shocking step of cordoning off People’s Park early Thursday morning with a wall of shipping containers stacked 17 feet high, the latest escalation in a long history of conflict over Berkeley’s most fiercely contested plot of land.
Cal wants to build student housing on the park, but the project has been stalled as the university fights legal challenges and fends off protests by activists to protect the historic open space. The move puts a perimeter around the planned construction zone while awaiting for the California Supreme Court to decide the park’s fate.
On Thursday, small groups of protesters chanted “Whose Park? People’s Park” while police in riot gear secured a nine-block zone around the park and construction crews lifted shipping containers.
It was just the latest stand-off in a 50-year-old battle over People’s Park that has been a costly, even deadly game of cat and mouse between activists and the university.
“There’s sort of a law of physics here, about action and reaction,” said UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof.
The first action came in 1967. The university bought a block of single-family homes and boarding houses, ostensibly to build student housing, but razed the homes to the ground and left the plot vacant for two years. Then a group of young people had the idea to build a park.
In May 1969, the university erected a 9-foot-high fence around the park, sparking mass protests that grew to 4,000 people on Telegraph Avenue. Police killed one man, James Rector, blinded another, and sent over 100 to the hospital with injuries. Called Bloody Thursday, the day forever enshrined Berkeley in the history of the 1960s social movements.
The fences stayed up for three years, pending plans to construct soccer fields on the site, until crowds tore them down during an anti-war protest in 1972. “They were not able to keep that fence up,” Osha Neumann, an eminent civil rights lawyer known for his defense of homeless people, said on Telegraph Thursday.
In July 1991, UC Berkeley brought bulldozers to build a volleyball court on the park. Protests erupted. Police and protesters clashed for 12 days, leading to 200 arrests. The courts lasted five years before the university tore them out and replaced them with grass — later installing basketball courts, which didn’t spark the same kind of resistance.
The proposed student housing project hasn’t sparked the kind of mass outrage that the parking lot did in 1969. When UC Berkeley unveiled plans in 2021 to build 1,100 student beds and supportive housing for formerly unhoused people on People’s Park, many students were on board, according to surveys conducted by the university.
The project also won the support of city officials, who agreed not to oppose the project and withdraw from two lawsuits against the university in exchange for a big hike to Cal’s payments for city services — an increase of $2.3 million annually.
Many also want to see the park become safer. In the last three years since the park became an encampment, crime at the park has increased, according to the university. The homeless people living at the park are often the victims of crime.
A loyal group of park defenders continued to oppose the project. There are other places the university can build housing, they argue, than on a historic landmark that continues to be a place for free expression and resistance. The park is also a resource hub for unhoused people, and some see it as one of the few places in the city where they will not be harassed. For its part, university officials have repeatedly said they will build housing on all available sites.
By obstructing the development, protesters hope UC Berkeley will eventually abandon the project and build somewhere else. Some activists want the park to be returned to Indigenous stewardship and to redirect funds from the UC Police Department to homeless residents and Cal students and staff.
In January 2021, when the university began fencing off part of the park to conduct soil samples on the site, a group of activists tore the fences down, egged on by Michael Delacour, one of the park’s founders, who died last March. They showily dumped the fences on the steps of Sproul Hall.
“They thought they were going to get away with doing their soil samples,” Russell Bates, a 78-year-old Vietnam veteran involved in the park since the 1970s, said at the time. “We’re saying, ‘No, you cannot get away with it. This is going to be more costly than you know.’”
UC Berkeley waited a year and half to make its next move. In August 2022, UC Berkeley began another midnight attempt to fence off the park. This time, the university was poised to begin construction. Again, activists swarmed the fences and climbed into trees to protect the park. The university decided to halt construction due to “unlawful protest activity” and the stand-offs cost the university more than $4 million, including pay and lodging for out-of-town police.
This week, the university leveled up its approach. It spent millions of dollars — Mogulof said he could share the exact figure next week — on 160 shipping containers, each weighing 5,000 pounds, to secure the park and prevent further disruption.
Cal Dining managers were told this week to prepare to host up to 1,400 law enforcement officers, though the university says it can’t confirm the number of police present at the site due to security concerns.
“We don’t want to have a repeat of what happened in August 2022, when there was violence and a million and half dollars in vandalism,” Mogulof said. “Time of day, time of year” — in the middle of the night, before students return to campus — “the number of police officers, because of the deterrent power of having this many officers, and also the shipping containers themselves,” Mogulof said, were all designed to “minimize disruption.”
Universities don’t typically use shipping containers to erect barriers around construction sites. But, as Andrea Pritchett, Berkeley Copwatch founder, said at the rally Thursday, “This is no ordinary construction project.”
“They have attempted fences in the past, and every time they’ve attempted a fence, it’s been torn down,” Neumann said. “So where did they go for their inspiration? They went to the most awful example of humanity’s failure to deal with social issues — the border walls.”
Two years ago, former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey began building a wall of shipping containers to secure a 10-mile stretch of the state’s border with Mexico. Activists occupied the construction site, running out the clock on Ducey’s term.
Activists see the wall as a sign the university is barging through without listening to its community, while the university and some of its supporters see it as a necessary eyesore to push through student housing opposed by an impassioned minority.
“The current state of Peoples Park does not reflect the original ideals. Protesters don’t represent the majority of our community who support needed housing and a new vision for the park,” Mayor Jesse Arreguín wrote on X, formerly Twitter, Friday.
Protests Thursday and Friday haven’t grown beyond 100 or so people. Police have made 12 arrests, including one felony charge. One protester was hospitalized after she said police pushed her head into the road during her arrest.
On Friday afternoon, crews were welding plates to cover gaps between storage containers and gates to provide site access. The makeshift wall is expected to completely seal off the park by the end of the weekend, and the university plans to keep it up “as long as it takes,” Mogulof said. “We’re in this for the long haul. This is too important to the campus and, we believe, to the community.”
But the park defenders are committed, too — some have been for 50 years.
“Now they think they have a huge, impenetrable wall,” Neumann said. “We’ll see.”
Supriya Yelimeli and Nico Savidge contributed reporting to this story.
