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On Sunday afternoon, Kimberly and I walked up to Founder's Rock, on the northeastern side of the UC Berkeley campus. Though I've since decided it was a bad move healthwise, It was a nice little trek through campus both ways, and a chance to see UC Berkeley landmark that I've never seen (though I've driven by it).

Founder's Rock is allegedly where the 12 trustees of the College of California (who were to give UC Berkeley's 160 acres to the state) met to dedicate the property in 1860. It's also supposed to be where Bishop Berkeley's quote ('westward the course of empire takes its way') was remembered in 1866 by Frederick Billings, giving rise to the city's name. I'm not entirely convinced that these historical dates are anchored in fact, but they certainly could have been.

Whatever the case, the site was remembered in 1896 with a plaque.

Founder's Rock is an interesting upjutting of rock that reminds me of nearby Indian Rock, and which was probably caused by pressure on the Hayward Fault. It's up at the northeastern corner of what would have been the original UC Berkeley land, and I can imagine that 150 years ago it might have offered a beautiful view of the virgin land running down to the cerulean Bay far below. In 1866 you could apparently see all the way out to the Golden Gate.

Founder's Rock was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, but it certainly doesn't look like it's been well cared for since. It's wedged up on a corner of campus, with no signs denoting its presence and no paths up to the rock itself. You have to scramble up some dirt paths to get next to it. We did so, passing a discarded beer can as we did.

The sign from 1896 has gotten badly tarnished. I'm surprised by this picture from 1960 when it still looked nice; ah, how things have changed.

Sadder, however, is the fact that there's no view here anymore. The trees which have been allowed to grow up around the rock would obscure part of the view, but the biggest problem is Cory Hall. It was built sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, as part of the same expansion that led to the creation of Sproul Plaza in the south.

It's an interesting contrast. On the one hand Sproul Plaza forms a beautiful frame for the historic Sather Gate. On the other hand Cory's Brutalist concrete architecture shrouds Founder's Rock in obscurity by not only hiding it from the rest of the campus but also by removing any visceral pull that it might once have had by removing its view.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in another 50 years, its become overgrown and all but forgotten.

Sitting in the middle of downtown Berkeley is a bronze-colored gazebo that looks like it's straight out of the 1970s (which, as it turns out, it is). It sits just a block from the western entrance to campus; the block of Allston Way in between is destined to (perhaps) one day become a pedestrian walkway highlighting Berkeley commerce. For now it's still a road and a culinary corridor, including everything from several fancy restaurants to Bongo Burger and Starbucks. Games of Berkeley has the privilege of sitting at the western end of one of the most traversed walkways in Berkeley, just across from the BART station itself.

(I didn't even notice the car illegally parked on the plaza next to BART before I pulled this picture out of my camera.)

BART, or the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, came into existence in 1972. It replaced the older Key Line train system--and indeed some of the BART lines in the East Bay--particularly those from North Berkeley to Richmond--run right along where the old Key Line used to be.

BART is not a bad transit system, but it's by no means a world-class one. Its biggest problem is that it's solely an arterial system, with major lines running to the major cities in the Bay Area. That means that once you get into the city of your choice, unless your destination is right on the BART line, you then have to transfer to another, less efficient transit system. Thus, even after a quick 30-minute BART ride into San Francisco, it can take another hour to get out to the furthest corner of the city, despite the fact that SF is a mere 49 square miles.

There are other flaws too. BART is a relatively expensive system to use for urban transit, with few discounts and no monthly passes. It also stops running for 4 or 5 hours every night, which has certainly caused me problems over the years. I've had friends crash at my place because they missed the last BART train, I've skipped gaming conventions in SF because the event I wanted to attend was after BART stopped running, I've avoided early airplane flights because they were too early to get there on BART, and I've almost missed the last BART train of the night when a flight into SFO got delayed. The fact that BART can't actually serve its customers through the middle of the night is surely the biggest embarrassment of the system, and something that keeps people from depending on it as their main form of transit. I'm also worried about the future of the system, as the state has been relatively reluctant to increase the system size over the years* and because it's running up to its limits for the number trains that can be run, resulting in BART starting to take some seats out of trains run at rush hour.

Despite the problems, I use BART every week to go to Endgame in Oakland. I used to take it down to Fremont when I was still at school and wanted to visit with the parents over the weekend, and I occasionally take it into San Francisco.

Getting back to Downtown Berkeley BART, it's an entirely underground station. As I understand it, there was room for the train to run above ground when it was built, and in fact BART runs above ground almost everywhere--other than downtown San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. However, the people of Berkeley didn't want an unsightly and loud train running above the streets, so they taxed themselves to put it under ground.

Thus, there's a large cavern under the center of downtown Berkeley, with four or five stairways running down to it from various places along Shattuck Avenue. The gazebo is simply the central one. Sometimes on a wet day, when I've been caught without an umbrella and I'm coming home, I'll duck underground at the northernmost stairwell and come back above ground in the southernmost one. It saves me maybe a quarter-mile of getting doused, but I think I particularly enjoy the feeling of temporarily dancing through a secret world, hidden beneath the streets.

There are three other BART stations in Berkeley: Ashby to the south and North Berkeley to the north, along the same line, and Rockridge to the east on the Pittsburg/Bay Point Line. Downtown Berkeley BART is the only one I particularly use, however, mainly because it's the most convenient to the library, restaurants, and the commerce of downtown.

(It's also marginally closer to my house than Ashby.)

* This is largely due to the high cost of BART as opposed to buses and other trains. However, I think these decisions are mainly made by out-of-touch politicians who have never ridden BART, a bus, or a train. I can certainly say BART is more pleasant, more convenient, faster, and considerably less likely to smell of urine. You have to pay to create a public transit system good enough that people will want to use it.

Last year I passed a benchmark: I'd lived in Berkeley for half of my life, since moving here in August 1989. Already, however, Berkeley had long been my home, the place I'd lived the longest--after living in St. Louis, Hoffman Estates, and Milpitas through my yougnest years and San Jose during the last 9 years of my adolescence.

I guess that just goes to show that my parents moved around while they were young adults, and I did not.

In any case, I've decided to write an occasional posting here to show those of you not from Berkeley what my home town looks like. Just keep an eye on the "tour of berkeley" tag (below) and you should see the posts.

Any tour of Berkeley must begin with the University of California at Berkeley. The city, you see, was just the northern part of the "Oakland Township" when work on the UC Berkeley campus began in 1868. Classes began at UC Berkeley in 1873, and it wasn't until five years later that the city itself was incorporated. Even today, when the city fills all the space from the campus down to the Bay, the University is its strong and vibrant center.

And, any tour of UC Berkeley must begin with one of its two best-known icons, the Sather Gate:

Sather Gate appears on any number of postcards of the city of Berkeley. For me it's iconic because of the Free Speech Movement, and pictures I've seen that show students marching for their rights through the gate*.

I also love the fact that its mere existence shows off the history of the city and the university.

Sather Gate, you see, is located on the south side of campus, whereas the most frequent entrance to campus is probably the west, the direction that points toward BART, highway 880, and the Bay. Further, Sather Gate is not actually located at the edge of campus, but rather several hundred yards in, past Sproul Plaza.

So why is there such an iconic entrance gate not at the main entrance to campus and not even at an entrance at all?

The first part of the answer comes from what I said earlier: Berkeley was originally the northern part of the Oakland Township. People got into Berkeley by taking a trolley north from Oakland, up Telegraph Avenue, a one-and-quarter hour trip when it was still horse-drawn. Thus, the south-facing Sather Gate was an obvious main entrance to the campus at the time, before the highway and a Union Pacific line appeared to the west.

(Now you can still make out the circle where the trolleys used to turn around, just outside the gate.)

The second part of the answer comes from the fact that the university has continually grown. When ground was broken in 1868, the campus consisted of 160 acres which lay between the two branches of Strawberry Creek. The southernmost of those branches runs right under the bridge on the far side of Sather Gate. Thus, it was the real entrance to the campus at the time that the Gate was completed (in 1910). At that time what is now Sproul Plaza was streets and buildings: the edge of the city of Berkeley. Today the University is 6651 acres. A lot of that growth was expansion into the hills, but the campus also grabbed an extra city block or so to the south, which is the area from Sather Gate to Bancroft Avenue.

So that's Sather Gate, the iconic entrance to the University of California at Berkeley, and thus one of the most iconic landmarks of the city itself.

* One of the things that I find interesting about the Free Speech picture is the fact that the four pillars that hold the gate each have big blank panels on them. They should have bas relief figures, as you can barely see in my own photograph. It's of the opposite side of the Gate, but there are four panels on each side. So, what happened?

These panels show classical nudes and they were taken down in the 1910s because of public protest. Fortunately they were saved and rediscovered almost seventy years later and reinstalled. But at the time of the Free Speech Movement it appears that they were still ... censored.

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Entries tagged with tour of berkeley

A Tour of Berkeley: Founder's Rock (UC Campus)

A Tour of Berkeley: Downtown Berkeley BART

A Tour of Berkeley: Sather Gate (UC Campus)

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