Some stories are impossible to write as an objective reporter. 

On Saturday afternoon, South Berkeley historian Donna Graves spoke to an assembled crowd at the Frances Albrier Community Center on the grounds of San Pablo Park about the life history of the Berkeley pioneer African-American woman for whom the center was named. 

The meeting was part of a Berkeley-sponsored Black History Month celebration both to honor the civil rights work of Albrier as well as to gather personal histories of the San Pablo Park/Longfellow School neighborhood that was once the center of Berkeley’s ethnic and racial minority population. The program was co-sponsored by the City of Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, the Frances Albrier Community Center, the San Pablo Neighborhood Council, the Berkeley Historical Society, and the West Berkeley Foundation, and included the presentation of a portrait of the late Albrier to the City of Berkeley by her children to be placed at the center. 

At one point in her presentation on Saturday, Graves related how Albrier had initiated a 1940 “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” civil rights campaign, putting community pressure on a Sacramento Street and Ashby Avenue grocery store to hire a black clerk. 

I realized that I had heard the same story many times in my life, but from a slightly different angle. My late mother, Maybelle Reid Allen, was the clerk hired at the store as a result of Albrier’s campaign. 

My mother, who grew up in South Berkeley in the ’20s and ’30s of the last century, often told me how she spent much of her childhood and teenage years at San Pablo Park, a tomboy who played football and baseball and tennis on the park’s courts and fields. As a 16-year-old, she met my father at the park, who had come there from his East Oakland home on a Sunday afternoon because San Pablo Park gained the reputation around the East Bay in the 1930s as a social gathering place for African-Americans. 

The park’s tennis courts were among the few places in the Bay Area where African-Americans could play competitive tennis in the 1930s. One of those who competed in tennis competitions in those years—Lionel Wilson—later became the first African-American mayor of Oakland. 

In addition, the San Pablo Park baseball diamond—now the home of the Berkeley High men’s baseball team—became a regular stop for barnstorming teams of the Negro Leagues. 

Richmond resident Betty Reid Soskin—one of my cousins on my father’s side, and a contemporary of my mother and father—described at Saturday’s gathering how she came out to San Pablo Park from East Oakland to the weekend Negro League baseball games with her father, who made pralines—a Louisiana candy—to sell to spectators. 

During those Sunday visits, Soskin said she got to see such famous teams as the Birmingham Black Barons—with whom legendary pitcher Satchel Paige began his professional career—play the California Eagles, an African-American team made up of local players. One of the Eagles players was Mel Reid, a star Berkeley High athlete of the 1930s, whom she met at San Pablo Park and later married. 

But while San Pablo Park was a social gathering place for African-Americans during the ‘20s and ‘30s, drawing black visitors from as far away as San Jose to the south and Vallejo to the north, it was also a center of diversity and multicultural life in an era long before those terms became popular. 

Participants at Saturday’s gathering related that while restrictive real estate covenants kept Asians and African-Americans from renting or purchasing homes in other parts of Berkeley during the early 20th century, the area around San Pablo Park was open to minorities. The result was a neighborhood mix where whites, Asians, and African-Americans grew up with each other, played together, and went to school together at nearby Longfellow. 

A 1938-era Longfellow School Holiday Card presented by historian Graves during a slideshow presentation at Saturday’s event illustrated the diversity of that school, showing a gathering of students of several races.  

“South Berkeley in the 1930s was the area that gained Berkeley its reputation as a place of tolerance for people with diverse backgrounds,” Soskin said. “That reputation carried over into the 60’s, when people from other locations heard of Berkeley’s reputation for diversity, came here, and made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.” 

One San Pablo Park veteran—UC Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa Elizabeth Gee—related how the South Berkeley community in the 20’s and 30’s was a racial oasis in a desert of discrimination. Gee related how her mother, a Chinese-American, was forced by the U.S. government to give up her United States citizenship when she married Gee’s father, a Chinese national. Gee later had to leave California to marry her own husband—who was white—because California law through World War II prevented marriage between the races—identical to the laws of the Jim Crow segregated South at the time. 

But Gee said none of that mattered in South Berkeley, and particularly at San Pablo Park. 

“I learned to play tennis here,” she said. “So did my brother, at the time when he wasn’t permitted to play at the Berkeley Tennis Club.” 

Another photo presented by Graves during her slide show pictured a young Gee—along with my mother, one of my aunts, and another of my cousins and two other African-American girls—in dance costumes preparing for a San Pablo Park performance. 

Frances Albrier’s son, William Jackson, related how he often ate at the homes of Japanese-American neighbors in the South Berkeley area, learning Japanese customs and language that served him well when visited Japan while working on a merchant ship that ran the trade route between the two countries in the years preceding World War II. 

When many of these South Berkeley Japanese-American neighbors were sent to Utah internment camps during World War II, Albrier’s daughter, Anita Black, told how many of them entrusted their property deeds to Albrier for the duration of the war to keep them from being seized by the government. 

White South Berkeley also residents related how growing up in a diverse neighborhood affected their lives and their racial outlook. Ken Berndt, who appears on the Longfellow Holiday Card, told of bragging to friends that he played with the black California Eagles team, “but they really only let me shag balls.” 

And Graves related the story of South Berkeley’s most famous white native, Johnny Valliotis, whose Greek-American parents owned a grocery store in the San Pablo Park area. Valliotis, an accomplished musician, spent his childhood hanging out with black South Berkeley friends, later changing his name to Johnny Otis and his public identity to African-American, often telling interviewers that he identified more with black than with white. 

In the 1950s, Otis became one of the pioneers of the rock’n’roll and rhythm & blues movement, playing to segregated, all-black audiences around the country with an all-black band, and helped write the original lyrics that later became Elvis Presley’s signature tune, “Hound Dog.” 

Graves said Saturday’s event originally came out of a plan to place a historical tribute plaque to Albrier in front of the Albrier Center. 

“I’m concerned that so many young people come to the center and don’t know who it’s named after, and what she accomplished for the community,” Graves said. “In doing research about Mrs. Albrier, I came to understand the tremendous richness that was present in the surrounding neighborhood during the time she was active.” 

Graves said that Saturday’s event was designed to bring out residents of the San Pablo Park neighborhood during the ‘20s, ‘30s, and the World War II years and videotape their presentations for the Berkeley Historical Society. 

“But there’s presently no money available to do decent, historical videotapes of these people,” she said. “They are all getting older, and we need to get them formally interviewed so that we can preserve their histories and their memories. A lot of Berkeley’s history will be lost, if we don’t hurry.” 

Graves said she is hoping that the City of Berkeley will make individual videotape histories a part of the city’s project for the San Pablo Centennial celebration, which is coming up next year. She said that City Councilmember Darryl Moore, who represents part of South Berkeley and who spoke at Saturday’s gathering, told her he would present that videotape proposal to the City Council.

Between Mayor Tom Bates’ State of the City address, a motion on the controversial Ashby BART housing project and a hearing on the city’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, Berkeley’s City Council will have its hands full tonight (Tuesday). 

Opponents of the Ashby BART project—a plan backed by Mayor Bates and Councilmember Max Anderson—have scheduled a 6:15 p.m. protest outside the Maudelle Shirek Building (Old City Hall), timed to occur while Bates will be inside giving his annual State of the City address. 

That speech will start at 6 p.m., after the council finishes a 5 p.m. work session featuring a budget update from City Manager Phil Kamlarz. 

In a Monday preview for reporters, Kamlarz said following the 10 percent city workforce reduction, the secret to balancing city budgets in the years ahead would be the elimination of cost of living increases for city workers. 

Contracts with city unions are due to expire over the next two years, starting with the firefighters’ compact in June. 

“We’re starting negotiations this month,” the city manager said. “The generous contracts we have had in place over the last couple of years have been above the median in comparison with surrounding jurisdictions.” 

Plans for the balanced budget in years ahead “would go sideways pretty fast if salary increases are given,” Kamlarz added. 

Meanwhile, because of additional, unplanned revenues mostly from property transfer taxes, the city expects to chalk up a budget surplus in the current two-year budget period, Kamlarz said. 

Another major issue in labor costs has been health insurance, with premiums increasing by 15 percent in the last year, he added.  

Ashby BART 

Councilmember Max Anderson’s resolution calls on the council to reaffirm its commitment to seeking a $120,000 grant from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to help plan a mixed-use housing and commercial project on the main parking lot of the Ashby BART station. 

Anderson’s resolution calls on the council to reject invoking state transit village legislation—a major sticking point with neighbors, who fear that the project would lead to upzoning and greater density in the surrounding neighborhood. 

The resolution would also reject the use of eminent domain in connection with the project. 

Neighbors have organized significant opposition to the project, in part because of fears of the project’s impact. The original proposal submitted to Caltrans by project consultant Ed Church, consultant to the South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation, called for a minimum of 300 housing units on the site. 

Anderson said later that 300 would be a maximum. 

Many of the concerns arose because the council’s vote to approve the funding application came more than a month after it had already been submitted. 

A neighborhood meeting last month drew a turnout estimated at 400, where most speakers spoke in opposition to the project. 

Anderson has scheduled a community meeting of for 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Paul’s AME Church, 2024 Ashby Ave., to answer concerns about the project. 

Landmarks law 

The council is also headed to a showdown over the city’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, pitting the preservationists like the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association and the city’s own Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) against developers and “smart growth” advocates, such as Livable Berkeley. 

The issue for the council to decide is which of two conflicting ordinances to approve—one drafted by the LPC and the other by the Planning Commission—or whether to craft a hybrid of their own, such as a proposal floated by Mayor Bates in December. 

Though tonight’s meeting was initially billed as a public workshop to discuss the ordinance, it is scheduled as a public hearing and listed on the action calendar with the notation to “adopt first reading of one of two ordinance, or a variant thereof ... or, alternatively, provide direction to staff to prepare an alternative ordinance to bring back to council.” 

Developers and other critics of the ordinance charge that landmarking buildings has become a weapon of anti-development forces, and that the law as it now reads leads to extended project delays. 

Supporters of the law generally acknowledge that it’s been used to challenge questionable projects, but say that delays have been largely due to city staff, and not the ordinance. 

Budget additions 

Because of one-time financial windfalls, Kamlarz is recommending that the council earmark $98,302 of general revenue funds to pay for disaster preparedness, hearing aids and the city’s Winter Shelter Program. 

That sum is part of the $1.23 million in additional revenues he expects in the city’s budget for fiscal years 2006-7. 

Of the immediate expenditures, the largest sum—$44,500—would be earmarked for disaster preparedness, with $38,802 budgeted for hearing aids for the Council for the Education of the Infant Deaf program and $15,000 to pay for alternative beds for the homeless after roof leaks forced the closure of the city-funded shelter at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. 

An additional $1.14 million in anticipated surplus funds would be earmarked for a variety of programs, many of them one-time capital improvement expenditures, said Kamlarz. 

The largest share, $300,000, would be allocated to replace street repair funds that had been shifted to cover anticipated overtime costs in the fire department. 

Another $292,6443 would be allocated to capital improvements in the city’s ailing stormwater system, and $200,000 would be added to the traffic calming budget. 

Another $144,000 would be slated to restore shortfall in the city’s Parks Capital Improvement Project, with $126,000 for a new backstop, pathway and picnic area improvements at San Pablo Park and $18,000 for improvements at Dorothy Bolte Park on Spruce Street. 

Kamlarz is asking for two $21,000 “Green Machines” to help clean sidewalks in the Telegraph Avenue and Downtown Areas in response to merchant and neighborhood complaints, and an additional $82,000 for the Community Choice Aggregation, which is a statewide program to encourage green energy, $50,000 for a bike and pedestrian gate to BART and $25,000 for special events funding. 

The extra funds come mostly from property transfer tax revenues, Kamlarz said, funds which can’t be relied on in the long term because of the volatility of the current real estate market and widespread anxieties over a possible bubble in housing prices. 

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Steve Barton, Berkeley’s housing director, said, “It’s probably the most complicated financial structure ever put together for a non-profit development in Berkeley, and quite possibly the most complicated for any Berkeley project.” 

But despite the complications, Barton said construction could start as soon as August on the David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza affordable housing building. 

Proponents say the project, which would replace the city parking lot along Fulton/Oxford Street between Kittredge Street and Allston Way, will become an international showcase. 

The city received word of the latest funding allocation Monday, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that the city had been awarded a $1.77 million grant and a $4 million loan earmarked for the project. 

The Brower Center, as the whole project is commonly called, involves two developers and an array of funding sources, as well as invisible lines that divide up the property into different parcels for funding purposes. 

Complex project 

The project will look like two buildings. With its greatest length along Allston Way, the David Brower Center will house offices of leading environmental organizations in a structure constructed to the highest green building standards. 

“We have letters of intent for over 50 percent of the office space,” said John Clawson of Equity Community Builders, which will be building the center for the non-profit David Brower Center corporation. 

“We hope to be applying for building permits in April or May,” said Carolyn Bookhart, project manager for Resources for Community Development, which will be building the 96-unit all-affordable housing building that will front along Oxford/Fulton. 

Known as Oxford Plaza, the building will increase Berkeley’s housing stock for low- and very-low income families by about 20 percent, said Barton. 

“It’s the only project of its kind in Berkeley,” said Barton. 

“We have other projects of similar scope,” including an 80-unit senior housing complex nearing completion on University Avenue, he said. “But we really don’t have anything comparable in the way of family housing.” 

Many of the Oxford Plaza units have two and three bedrooms, he said, providing homes for people who work in downtown Berkeley. 

Together, the two structures—plus the underground parking lot that will replace the spaces lost from the city lot that now occupies the site—will cost about $61 million. 

Invisible lines 

But because housing sources that pay for affordable housing don’t pay for creation of offices and retail spaces, the project is transected by invisible lines that reflect funding realities. 

While Oxford Plaza consists of five floors of housing, the ground floor is devoted to retail—a standing policy for projects built in downtown Berkeley. So the ground floor funding is linked to the Brower Center and separate from the sources that will pay for the structure’s housing component. 

Barton said the Brower Center itself is estimated to cost about $21 million, while the commercial ground floor of Oxford Plaza will cost $4 million to $5 million more. The final component, the underground parking lot, adds another $6 million to $7 million, he said. 

Costs of the lot have been assigned to the two projects, with RCD to pay for two-thirds of the costs and the Brower Center for the other third, Barton said. 

One component of the funding is a Brownfields Economic Development Incentive (BEDI) grant, funds awarded by the U.S. HUD to fund projects built on potentially contaminated sites—including former parking lots. 

It was that grant which HUD formally announced Monday, though Barton and Clawson both said last week that preliminary word from Washington had indicated that Berkeley would receive the funds. 

But the grant hasn’t come without controversy. As one condition of the funding, the city also had to pledge to commit $4 million in HUD Section 108 funding to the project, and to secure the funds by pledging an equal amount of the city’s Community Block Grant Development (CBGD) funding as collateral—a move voted down by a two-one vote in a Berkeley Housing Advisory Commission (HAC) subcommittee but approved by the commission itself. 

Critics worried 

Critics—including ousted HAC member and Berkeley Daily Planet Arts Editor Anne Wagley—cautioned that the city had committed its available Housing Trust Fund money to the project to the extent that other projects were precluded for a period of several years. 

City councilmembers also expressed caution when they voted to approve the loan, which puts at risk CBDG moneys used to fund a variety of city programs that benefit lower-income residents. 

“We are putting the funding for the city’s non-profit community groups at risk,” Wagley said. 

Wagley, who served as chair of the city’s Housing Advisory Commission (HAC), was removed from her post by City Councilmember Gordon Wozniak at the end of last June. She had been an outspoken critic of the project. 

“Both buildings will be built on top of a very expensive parking garage,” said Wagley, “and I would have been more supportive had the Brower Center been able to make a substantial contribution to its costs. But it became clear the city’s Housing Trust Fund wasn’t going to be the only contribution,” referring to the BEDI grant and the loan guarantees. 

Wagley said she also objected to tying up the city’s limited housing funds on a single project that was years in development when so many other projects were in need of the money. 

HAC member Jane Coulter says she wonders how the families in the 52 two- and -three bedroom units will get their children to and from school, given the project’s 40 total parking spaces and the lack of schools within walking distance. 

Another critic, current HAC member Marie Bowman, declined to comment, beyond saying that she had “heard a lot of concerns from the community. But it’s not the most positive thing for me as a HAC member to comment.” 

Tax credits and UC 

New Market Tax Credits will be used to help fund the Brower Center and ground floor commercial space at Oxford Plaza. 

“They are critical, because the cost of building new office space for environmental groups wouldn’t be feasible without them,” Barton said. “Otherwise, they would have to charge extremely high market rates, rates that would be at the high end of the market or above.” 

The program is a creation of the Clinton era, and is designed to fund development in low-income census tracks by giving major tax credits to investors. Downtown Berkeley qualifies for the program mainly because of the large number of students who live in the area. 

Unlike most of the housing recently built in downtown Berkeley, the majority of tenants won’t be single UC students, Barton said, because students receiving parental support aren’t eligible for the all-affordable apartments. However, students who are genuinely needy would be eligible for the studio apartments, and low-income married students and those with low incomes and families would be eligible for the larger units. 

There would be no units rented to multiple singles, however. 

And should the David Brower Center find itself without enough tenants to occupy its office space, there are no restrictions barring lease to the University of California, a point Barton acknowledged at the Jan. 24 City Council meeting. 

Deadlines near 

As deadlines approach, officials at RCD and the Brower Center are finishing the final funding documents and agreements and architects are finishing off the last details of their plans. 

“We hope to go to the city council in March with a development and disposition agreement,” said RCD Executive Director Dan Sawislak. “We’re still negotiating terms of the agreement,” which will be binding on the city and the joint development entity formed by RCD and the Brower Center. 

“The financing is coming together very well,” said Clawson. “We hope to be submitting building permits in June, and our objective to is to start construction in late summer or early fall.” 

Bookhart said RCD hopes to submit applications for its building permits in April or May. 

“Ideally, with financing secured by August for all components, we would start clearing and shoring” for the underground lot “in late August or early September,” said Roger Asterino, the city’s Community Development Project Coordinator. 

Those dates are critical because of the rainy season, which can start in late October or November. 

“Ideally, construction would be complete in late 2007 or early 2008, and they could then begin marketing, with full leases by May, 2008,” he said. 

“It could go another year,” added Barton.r

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is demanding information from the U.S. military about a report of spying on UC students who have protested the Iraq war. 

The organization said it will wait one more week for the requested information to be delivered before deciding to file an administrative appeal or take other legal action about the report of widespread military spying on American anti-Iraq War demonstrations, including those by students at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. 

The ACLU filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last Wednesday with the Pentagon, the three armed services, the Department of Defense, and the Defense Intelligence Agency specifically on behalf of UC Santa Cruz Students Against the War and UC Berkeley student members of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition. The request seeks documents related to possible Pentagon monitoring of the groups’ anti-war activities. 

“We’ve asked that the Pentagon and other agencies to handle this with expedited processing, and they have to give us an answer back within 10 days on whether or not they will comply,” said Mark Schlosberg, ACLU of Northern California police practices policy director. “If you don’t get expedited processing, the process could take years. They put you at the back of the line.” 

Schlosberg said his organization is still waiting to get government documents from a FOIA request filed in August 2004. 

The Northern California ACLU request was filed in conjunction with similar requests filed by ACLU affiliates on behalf of several anti-war organizations around the country. 

The requests grew out of a NBC news report in December listing a secret Defense Department document, obtained by the news agency, that contained information on more than 1,500 anti-Iraq war incidents labeled “suspicious” by the military. 

Included in the “suspicions incidents” was an April 20 and 21, 2005, protest against recruiters at UC Berkeley organized by the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition and a similar April 4 and 5, 2005, protest at UC Santa Cruz organized by UC Santa Cruz Students Against the War. 

The Department of Defense document lists the UC Berkeley protest as a “not credible threat” and the UC Santa Cruz protest as a “credible threat.” A note in the Department of Defense document on the UC Berkeley event said that the “protest took place without incident.” 

“We want to know where the information came from about these protests and organizations and what’s being done with it,” the ACLU’s Schlosberg said. 

He added in a prepared statement that “students should be able to express themselves on campus without fear of ending up in a military database.” 

National ACLU staff attorney Ben Wisner said in a prepared statement that “the Pentagon’s monitoring of anti-war protesters is yet another example of a government agency using its powers to spy on law-abiding Americans who criticize U.S. policies. How can we believe that the National Security Agency is intercepting only al Qaeda phone calls when we have evidence that the Pentagon is keeping tabs on Quakers in Fort Lauderdale?” 

In an eight-page document obtained by NBC, the Department of Defense listed reports on 43 anti-war activities between November 2004 and May 2005 in 18 states and Washington, D.C. The majority were listed as “not credible” threats.  

The April UC Berkeley demonstration was aimed at attempting to halt military recruitment on the campus. A Berkeley Stop the War Coalition flyer announcing the event noted that “the Associated Students at the University of California [had recently] passed a resolution that argued that military recruiters (who refuse to recruit gays and lesbians) violate the University of California’s anti-discrimination policy and therefore should not be allowed access to ASUC facilities.”

Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commissioners issued a scathing review of plans for the Prince Hall Arms, a four-story, 42-unit senior citizen residential and commercial building planned for 3132 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The commission was charged with reviewing the impact of the project on historical resources in the surrounding area because the project is receiving federal funding. 

Commissioners faulted project proponents for submitting drawings that inaccurately minimized the scale of the four-story turreted structure in comparison with surrounding buildings. 

By unanimous vote, the commission also said that the area of potential impacts needed to be enlarged. The commission also voted unanimously to declare that the structure as planned adversely impacted historical structures in the area, as well as their historic context. 

“I was very concerned about what looked like doctoring of the pictures” regarding the proposed building’s height and mass, said commissioner Patti Dacey. “This is like ripping the heart out of the context of the neighborhood.” 

James Peterson, who is representing the project for the Prince Hall Masons—an African-American Masonic organization created at a time when the Freemasons were excluding African Americans from membership—had told the commission that he would take the issue to the City Council “if you take action contrary to what I think is reasonable action.” 

Several project neighbors spoke in opposition, including attorney Osha Neumann, whose Victorian home and office is located next to the project. 

Dori Kojima, project manager for Satellite Housing, an affordable housing developer, spoke in favor of the project, which she described as “a great asset for the neighborhood.” 

Robin Wright of the Lorin District Neighborhood Association, called the project “truly horrific, with no redeeming qualities for the neighborhood.” Her view was echoed by other neighbors. 

“This has been very educational,” said city Housing Senior Planner Tim Stroshane after the vote. “I will revise my report and I will be submitting it on behalf of the city to the State Office of Historic Preservation.” The office will make the final recommendation to Washington. 

The hearing came at a bad time for the developer because the neighborhood has been galvanized in recent months by a proposal to build a major housing project nearby on the Ashby BART parking lot which has raised extensive opposition. 

H.J. Heinz Building 

Commissioners also turned down a proposal by the owners of the landmarked H.J. Heinz Building at 2900 San Pablo Ave. 

The building’s owners wanted to remove galvanized siding from the rear of the building and replace it with stucco to match the exterior of the building’s San Pablo frontage, but the commission denied the proposal on a 6-0-1 vote, with member Fran Packard abstaining. 

Gary Parsons, an architect recently appointed to the board by City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, said that the siding reflects the building’s past and the reason the structure was landmarked. 

At an earlier hearing, Parsons had suggested replacement of the aging siding with new and more durable corrugated siding that would replicate the original and last longer. 

The commission did vote to allow the demolition of an aging detached garage building that members agreed posed a traffic hazard in light of the anticipated increase in area traffic that would result if construction of a new Berkeley Bowl is permitted directly to the west. 

Commissioners also voted to landmark the Oaks Theater at 1861 Solano Ave., giving the owner an option to retain the structure in its present form, the result of a 1935 remodeling, or to restore it to its original Spanish-Moorish architecture. 

Hot issues 

The commission also dealt with a series of politically sensitive issues, including the new downtown plan, UC Berkeley developments planned for the Memorial Stadium area and the City Council’s deliberations over proposed revisions to the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO)—the law the commission administers on behalf of the city. 

Because the new downtown plan will include a survey of historical buildings in the city center, members Leslie Emmington and Dacey said it was important for commissioners to attend the meetings of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee that will be considering the topic. 

Members also addressed a March 8 meeting of multiple city commissions at which UC Berkeley is scheduled to brief them on its plans for a Student High Performance Center to be built adjacent to the stadium. 

As one of the conditions of the settlement of the city’s suit against the university’s Long Range Development Plan for 2020, the university agreed to brief city commissions on similar proposals. 

Emmington said the university should make a presentation to the landmarks commission because their plans directly affect several existing and proposed landmarks. 

“We request that the University of California come the Landmarks Preservation Commission at a regular meeting,” Emmington told commission secretary Janet Homrighausen, offering her proposal in the form of a motion. Dacey agreed, offering a second. 

With little discussion, the motion carried on a unanimous vote. 

A landmark application is pending on the stadium itself, and the university’s plans for the Southeast Quadrant call for demolition of two historic structures, and significant alterations to another. It also poses significant impacts to the landmarked streetscape of Piedmont Avenue/Gayley Way, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York’s Central Park who is considered the father of American landscape architecture. 

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Investigators seized more than 30,000 electronic child pornography images when they searched the locker last month of a Berkeley firefighter who is now being held in Santa Rita jail in lieu of $1 million in bail, said the prosecutor handling his case. 

Most of the images were seized from a locker at a Berkeley fire station, said Alameda County Deputy District Attorney John Creighton. 

“He didn’t even have a lock on it,” the prosecutor added. 

The suspect, 49-year-old firefighter Luis Ponce, a 17-year veteran of the Berkeley Department, was arrested at his home in Grass Valley on Jan. 26. 

He is scheduled to enter a plea on 57 counts of possession of child pornography on Feb. 15 in Department 104 of Alameda County Superior Court, Creighton said. 

According to the prosecutor, a search of Ponce’s fire department locker by a team of investigators headed by Berkeley Police Detective Angela Hawk turned up CDs, digital videos and one or two analog recordings of underage porn. 

“The subjects were under age, and as I understand it, the overwhelming number of them were of females, although there were some males as well,” Creighton said. 

Investigators were first alerted to Ponce when another fire department employee discovered child porn images on a shared computer and an investigation followed. 

A search made at the time of Ponce’s arrest in Grass Valley resulted in the seizure of computers and disks, Creighton said. That computer gear is still undergoing expert examination by forensic investigators in Nevada County. 

“Typically in these case, there are computer security systems with passwords and the like,” the prosecutor said. 

Each of the 57 charges now pending is a misdemeanor. 

“Possession of child pornography is a misdemeanor,” Creighton said, “while manufacture or participation in the manufacture of child pornography is a felony.” Distribution is also a felony. 

As one part of the investigation, detectives in Alameda and Nevada counties are trying to identify some of the children used in the creation of the images. 

“We’re trying to see if he did more than possess,” Creighton said.

Berkeley officers are investigating two different shooting reports that occurred during the predawn hours Sunday. 

In the more dramatic of the two incidents, about 30 shots were fired at a house in the 1300 block of Ward Street around 3 a.m., said Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Ed Galvan. 

One Berkeley officer who was parked about three blocks away reported hearing about 30 gunshots. 

“And then the phones started ringing,” said Galvan. “A woman who was sleeping on a couch in the front room said she awoke to the sound of breaking glass.” 

The woman sustained minor injuries to her left shoulder and hand which may have come either from bits of drywall blasted loose by the gunfire or from fragments of .223-caliber bullets which were fired into the house. 

Officers later found shell casings from both 9-millimeter and .223-caliber bullets outside the house. The latter rounds, which are used in assault rifles like the AR15, are designed to fragment on impact, Galvan said. 

Most of the rounds were stopped by stucco and other wall materials, and investigators later counted nine bullet holes by the front door itself. 

Galvan said investigators believe the attack may have been designed to get the attention of the woman’s son, “who is known to us.” 

Shortly after the incident and because of inconsistencies in the woman’s story, officers obtained and served a search warrant on the house in search of her son, who is wanted by police in connection with other charges not related to the shooting. 

The young man was not present and remains at large, Galvan said. 

No one in the neighborhood was able to offer a description of the shooters or any vehicle associated with them, he said. 

Just 90 minutes earlier, officers were called to Roundtree’s Restaurant at 2618 San Pablo Ave. after receiving reports that anywhere from six to 30 gunshots had been reported in the area. 

When officers arrived, a large party was just leaving the restaurant, but none of the partygoers reported seeing or hearing anything. 

One caller reported hearing a motorcycle leaving the scene at high speed immediately after the shooting, and officers were given a description of a possible shooter, an 18-year-old African-American man with short cropped hair and gold-capped front teeth who stands about 5’7”, weighs about 160 pounds and who waas wearing a black Raiders cap and a black hooded sweatshirt.  

Investigating officers found shell casings at the scene.u

Brennan’s robbed 

A gunman who waited until after closing time robbed the evening’s take from Brennan’s Irish Pub at 700 University Ave. early Wednesday morning, reports Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Ed Galvan. 

The manager was carrying the contents of the till when a bandit, his face masked by a scarf, shoved the barrel of a pistol into his neck and demanded the cash. 

The gunman then fled with his loot. 

Gets flocked 

Burglar or burglars unknown cut a lock and broke into the Lucky Dog Pet Shop at 2154 San Pablo Ave. that same evening and made off with or “liberated” some 500 pigeons, said Officer Galvan. 

The officer suspects the birds may have been released. Otherwise, “it would take quite a container to haul them away,” he said. 

Car clout interrupted 

A 23-year-old Berkeley man spotted someone in his car in the 2200 block of 9th Street at 2 a.m. Friday, only to find himself face to face with an angry burglar who confronted him with a screwdriver. 

The young man’s mother had meanwhile called police, and officers arrived moments later, in time to apprehend a suspect—a juvenile—nearby.  

Nothing was taken in the incident, said Officer Galvan. 

Sorry about that 

After a bandit tried to steal some jewelry from a 23-year-old woman in the Roxie Food Center on Dwight Way late Friday afternoon, language problems proved momentarily disconcerting for a hapless bystander. 

When the young woman—who has some difficulty with English—called out, workers in the store thought she was referring to a young man nearby, who they grabbed and held down until police arrived. 

Once the language issues were resolved, the poor fellow was liberated with apologies. By then, the actual would-be bandit was long gone. 

Hot, piping prowl 

A resident of the 2800 block of Ellsworth Street was awakened late Saturday evening to discover a pipe-smoking felon in a black trenchcoat in the process of burglarizing his domicile. 

The hapless inhabitant threw his only available weapon, a glass of water, and the darkly clad burglar departed, along with the resident’s laptop computer and his doused pipe. 

Coat heist 

A fellow with a knife robbed a 48-year-old San Francisco man of his brown leather jacket outside the Walgreen’s store at 1050 Gilman St. just as Saturday night became Sunday morning.  

New officers wanted 

Starting Monday, the Berkeley Police Department is looking for a dozen new officers to join the ranks of the city’s finest, reports Officer Galvan. 

“We just received the word, and we are hoping some Berkeley residents apply,” he said. 

The department is accepting applications though March 6, and a tentative date for written and physical exams has been set for March 18. 

Entry level salaries start at $76,284 and applications are available online. For more information, see www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/police/employment/jobinformation.html.

Hit, run, burn 

A speeding car plowed into a bank of three gasoline pumps at a 1580 San Pablo Ave. Shell station at three minutes before midnight on Saturday, igniting a blaze. 

The driver and occupants fled the scene as the flames erupted, and automatic shutoff valves limited the blaze, said Deputy Fire Chief David P. Orth. 

“The gasoline that was in the pumps and hoses burned up, but it was nothing like what you see in the movies,” he said. 

Firefighters quickly doused the fire, which had also spread to the car, and protected the other pumps and the accompanying Mini Mart at the station. 

The car owners never returned to the scene, Orth said.e

Planning commissioners will face a full agenda when they meet Wednesday night, while the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) faces a fairly light slate Thursday. 

Planners will discuss West Berkeley zoning changes that would allow Berkeley car sellers to relocate from downtown to areas near the freeway that are currently zoned only for manufacturing and light industrial uses. 

City Hall and Mayor Tom Bates are pushing for the changes as an effort to keep car dealers and their sales taxes in the city. The commission took up the discussion at their last meeting and continued it to Wednesday’s session, which begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Also on the agenda is a discussion of possible preliminary changes to the city’s creek ordinance, which affects more than 2,000 property owners whose homes and businesses abut the city’s above-ground and culverted creeks. 

The commission is also slated to set hearings on the environmental impact report for the planned new Berkeley Bowl in West Berkeley, a provisional extension of the ordinance governing low-income units required of major new housing projects and a joint meeting of several city commissions on UC Berkeley’s expansion plans for Memorial Stadium and surroundings in the campus’ southeastern quadrant. 

ZAB, which meets at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers in the Maudelle Shirek Building (Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way), will once again take up the case of Black & White Liquors. 

While ZAB had initially voted to declare the 3027 Adeline St. store a public nuisance in December, members relented two weeks ago and decided instead to allow owner Sucha Singh Banger to work out a zoning certificate with city staff. 

ZAB will hear a report on the conditions proposed for the certificate and may take action Thursday. 

Also on the agenda is an application by Spud’s Pizza, at 3290 Adeline St., for a beer and wine license.

A clean-air watchdog group is threatening to sue Pacific Steel Casting, if the West Berkeley foundry fails to permanently eradicate foul odor emissions within 30 days. 

The newly formed Clean Air Coalition (CAC) announced Thursday that it will file a multiple-action small claims lawsuit against the plant under California State Law Public Nuisance 3479, “for causing and maintaining a nuisance that interferes with (community members’) right to enjoy their lives and property,” writes Grace Neufeld, executive director of the nonprofit mediation service Neighborhood Solutions, in a letter to Pacific Steel. The group is helping CAC with its suit. 

Litigants from Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito will demand up to $7,500 each if the steel company, comprised of three plants on Second Street in West Berkeley, is unable to deliver a complete abatement plan by Mar. 2. The plan must detail, in layperson’s terms the “production of an odorless, toxic-less by-product,” said coalition representative Willi Paul in a phone interview Thursday. 

West Berkeley inhabitants and businesses have complained about the steel company’s noxious emissions for more than two decades, saying it causes headaches, nausea and shortness of breath. Many liken the stench to a burning pot handle. 

But Pacific Steel consultant Dion Aroner said suing the company doesn’t make sense. 

“From my perspective, a court suit like this becomes a distraction from trying to remedy the issue,” she said, pointing out that the company is already pursuing avenues to clean up its emissions. 

Prior Action 

In a recent settlement with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), Pacific Steel agreed to install a $2 million carbon abatement system that is expected to significantly reduce or eliminate air quality problems, said air district Executive Officer Jack Broadbent in a Dec. 23 press release. The project is slated for completion in October. 

The agreement also slaps Pacific Steel with $17,500 in fines for nine emission and permit violations. 

The West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs, a watchdog group that formed nine months before the coalition, held a meeting Tuesday to discuss the settlement and the future of Pacific Steel. The meeting gathered alliance members, air district officials, Councilmember Linda Maio, Mayor Tom Bates and delegates from other public offices. Representatives from Pacific Steel did not attend, because they learned about the meeting too late, a consultant said. 

On Tuesday, some alliance members hailed the agreement as an important attempt to improve pollution in the neighborhood, but also criticized it for failing to address the full spectrum of their concerns. 

“The settlement is a weak agreement that does very little to improve the situation, and mostly provided ‘feel good’ PR for PSC and BAAQMD,” said alliance member Andrew Galpern, in an e-mail. “It’s a tiny step in the right direction.” 

Paul, who is also an alliance member, agreed: “The settlement fell way short,” he said. The meeting illuminated those shortcomings, and the coalition formed as a result.  

Health Matters 

At issue is “not just an odor problem, but a very serious health problem for this community,” said alliance member Peter Guerrero at the meeting. “It’s producing emissions that are known carcinogens” such as benzene, formaldehyde and additional toxins associated with cancer, reproductive, respiratory, neurotoxic and other adverse health effects. 

The air district, which is charged with regulating air quality in nine Bay Area counties, confirmed that Pacific Steel emits those toxic compounds. The agency has not, however, found evidence to support claims that they occur in dangerous quantities. 

Pacific Steel General Manager Joe Emmerichs said what carcinogens the plant emits are “so minimal, most of it is burned off before it comes out” into the air.  

“There are people out there who think we have toxins, but we don’t,” he said. “We’ve never had an employee get sick from this. We have 600 employees. It doesn’t happen at Pacific Steel.” 

Nonetheless, a recent spike in production has prompted air district staff to conduct a formal review of the plant’s potential health risks. If deemed a hazard, the plant will be forced to conduct an audit, said Brian Bateman, director of toxic evaluation at the air district. The report is due in June. 

Some residents don’t want to wait. They’ve started measuring air quality themselves. 

Richard Spencer said a tester he used came back with levels of formaldehyde “higher than they should be.” He lives six blocks from the plant, and said he has experienced countless health problems since moving in 10 years ago: depression, sleep disturbances and dry, red skin, to name a few. He admitted he can’t directly attribute foundry emissions to his diminishing health. Still, he said, “I eat all organic food. I don’t know how else [I could be like this] unless I was picking up the pollution elsewhere.”  

Past and future 

The first odor complaint lodged against Pacific Steel was recorded in 1981. In 1985, an unconditional order of abatement went into effect, forcing the company to stop polluting the air. In 2000, the order was lifted, over much opposition from residents. 

Since then, complaints against Pacific Steel have steadily risen: 18 in 2001, 49 in 2003, 112 in 2004 and 533 in 2005.  

The upsurge in grievances—and the resulting settlement—is chiefly due to the efforts of the alliance, which formed in April, and encourages residents to call the air district whenever a foul odor wafts through the air.  

But Paul thinks it isn’t enough. 

“Our work puts legal muscle in support of many of the demands that the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs delivered to BAAQMD at their community meeting on 1/31/06,” he writes of the coalition in an e-mail. “The community has suffered for decades and now requires a ‘clean up strategy with teeth’ to bring PSC into compliance.” 

To Paul’s knowledge, this is the first time residents have trotted out a small claims threat against the company, he said. He anticipates that as many as 150 residents will join the suit, should Pacific Steel fail to heed the coalition’s demands. 

In the wake of a U.S. Court of Appeals rejection of the City of Berkeley’s bid to regulate telecommunications companies inside the city’s borders, one of the leading proponents of that regulation says that the issue should be dropped for now. 

“I don’t see a lot of hope in continuing an appeal to the United States Supreme Court,” City Councilmember Dona Spring said in a telephone interview this week. “It’s clear that the trend in these cases is favoring multinational corporations over the rights of citizens and of cities. The Congress, the legislatures, the presidency, and the judiciary are all coming under the control of these multinationals.” 

Last month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a 2003 district court decision ruling that two separate telecommunications regulations laws passed by the City of Berkeley were pre-empted by federal law. The Berkeley ordinances were aimed at a plan by Qwest Communications Corporation to provide expanded telecommunications capacity to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

“The district court ruled [in 2003] that the [Berkeley law] is preempted by the [Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996] because the ordinance imposed an onerous burden on telecommunications providers seeking entry into the telecommunications market in Berkeley,” the three-judge panel wrote in its January ruling. “The court held also that the . . . regulations that create this prohibiting effect do not merely regulate the City of Berkeley’s public rights-of-way but regulate the telecommunications companies themselves.” The judges said that Berkeley’s attempt to regulate telecommunications companies went against the federal telecommunications law, which precluded “states and municipalities from passing laws that ‘prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity’ from providing telecommunications services.” 

“We have interpreted [the federal Telecommunications Act] to be clear and ‘virtually absolute’ in restricting municipalities to a ‘very limited and proscribed role in the regulation of telecommunications,’” the appeals court concluded. 

A spokesperson in the office of Berkeley City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque said that the city attorney would discuss the court’s ruling in closed session with the City Council next Tuesday. The spokesperson said Albuquerque could make no further comment on the issue until then. 

Meanwhile, Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who opposed the Berkeley telecommunications ordinance when it originally came up for council vote, said that the Berkeley law “was patently illegal,” and Council “should have listened to me. Only once or twice a year do I say that the city attorney’s advice is wrong. I said it this time.” 

The Berkeley ordinance grew out of a 1999 contract between Qwest and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab to beef up the lab’s telecommunications facilities. As part of this contract, Qwest requested permits to dig trenches under city streets to lay conduit lines between Qwest’s central facilities and the lab. 

In the summer of 2000, in the midst of negotiations over permits for the trench digging, the City Council declared a moratorium on telecommunications infrastructure work within the city. In December of that year, City Council passed a telecommunications ordinance calling for stiffer fees and regulation of telecommunications construction in the city. That was followed by a period of legal maneuvering in which Qwest won a federal injunction preventing the city from enforcing the ordinance, and City Council passed a second ordinance in an attempt to clean up the court’s concerns about the first ordinance. Qwest sued the city, winning in federal district court in 2003, and setting up the city’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit. 

Councilmember Worthington sees the ordinance and appeal as a waste of the city’s time, even if they were in service of what the councilmember feels was a good cause. 

“They were trying to do something noble,” Worthington said, “getting a telecommunications corporation to mitigate its impact on the city of Berkeley. I’m all for that. If they can be made to pay their fair share, then send them a bill.” 

But Worthington said he felt the ordinance was doomed from the start, and said he backed up that view by passing out to fellow Councilmembers the opinions of several attorneys, all of whom Worthington said agreed that the ordinance would probably be disallowed. 

“I can’t think of a single Democratic federal judge who would have sided with the city on this,” Worthington said, “much less the Republican ones who now dominate the judiciary. I wouldn’t have even minded using a fight in court to raise public awareness to help change the federal law. But doing this all so quietly—as the city did—didn’t make any sense under any circumstances.” 

For her part, Councilmember Spring feels the Appeals Court ruling doesn’t bode well for Berkeley in trying to control what corporations can and cannot do inside the city limits. 

“The court has denied local jurisdictions the right to regulate trenching operations,” she said. “That means corporations can come in and dig up streets at will, and cities are in a very weak position trying to deal with the problems. We shouldn’t have our streets torn up without adequate compensation.”

After a relatively quiet period at the end of 2005, the Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees returned last week to the type of open-ended fiscal battles that marked the first of last year. If that continues, it would seem to dim the prospects of the passage of a new construction bond measure in the near future, which district leaders have repeatedly said is needed to repair and rebuild the district’s aging facilities. 

At last week’s meeting, trustees approved on a 4-3 vote a $2.3 million contract to construct 1,400 new bleachers, put in additional lights, and revamp toilet facilities at the Laney College Stadium. President Linda Handy, Vice President Bill Withrow, and trustees Bill Riley and Alona Clifton supported the contract, while trustees Nicky González Yuen, Cy Gulassa, and Marcie Hodge opposed. Hodge, who supported the stadium construction when it initially came before trustees last year, reversed herself and seconded Yuen’s motion at last week’s meeting to put off the construction. 

Money for the contract will come out of Measure E funds, the $153 million Peralta Colleges facilities construction bond measure passed by voters in 2000. 

The vote came shortly after trustees rejected—on a reverse 3-4 vote—a resolution by Yuen that would have put the bleacher construction off until a new construction bond measure is passed. 

In his failed resolution, Yuen said that “expansion of Laney’s bleacher seating appears nowhere on any list of current priorities generated by any of the personnel who actually work at or use the four campuses...or any priority lists generated by any of the District or College facilities committees,” and added that “the Director of the Athletic Department at Laney College, Stan Peters, has clearly stated on several occasions...that bleacher expansion is a relatively low priority for the department.” 

Trustee Riley, one of the supporters of the Laney stadium renovation measure, said the renovations were needed so that Laney could host a high school invitational track meet scheduled for April. Riley said the Oakland Invitational Relays, which originated at Laney but were moved to UC Berkeley during the past decade, draw participants from 110 high schools from Northern California and Oregon. Riley said that 5,000 to 6,000 spectators are anticipated. 

But under questioning from Trustee Hodge, Peralta General Services Director Sadiq Ikharo said that the permanent bleachers cIkharo said that construction would only be completed on the additional lighting and access paths to accomodate the temporary bleachers. 

The vote on the Laney stadium renovations revived some of the type of bitter debate that marked last year’s prolonged discussion over the proposal by Oakland developer Alan Dones to develop a portion of the Laney campus and the Peralta Administration grounds. 

Handy called Yuen’s attempt to stop the contract award “irresponsible. There hasn’t been any research on this motion.” Handy added that trustees “have already discussed the original proposal at length.” 

In fact, last week’s stadium construction vote was a continuation of a contentious debate last May, when trustees approved taking out bids for the construction. With Gulassa and Yuen unsuccessfully trying to table the matter for further study, Yuen argued that the vote would constitute a new bond measure expenditure that would prevent the completion of construction proposals already on the district’s list. 

At that May meeting, Hodge initially expressed concerns about the priority of constructing bleachers over what she called “other more pressing needs,” but later voted to support the stadium construction after a conversation with Riley.›

OAKLAND (BCN)—A University of California, Berkeley football player testified today that Dartmouth College student Meleia Willis-Starbuck was arguing with a group of men in Berkeley just before she was shot to death last July 17. 

Gary Doxy, an 18-year-old freshman from Long Beach, said Willis-Starbuck, 19, told a group of about six men at her apartment at the intersection of College Avenue and Dwight Way that they should leave, following a confrontation between the men and Willis-Starbuck and about four female friends. 

Doxy said the confrontation began after one of the other men called one of Willis-Starbuck’s friends a name. 

Doxy said Willis-Starbuck told the men, “This is my block and my street and I run this.’’ 

Doxy said that shortly after that, a shot rang out and he ran away as fast as he could. 

He said as he started running, he heard Willis-Starbuck say, “That’s my brother right there,’’ and another man also started running away. 

Doxy said he then heard three to five more shots. 

He said when he got back to his dormitory, which was nearby, someone told him he had blood on his T-shirt and he noticed a mark on his right wrist, which he assumed was from one of the gunshots. 

Doxy said he returned to the shooting scene a short while later and saw authorities attending to Willis-Starbuck, who he said was lying on the ground at the spot where he had last seen her. 

Doxy is testifying at the preliminary hearing of Christopher Hollis, a 22-year-old Hayward man and Christopher Wilson, a 20-year-old Berkeley man, who are both charged with murder in connection with Willis-Starbuck’s death. 

Authorities allege that Hollis fired the shot that killed Willis-Starbuck and that Wilson drove the getaway car. 

Hollis and Wilson are also charged with assault with a firearm in connection with the injury that Doxy sustained. 

Stew Albert, one of the creators of People’s Park, a former editor of the Berkeley Barb and a founder of the Youth International Party—the Yippies—died Monday at his home in Portland, Ore. 

He was 66, and an unreconstructed radical to the end. 

According to longtime friend and almost-codefendant Paul Krassner, Albert died of liver cancer. His passing was noted by newspapers across the country, and in scores of blogs. 

Albert achieved his greatest notoriety during the Republican National Convention in 1968, when he and other members of the Yippies ran a counter-presidential campaign with Pigasus as their chosen standard-bearer. 

Fellow Yippie Krassner, a satirist who now lives in Desert Hot Springs, said that he and Albert were originally slated to be prosecuted as defendants in what became known as the trial of the Chicago Seven, radicals charged with crossing state lines for the purpose of conspiring to incite protesters to riot at the convention. 

Krassner said Albert may have been the first to have had his head smashed by a Chicago lawman during what was later characterized as a “police riot” by politicians and the media. 

He said William Kunstler, the famed defense attorney who represented the defendants in the conspiracy trial, told him that he and Albert weren’t charged and had been listed as unindicted co-conspirators because prosecutors feared they would raise a First Amendment defense.  

Albert was covering the convention for the Berkeley Barb, while Krassner edited The Realist, a satirical newsletter. 

“Stew served as a peacemaker in the Yippies,” said Krassner. “Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin would have arguments about something and Stew would serve as a buffer.” 

One such dispute involved whether or not the pig originally selected as the party’s presidential hopeful was sufficiently ugly for the part. In the end, “Stew went with Jerry to buy a bigger and uglier pig,” Krassner said. 

Krassner first met Albert when Krassner was invited to host the first Vietnam Day Teach-In at the UC Berkeley campus in 1965. 

“I was first turned on to marijuana by him then,” Krassner recalled. “I’d tried it a few times, but nothing. He gave me some Thai stick and I said, ‘Now I know why we’re fighting in Southeast Asia—to protect the crop.’” 

Albert described his involvement in the creation of People’s Park in an interview for the April 20, 2004 edition of the Daily Planet. 

“I got invited to a meeting at the Red Square on April 13 [1969]. Michael Delacour presented the idea of building a park, and different people laid out the plans,” said Albert. 

“I was given the assignment of writing a story for the Berkeley Barb, which appeared on April 18, 1969, as a call for one and all to one to bring building materials to the lot so they could build a community park. I signed it as Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner,” Albert said. “The Barb story appeared on April 19, and the next morning between 100 and 200 people showed up. 

“The next weekend we had something like a thousand. It was all spontaneous, and there wasn’t much of a central authority.”  

At Delacour’s suggestion, he and landscaper John Reed had driven up to a sod farm in Vallejo, buying turf that volunteers laid on ground they had cleared and prepared. 

A few days later, UC Berkeley administrators announced their intent to turn the area into an intramural soccer field, setting the stage for the violent showdown that was to follow. 

On May 14, the university sealed off the park with a fence, and the following day’s demonstration turned bloody when Alameda County Sheriff’s officers, clad in the jumpsuits that gave them the nickname of Blue Meanies, marched on the demonstrators. 

A Berkeley poet was blinded by a shotgun pellet, and a San Jose man who was visiting Berkeley was killed by another shotgun blast, both fired by deputies. 

Albert’s involvement in the protests led to an arrest and a two-month stretch in the Alameda County Jail at Santa Rita. 

The following year he decided to run for Alameda County Sheriff against incumbent John Madigan. He carried the city of Berkeley and captured 65,000 votes. 

Albert also served as the liaison between the Yippies and the Black Panther Party, Krassner said.  

Albert was in Algeria when LSD advocate Timothy Leary fled the country and sought refuge in that country, where Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver was also in exile, Krassner said. 

“Leary had some acid, and Albert asked if Cleaver was interested in trying some with Leary. Cleaver was afraid Leary was going to try to program him, so he said he’d do it only if he could hold on to his gun,” Krassner said. 

Krassner said he last saw his friend in August at the Portland Book Festival. 

“He had become very involved in his old religion, and he wrote a column for a local newspaper called ‘Jews in the News.’ He had his website and his weblogs, and he was very accessible. A lot of young people who wanted to know about the ‘60s and the Yippies wrote him, and it made him feel good to see that the spirit of questioning authority was continuing,” Krassner said. 

Albert had moved to Portland in 1984 with his spouse, Judy Gumbo, who had been at his side since his Berkeley days and was a co-founder of the Yippies. 

His memoir Who the Hell is Stew Albert? appeared last year and is available from Red Hen Press. His website at http://hometown.aol.com/stewa/stew.html contains selections of his writings. 

Krassner said he’ll miss his old friend. 

“He was like a wise old rabbi in the body of a friendly blond teddy bear,” said Krassner. 

Photo by ©Robert Altman, 2003  

Stew Albert, a seminal figures of 1960s radicalism in Berkeley and the nation, died Monday at his home in Portland, Ore. In this picture he is shown speaking at a Berkeley protest in 1969.

The elephant before them was the groom in a shotgun wedding. 

And by the end of Tuesday night’s meeting, members of the panel planning the future of downtown Berkeley had invited the beast to take a seat—three of them, actually—at the table. 

The elephantine nuptial analogies were raised by members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, during a long discussion about whether or not to grant ex officio status on the panel to representatives of UC Berkeley. 

Last month DAPAC Chair Will Travis had earned the displeasure of City Councilmember Kriss Worthington for inviting the university to name four ex officio members to the panel. 

Worthington objected, questioning whether Travis had the power to invite members onto a committee whose other members had been selected by the councilmembers and the planning commission. 

Afterward, Travis sent a follow-up letter, inviting the university to participate “on an informal basis” until the issue was resolved. 

Procedure questioned 

At least one DAPAC member also objected Tuesday that Travis had acted unilaterally, extending the invitation without first consulting the rest of the committee. 

“I really don’t believe you had the power to do it,” said Patricia Dacey. 

“I really do believe we should stick to our brief and follow the rules” and the city’s handbook for conduct of Berkeley commissions and committees. 

Jesse Arreguin, a DAPAC member who serves on other city commissions, agreed. “Letters sent out in the name of the committee must be sent out with the consent of the committee.”  

Travis acknowledged his error. 

The committee’s existence and the formulation of the new downtown plan are a direct result of the university’s massive expansion plans targeting the downtown, which were revealed in its Long Range Development Plan for 2020. 

The committee was formed as a condition of the settlement of a city suit against the university, filed in an attempt to mitigate the impacts of the LRDP on the city and local taxpayers. 

Two informal university representatives were on hand to field questions Tuesday, Kevin Hufferd and Jennifer Lawrence. Hufferd is a project manager/senior planner in UC’s Office of Capital Projects and Lawrence is a principal planner. 

The pair occasionally offered comments and answered questions as DAPAC spent most of Tuesday’s meeting deciding just what role gown should play on town’s panel. 

In the lengthy discussion that followed, the committee made its first break from the tightly scripted agendas it had followed in its previous meetings, documents that blocked out specific time segments for each item. 

Committee Chair Will Travis had been adept at hewing to the timelines in earlier meetings. 

Travis, who has two degrees in planning, works as executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and was appointed by Mayor Bates to chair DAPAC. 

Juliet Lamont, Bates’ other appointee, said she had mixed feelings about the ex officio appointments, “but our best hope of working in partnership with the university to have an open dialog and make sure information is going back and forth.” 

No reciprocity? 

Several members wanted a reciprocal action by the university—city representation on the UCB body that will make decisions about the massive development the university plans downtown that sparked the city lawsuit that led to the settlement which included creation of DAPAC. 

But Vice Chancellor of Facilities Services Edward J. Denton, in a letter sent to DAPAC the day before the meeting, declared that UCB doesn’t have a committee paralleling DAPAC “and does not intend to constitute one.” 

He did acknowledged that “the university from time to time will consult with an ad hoc group of advisors, including faculty and administrators, willing to consider the university’s role and provide expertise to the university about our participation in the process.” 

The paragraph “really wants to say, ‘We ain’t got nobody you can meet with on our side,’” quipped DAPAC member and Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman. 

Referring to the proposed ex officio representatives, he asked, “Are we really getting the counterparts of Matt and Dan?” referring to Matt Taecker, the planner hired by the city to work on the plan, and Berkeley Planning Director Dan Marks. “I would really like to know what we’re going to get from this.” 

“What do we get out of this by having ex officio members?” added DAPAC Member and transportation Commission Chair Rob Wrenn. 

Wrenn said that if the university had permanent representation on the panel, he wanted to make sure other stakeholder groups had ample time to make their presentations to DAPAC beyond the three-minute public comment periods at the start of each meeting. 

Others agreed. 

“It’s disingenuous for the university to say there is no committee and then to say they are meeting from time to time with advisors,” added member Linda Schacht. 

“To me, the bottom line is to embrace the charge that we have” from the City Council, said Carole Kennerly, which is to work with the university on a plan that encompasses their plans for the downtown. 

Numbers question 

Dacey objected to granting four seats to the university when many other stakeholder groups aren’t represented on the panel. 

Arreguin, who is a graduate student at the university, said that he wanted the UCB representatives to include a staff member and a student, a suggestion immediately endorsed by DAPAC member Wendy Alfsen. 

But Dorothy Walker, a DAPAC member who retired from the university as assistant vice chancellor for property development, called on the panel to embrace a “golden opportunity.” 

“The decision process will not involving plumbing the thoughts of students and staff,” she said, urging the panel to name university decision-makers, “the higher the level, the better.” 

Committee member Winston Burton then suggested that the university appointees be limited to two, the same number each councilmember appointed. 

Victoria Eisen said she would welcome four or six. 

At that point Planning Commissioner and DAPAC member Helen Burke interjected. 

“First, I think this whole process is like a shotgun wedding. Nobody wants it but we’re here at the table and the bridegroom needs to be at the table,” she said. 

“And the bridegroom’s an elephant,” called out another member. 

Burke said she’d supported two UC officials, but colleague and former City Councilmember Mim Hawley suggested three—to match the three planning commissioners serving on the committee. 

Burke agreed, although Poschman, one of the three planning commissioners, quipped, “How about reducing the planning commission to two?” 

A motion followed to recommend that the council invited three members, and when it came to a vote, only Dacey opposed. 

The final decision rests with the City Council, which is expected to endorse the decision. 

Committee members never got around to sharing their three goals for downtown Berkeley—an assignment from Travis. Instead, they were asked to submit them by e-mail for discussion at the group’s next meeting Wednesday. 

At that session Dan Marks and city Economic Development Director Dave Fogarty are scheduled to present information on the demographics and economic trends of the downtown, and the panel is also expected to name a subcommittee that will focus on the historic character of the city center. ›

SAN FRANCISCO—Turn a quiet corner of the U.S. health care system and bump into a medical niche unknown — and unavailable — to most patients.  

While many Americans are traveling to India and Singapore for affordable lifesaving or cosmetic procedures, affluent foreign patients are paying cash upfront for stateside surgery and routine checkups in large medical centers with concierge services that cater to traveling families’ banking, dining and shopping desires.  

Call it medical tourism, American style.  

Bouncing back from a post-9/11 setback in Middle Eastern patients by reaching out to Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, this market is competitive and lucrative. Neither the American Hospital Association nor the federal government knows the total number of foreign patients who received care at U.S. international medicine centers last year, or how much revenue U.S. hospitals and local economies reaped for treating them and hosting their families. According to “The Healthcare Business Market Research Handbook,” by Richard K. Miller and Associates, annual revenue to U.S. hospitals for treating foreign patients who return home afterward totals more than $1 billion.  

Mayo Clinic. Johns Hopkins. Cleveland Clinic. Texas Medical Center. Together with nine medical facilities in Philadelphia, these domestic drivers of medical tourism alone report welcoming more than 30,000 patients from more than 100 countries last year.  

Philadelphia International Medicine (PIM) is the only U.S. medical consortium formed specifically to attract foreign patients to one metropolitan area, according to Leonard Karp, executive vice president and chief operations officer. Among its members are University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Temple University Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Founded six years ago, PIM is also building a hospital in Korea at an estimated cost of $860 million.  

“Originally, our hope was to generate $200 million a year for the Philadelphia region, with about 6,000 patients generating $60 million in revenue,” Karp says. “Since 9/11, we have restructured to be in a better position to withstand world events. This year, we attracted between 4,000 and 5,000 patients, mostly from the Caribbean, Middle East and Brazil, who generated more than $60 million in economic activity in Philadelphia.”  

Like his competitors, who attract at least double the number of overseas patients, Karp is secretive about total revenue and profit figures. Middle Eastern embassies regularly arrange payments for their patients, he says. Other patients pay cash or use insurance from companies with PIM contracts. Foreign patients can pay as much as 100 percent more than domestic patients.  

Most health care observers consider marketing these centers a savvy way to make money in a broken health care system. But because doctor-patient communication in every major language is at the core of these programs, their interpretation services are the envy of health professionals serving as many as 20 million U.S. residents who barely speak English. These immigrants would be lucky to find a full-time, trained medical interpreter in a major metropolitan area emergency room.  

Patients who speak limited English risk misdiagnosis, medical errors and poor quality of care, according to widespread research on language access in health care. These patients are more likely than others to report being in fair or poor health, defer needed medical care and experience drug complications. Guaranteed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a protection against discrimination based on national origin, medical interpreting is often called health care’s biggest “unfunded mandate.” But failure to afford an interpreter will not prevent a malpractice lawsuit or civil rights investigation when mistakes from lack of communication result in injury or death.  

In some cases, immigrants with a limited grasp of English who live and work near international medical centers can benefit from these facilities’ commitment to hiring full-time interpreters. For instance, Johns Hopkins Medicine International reports having 40 full-time and 45 on-call interpreters; Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, 38 fulltime interpreters and 25 on-call employees; Cleveland Clinic, 35 staff interpreters; and Texas Medical Center, 10 full-time interpreters and 25 bilingual staffers.  

“When our international patient coordinators have time to assist domestic patients who are limited-English-proficient, they do so,” says Mika Dulay, project analyst for the Johns Hopkins International Call Center in Baltimore, Md. “Domestic patients who speak unusual languages might have to wait 60 or 90 minutes to get an in-person interpreter, and we also use telephonic interpreting.”  

In the Philadelphia international consortium, however, “there is a difference between use of medical interpreting for domestic patients who barely speak English and foreign patients,” Karp says. “It’s daunting for U.S. patients who speak English. You can imagine how it is for a person from a foreign country who doesn’t speak English... We wouldn’t want to use a telephonic interpreting service for the foreign patient unfamiliar with our culture and not speaking English. It’s pretty impersonal. But telephonic works well in emergencies in hospitals for domestic patients who may not speak English.”  

It’s the nature of the world that “crazy amounts of money buy good health care like trained medical interpreters,” says Heng Foong, program director of PALS for Health, a community-based organization offering free, professional health care interpreting in Los Angeles and Orange County. “Do I think it’s fair to someone who’s living in this country and can’t afford it? No. But this is a hard nut to crack. Very few people are willing to talk about it.”  

From where I sit on Thursdays in the Friends’ bookstore at the Central Library, I can watch parents and their children streaming into the elevator for the ride up to the Children’s Room on the fourth floor. I remember 50 years ago when my own children and I climbed the endless staircase up to what was then the library’s top floor. They loved hearing their voices and footsteps echoing in the tall space and the exhilarating—and scary—glimpses down the stairwell. 

On my first visit recently—in the new elevator—I was delighted to discover in this grand new space that the old library continues to occupy alcoves along the north wall. The high peaked windows with their window seats, the original fireplace, and even the pint-sized, round oak tables, each with four chairs, remain—though all refurbished and looking as they must have looked when the new library first opened in 1932. 

Then, as now, the Children’s Room and the children’s library section in the four branch libraries, are often a Berkeleyan’s first introduction to the world of books. There will always be an exquisite pleasure to possessing—even for a limited time—one’s own selection of books.  

Senior librarian Elizabeth Overmyer, who is primarily responsible for the various special children’s programs including the summer reading program, points up through the new two-story window wall. “When we’re outside on the sidewalk, I ask the children to look up toward the top of one of the columns and they claim they see nothing special. Then when we are upstairs, I ask them to look again and they discover to their delight, the stern face of a concrete ram seeming to look intently at them through the window.” 

In front of the windows, board books for babies and toddlers are displayed in special low shelves. Kids sprawling on the colorful carpet share the space with two large stuffed bears. 

Across the way is the picture book alcove with hundreds of books. Elizabeth, who moves with the agility and enthusiasm of the very young, tells the story of the quilt hanging on the wall. “Each of the nine squares depicts a beloved children’s book and as one might expect, an illustration from Goodnight, Moon occupies the upper left-hand corner,” she says. “This particular piece was done for us by Olivia Hurd, the daughter-in-law of Clement Hurd, the book’s illustrator,” she adds. Turning over a corner of the quilt, she reveals dozens of signatures. “In the week before we opened the remodeled library, all the staff visited the Children’s Library and each member made a stitch on the quilt and signed their name.” 

At the reference desk, we are joined by librarians Armin Arethna and supervising library assistant Susan Huish. Armin conducts the Wednesday morning “Baby Bounces” and Susan combines time on the reference desk with the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep the department running smoothly. Passing through the area with its wide assortment of books on tape, CDs, videos, and DVDs, we open the heavy door to the Story Room which once served as the library’s art gallery and is still illuminated by skylights.  

Armin gets out the box of mariachis, tambourines, and sticks—always a big moment in the Baby Bounce. “The children and babies range in age from six months to three years,” she says. “To keep them engaged we provide lots of activity including finger plays, very short stories, and the music-making.” 

“Once a month we have a special performer such as a puppeteer or magician,” she adds. 

In a perfect example of serendipity, the east-facing window frames downtown Berkeley’s most charming building—the story-book clinker brick, slate-roofed Tupper and Reed building with its tall chimney topped by the iron silhouette of a prancing piper, horn raised to the sky. The spell of this being a pre-arranged stage set is broken only by stepping forward and looking down onto Shattuck Avenue and seeing the AC Transit buses. 

The Children’s Library isn’t just about spinning delights inside and out, of course, it’s also about education and research. Linda Perkins, the head of Children’s Services points out that they serve kids up through the eighth grade. “Teachers bring their classes and we show them how to use a variety of material, including our on-line catalogs and electronic resources. We also have book collections in several languages and an assortment of magazines.” 

But it’s the summer reading program—one of the many programs sponsored by the Friends—that probably helps most to establish a life-long reading habit. “At the end of the spring semester, the children’s librarians from the Central Library and all the branches go out to the schools to explain the program and invite the children to participate,” Linda says. “Our reward is when teachers tell us they know which children have kept up their reading over the long summer.” 

Photograph by Stephan Babuljak: 

Amanda Bristow reads to her 3-year-old son George at the central branch of the Berkeley Public Library on Wednesday.ô

Residents of Berkeley and surrounding communities with a connection to San Pablo Park during the years from the Depression through the 1960s have been invited by the city to come to the park this Saturday to share their memories. 

The program, co-sponsored by the City of Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, the Frances Albrier Community Center, the San Pablo Neighborhood Council, the Berkeley Historical Society, and the West Berkeley Foundation, will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Frances Albrier Center, 2800 Park St., on the San Pablo Park grounds. 

Albrier was a community and social activist in the South Berkeley and San Pablo Park areas during the middle decades of the last century, and one of the purposes of Saturday’s meeting is to inform current neighborhood and city residents about her work. 

“As I dug more deeply into Albrier’s life, I realized her remarkable activism took place in a neighborhood that had its own fascinating history,” said local historian Donna Graves, the director of the event. Graves was recently involved in a similar collection of community historical memories of people who came to Richmond during World War II to work in the shipyards. 

Participants in Saturday’s San Pablo Park event are being asked to bring photos and other memorabilia from the San Pablo Park neighborhood for archival scanning. In addition, the personal histories presented at Saturday’s event will be video recorded for preservation at the Berkeley Public Library’s History Room and the Berkeley Historical Society.

The headline is a quote from the father of a friend of mine, who knew whereof he spoke. The aptness of his cynical worldview has been apparent in the last week.  

On Monday morning, the Daily Planet received in short order multiple copies of the following letter over different signatures, one of which added the original material which is in square brackets: 

I’m writing to say that, as a member of the media in a free society, you have a RESPONSIBILITY to publish the controversial cartoons on Islamofascism. 

I can understand the indignation of having your religion, and your religious leaders, portrayed in unflattering, even blasphemous, ways by secularists in the mainstream media. It happens to Christians ALL THE TIME in America and Europe. [You don’t see them cutting off heads—if you live in a free socity [sic] anyone has a right to offend you. That is freedom of speech, when that freedom is taken away by people who don’t agree with you, this is down right and simple communism. In America the ACLU is trying to shutdown the freedoms of Christians in the public square. You can’t mention JESUS, and now in America you get arrested. You can’t have anti protest because certain groups of people have more rights than you.] If you allow this censorship, you will allow the Islamic Fascism to win. 

But indignation is NEVER an excuse for violence. And threats of violence need to be *resisted* in free nations. And the best form of resistance to Islamofascist threats here? PUBLISH THE CARTOONS. 

As freedom-loving people, we need to resist the Islamofascists on ALL fronts. In solidarity with the people of free Europe and in support of the concept of freedom of the press, you need to PUBLISH the Danish cartoons.  

Thank you. 

We get entirely too many form letters like this from people who can’t seem to think for themselves, or who have disasterous results when they try. Fortunately, the addresses on most of this group of letters were not local, so the signers probably aren’t even Planet readers, but have used some kind of robot letter generator from some half-witted organization or other. We’d hate to think we were surrounded by them in the East Bay.  

This just in: The stupids are not confined to one religion, nationality, ethnic group or continent. It’s tempting to run up a whole series of cartoons along the lines of the Danish right wing models targeting the foibles of all known religions equally, but we can’t begin to afford enough space to do that on our budget. And also, the tiniest pinprick of possible criticism against any kind of religious organization in the past has subjected us to a deluge of ignorant and vituperative letters which clogged our e-mail for weeks. Comedians sometimes lament that you can’t satirize anything anymore, and they may be right. If we’re going to start up that machine again, we’ll at least do it with our own editorial cartoons, not someone else’s. 

For birthright citizens of what used to be considered a secular society, the concept of blasphemy is hard to parse. We would never have thought, for example, that what seemed to be a gently humorous soft feature on Berkeley’s annual pagan—oh, sorry, Pagan—parade, accompanied by a picture of two young ladies in fairy wings smoking cigarettes while leaning on the hood of a pickup, could be so offensive to so many. We even got letters from Pagans in South Africa. Their main beef? We didn’t capitalize Pagan, as we do Christian or Moslem.  

Religious people, all religious people, should become aware that there are at least some people on this earth who think that most if not all of their cherished beliefs and pretentions are silly. That’s right, silly. Not necessarily awesome, just silly. And equally silly, for the most part.  

We acknowledge the wholesome role of most religious traditions in encouraging what we think is desirable behavior: kindness, honesty, etc. But we also notice that many non-religious people do just fine on these dimensions without believing any of the silly stuff.  

Bad behavior is sometimes encouraged by the belief system of some religions, but much more often by errant members of religious groups who aren’t sanctioned by the authorities in their denomination, whoever the authorities might be. Stupid epithets like “Islamofascist” are created by people who can’t figure out which of these categories is which. “They’re everywhere, the stupids.” 

Yes, plenty of Moslems don’t respect freedom of speech, but neither do plenty of other people who should know better. 

We’re reminded of a wicked couplet attributed variously on the Internet to Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash and Hilaire Belloc: 

“Happy little moron, he doesn’t give a damn. 

I wish I were a moron—my God, perhaps I am.”  

Or, as stated more politely in the Christian tradition, “let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.”  

B

Thanks, Cindy Sheehan, for giving us a nice hook for one of our periodic lectures on why everyone should love the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Here’s what it says: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  

Justice Hugo Black used to holler at doubters “that means NO LAW!” — nothing, for instance, like saying that Cindy couldn’t wear a t-shirt with the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq printed on the front to the State of the Union address. Congress didn’t pass any such law, but that didn’t stop the Capitol police from thinking they had. Even the police have finally, belatedly, figured it out, perhaps helped by the Congressman whose wife was also reprimanded for expressing a pro-government point of view on her own t-shirt. Mrs. Congressperson, however, was not arrested, though Cindy was. 

Subsequent amendments and interpretations have extended the prohibition on restricting speech to all government bodies. The government, in any of its multifarious manifestations (federal, state, local) may not restrict the content of political speech, period, and it has to watch its step in trying to stop other kinds of speech as well. The City of Berkeley learned this lesson a few years ago, expensively, by taking a city law which tried to keep citizens from begging for money in undesired spots, like near ATMs, as far as the federal appeals court. Berkeley’s own judge Claudia Wilken, at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued an injunction against the enforcement of the Berkeley ordinance because it purported to regulate the content of panhandlers’ speech.  

A lot of otherwise politically astute people don’t quite understand the special role of government action in the free speech debate. A discouraging number of well-meaning critics, including members of the anti-war Code Pink organization and letter-writers to this very paper, thought that BART should not have rented advertising space for an anti-abortion ad to a religious group.  

Wrong. BART is a government entity, and under both the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion clauses it can’t censor the content of its ads. And besides, everyone benefits from knowing what the sponsors of these ads think, even if we don’t agree with them.  

Other countries, even other “democracies,” don’t have the same ingrained reverence for free speech which our own First Amendment ensures. Just this week, Britain narrowly escaped passage of another Tony Blair special, a proposal to make it a criminal offense to incite religious hatred through threatening words or actions, which critics interpreted as banning any criticism of religion whatsoever. Around the world countries left and right, democratic and undemocratic, have repeatedly tried and sometimes succeeded in passing similar regulations. 

Some first amendment purists would argue that dissenters have the right to scrawl rude comments on the BART ads if they want, or even to tear them up. Whether or not dissenters to any speech should be allowed to silence their opponents is a hot, endlessly disputable topic which often comes up in the context of hecklers at lectures on campuses. But the key difference is that individuals tearing up signs and shouting down speakers are not government action, though they may be regarded as rude.  

A lot of people do have a problem with rudeness in discussions. The Washington Post’s ombudsperson expressed shock because e-mail correspondents and bloggers scathingly criticized the paper for implying that Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats, when in fact he didn’t, though some of his clients did. The comments that were so shocking to the Post were not untrue, obscene or personal, though they were very pointed, sometimes vulgar and occasionally profane. The Post in its horror shut down its blog, but that can’t last forever. This is the new new journalism, where the readers talk back, as any regular reader of the Daily Planet’s opinion pages can attest, and the old media will just have to get used to it.  

We’re used to it, though we sometimes cringe at the vituperative tone of some attacks on our paper. About the only thing we don’t print is personal attacks on private individuals, because we have no way of checking whether they’re true or not.  

Researching this piece did bring to our attention that we received one letter about the Abramoff affair that we failed to print, because we’d mislaid it, as sometimes happens around here. If letters and comments aren’t addressed to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com, and sometimes even if they are, they can get lost. In any event, here it is now, from a stalwart supporter of the Planet: 

Your editorial makes it look like Abramoff gave money to Boxer. Abramoff gave no money to Democrats. An Indian tribe did give money to Boxer, including one tribe tied to Abramoff. There is no evidence that Abramoff directed the gift. Certainly the Republicans would like to spin the events to make the Democrats look bad also. Please pull down the Internet posting of your editorial, as it is misleading, clarify your editorial, and re-post it on the Internet. 

—Tim Hansen 

We can’t take mistakes out of our archives, but we can run subsequent corrections which should be found by online searches. Tim is absolutely right—we were misled, as thousands of other irate readers were not, by what we read in the Post and elsewhere, and we appreciate the correction, as we do all corrections.  

B

To view Justin DeFreitas’ latest editorial cartoon, please visit  

www.jfdefreitas.com To search for previous cartoons by date of publication, click on the Daily Planet Archive.



TRIBUNE REPORTER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You guys must be really desperate for news. If any of you knew Alex Katz, you would know that he is a first-rate reporter who is as objective as a reporter can be. Like Cynthia Gorney said, there is no proof of any bias in Katz’ school stories. And what would you do in his place? Give notice to the Oakland Tribune before you had secured another job? Don’t be idiots. If you are real journalists, you know that stories are often held for days after they’re written, and any story printed on Friday, Jan. 13 or Monday, Jan. 16, was obviously completed, or near completion, before he gave notice on Jan. 12. Do you really think it was Katz’ intention, by writing a story about the closing of the Castlemont High School Library, to aid OUSD in their negotiations with the teachers’ union? Sounds to me like the Daily Planet has big newspaper envy. 

Meghan Ward 

• 

ETHICS ISSUES? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

If you question the ethics of Oakland Tribune reporter Alex Katz , I question your decision to print the “Ethics Issues” story without getting a perspective from Katz or the school district. Writing “neither the district nor Katz was available for comment” doesn’t mean anything. Did you call him multiple times? E-mail him? Pray tell. 

Such weak reporting goes on the op-ed page, not as a news story. 

Jason Blalock 

• 

BART ADVERTISING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Letter-writer John McMullen says he is “aghast” that a “point-of-view” advertisement is posted in a BART station, a public space that is subsidized by taxes. While his letter is carefully couched to avoid expressing a point of view of his own, I wonder what on Jefferson’s green earth he could possibly be thinking. Last time I checked—and, I admit, the situation is changing rapidly—we live in a democracy, in which citizens are meant to conduct political discourse with one another in order to wrestle toward resolution the constant and shifting conflicts that arise among people whose opinions are not marshalled by thought-police into neat, conforming rows. Does Mr. McMullen mean to suggest that political discourse ought to be a private matter, conducted in dark alleys and behind closed doors, where each of us can be safely and hermetically isolated from those whose points of view diverge from our own? I sure hope that’s not where we’re headed. As the still-controversial third president of the United States once observed, “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.” While I myself go queasy at the content and tenor of the anti-choice ads that so upset Mr. McMullen, it would be a nail in the coffin of democracy to agitate against the right of those with whom I disagree to express themselves in public. Whose mouth gets duct-taped next? Mine, maybe?  

Steve Masover 

• 

PACIFIC STEEL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our compliments to the Daily Planet for Suzanne La Barre’s interesting article “Watchdog Group Will Sue Pacific Steel.” Many have called or e-mailed us with the same questions: are you proposing to clean up PSC once and for all—or close them down? What about the jobs and the tax base? We’d like to clarify our position:  

We have never asked for the closure of PSC; we clearly have demanded they stop polluting our air! It is up to PSC to determine if, how or when they will do so.  

cleanaircoalition.net is not in favor of dirty jobs and companies that expose their workers and our neighborhoods to toxics 24/7. We side with, and fully support, our neighborhoods.  

I know this is a tough situation for many—including the Ecology Center and local politicians who have complex loyalties and relationships with the powers that be in B-Town, but our focus is dedicated to the citizens living in our neighborhoods who have long suffered from both the toxic rain of PSC and the lack of political will to fully remedy the problem. Cleanaircoalition.net will continue to try to find ways to work on the PSC problem with any and all individuals and groups who are interested in cleaning up the noxious, toxic vapors that PSC relentlessly vents into our air from its chimney stacks on 2nd Street. Anyone who has suffered from this nuisance may join this suit. 

We will be posting regular updates on our progress at www.cleanaircoalition.net. 

P.S.: Please let your readers know about Councilmember Linda Maio’s community meeting at 7 p.m. on Feb. 15 at the Berkeley Senior Center. Everyone who is interested in this situation should join the cleanaircoalition.net and other interested groups and attend this public meeting. (We understand that PSC will actually show up this time to meet the people they are endangering daily!) 

Willi Paul 

Founder and Project Director  

• 

DOWNTOWN PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In Friday’s article on the Downtown Plan Committee, it was mentioned that the committee “was formed as a condition of the settlement of a city suit against the university, filed in an attempt to mitigate [UC’s] impacts on the city and local taxpayers.” 

The settlement agreement does not have this committee as a condition.  

In fact, the settlement agreement envisions a planning process well-removed from the public. 

According to the settlement agreement, the Downtown Area Plan is to be prepared by a joint UC/City of Berkeley planning process with one FTE planner from each entity. The staff from the two entities “will meet to ensure the orderly and timely completion of the plan” within 48 months. 

The agreement continues to reinforce that the Downtown Area Pan is a creature of the city and university: 

“All public meetings regarding the Downtown Area Plan ... must be jointly sponsored by the city and UC Berkeley.” 

“... because the Downtown Area Plan is a joint plan, there shall be no release of draft or final Downtown Area Plan or EIR without concurrence of both parties.” 

“UC Berkeley reserves the right to determine if the Downtown Area Plan or EIR meets the Regents’ needs.” 

The exclusion of the public and the Planning Commission from the planning process, in violation of our city charter and municipal code is one of the reasons I and three other Berkeley residents decided to sue the city and the university over the terms of the settlement agreement. 

For the text of the settlement agreement, see www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/manager/LRDP/ucblrdpagreement.pdf. 

For information on the lawsuit, please e-mail blue@igc.org. 

Anne Wagley 

• 

STATE OF THE CITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to thank Mayor Bates for his invitation to his State of the City address. 

I have a few questions about what is to be covered in this address. 

In his January 2005 Mayor’s Policy Briefs/Re-inventing Berkeley Government, he mentioned his support of an in-progress sunshine ordinance “to ensure and open and transparent government.” The mayor stated, “The Clerk has prepared an excellent working draft and we must complete work and adopt it this year.” That is, in 2005. 

In the upcoming State of the City address, I hope the mayor will tell the people what he did on this issue in 2005 and how soon this ordinance will be ready for public review and implementation.  

This is especially relevant in light of the city attorney’s current refusal to release information under a Public Records Act request for documents related to the revision of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, the “surprise” grant application for the Ashby BART station development, and the secrecy leading up to the UC settlement agreement. Perhaps those three incidents from 2005 will also suggest some additions to the draft sunshine ordinance. 

Sharon Hudson 

• 

ENERGY POLICY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Tuesday night President Bush spoke on our need to change the way we power America. Yet his “solutions” are pitiful stand-ins for actual progress. I am no longer amused while wondering if he’ll pronounce “nuclear” correctly, rather I am terrified that he calls it “safe and clean.” A process that leaves barrels of toxic waste cannot possibly be described as safe or clean. 

He claims that by 2025 we can reduce our dependency on Middle Eastern oil by 75 percent. What he failed to report was that the Energy For Our Future Act, a current piece of legislation, would save as much (not three-fourths of) oil as we import from the Middle East within 10 years, not 20. 

When will we demand truth and action and stop being satisfied with simple sound bytes that carry no substance? How about today? 

LC Smith 

• 

FIRST AMENDMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley deserves praise for her articulate defense of Cindy Sheehan’s First Amendment rights. It was indeed outrageous that Capitol Cops should have thrown Sheehan out of the State of the Union address for simply wearing an anti-war slogan on a t-shirt. 

And it was equally appalling that the same cops should have removed the wife of a congressman who wore a “Support Our Troops” shirt.  

Moreover, O’Malley deserves kudos for noting that Code Pink people were out of line for bashing BART because it ran a “pro-life” ad. This should have not come a surprise to O’Malley as she can’t help but have noted the regular hypocrisy of local leftists when it comes to freedoms of expression. For example, surely O’Malley remembers the successful efforts of her pal, Barbara Lubin, to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking in Berkeley.  

Unfortunately, while Ms. O’Malley’s editorial was in the finest tradition of an editor’s support of First Amendment rights, I can’t help but wonder why she didn’t include the most egregious recent demands for censorship played out on an international stage, the demonstration of millions of Muslims worldwide in condemnation of cartoons published depicting their prophet Muhammed. As this happened before the Daily Planet was put to bed, it is curious to note the absence of any editorial commentary by Ms. O’Malley on this odious attempt to abridge freedom of the press.  

I hope to see some future response by O’Malley on the above as we have already seen representatives of the EU threatened by thugs in Gaza and a speech there from a Palestinian religious leader stating: “We will not accept less than the severing of heads by those responsible.”  

Dan Spitzer 

Kensington 

• 

CARTOON CONTROVERSY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Muslims may object to being portrayed as berserk bombers, but their recent reaction to the Danish cartoons would seem to prove that very point. 

Steve Geller 

• 

RENT BOARD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to respond to the Jan. 27 letter by Chris Kavanagh regarding the reasons for Berkeley having a much higher unit registration fee than that of San Francisco and Oakland. He states first that San Francisco has an “honor system” between owners and tenants. This is true only if you believe that a contract, i.e. rental agreement, can be broken with impunity, and that tenants are a childlike lot who have no hope of understanding that agreement. He states that Berkeley has a city operated “tracking system” for all rents; this is known to the rest of us as a database--rents are not wild geese being chased down the Pacific flyway. In the era of Costa-Hawkins, all that needs be known is the initial rent, services provided, length of lease and the date, and the “correct, legal amount” can be automatically calculated from there. For pre Costa-Hawkins legacy tenants, all this information is already in the archives. Even if you believe that it is necessary to send out a mailing listing the allowable rent each year, it should not take a $3 million bureaucracy to do it. 

Other services which he asserts the Rent Board offers are:  

1. Mediation-hearing examiner process. How often has this been used in the past year?  

2. An agency legal counseling service for both property owners and tenants. This sounds so even-handed, but how many landlords have actually trusted the Rent Stabilization Program to give them advice, and how many tenants have taken advantage of it with all the other free legal advice available to tenants in Berkeley?  

3. Information newsletters/mailings. People actually read these things? I get one in every utility bill, credit card and bank statement etc. 

Lastly, Mr. Kavanagh claims that the staff receives over 10,000 “inquiries” per year. This sounds impressive until you do the math. Assuming the office is open 250 days in a year, for 7.5 hours in an average day, this works out to 5.3 inquiries per hour. I’ll bet this number includes the “How late are you open” kind, so how many staff members need to be devoted to this? Most of the substantive inquiries would hardly be necessary anyway if the board did not adopt convoluted and perverse interpretations of plain language in State law, to which they grudgingly submit, and common sense, to which they don’t submit at all (e.g. see their interpretation of the meaning of “original tenant” in the Costa-Hawkins law.) 

I can’t help but think that the $3 million, and rising, each year which the Rent Stabilization Program consumes could be put to better use in an assistance program targeted to people who really need it. It could fund a subsidy of $250,000 per month for the neediest people in Berkeley, helping hundreds of families directly without the rancor and ill will of the current regime. 

Mike Mitschang 

• 

TRUCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

1. Has no one else heard the rest of Osama bin Laden’s message? He threatens, yes, but then offers a truce. Sounds good to me. Stop the killing! 

2. What’s an insurgent? 

3. How much does a shopping cart cost? How much of a $40 grocery bill am I donating, like it or not, to pay for a stolen grocery wagon? 

I have a simple answer to most of our complex problems: Cancel the war and close the worldwide string of U.S. military bases (how would we like a foreign base in our neighborhood?) and use the money for universal free health care as good as Congress gets, housing the homeless, educating everybody tuition-free, and so on. 

It would work! 

Ruth Bird 

• 

THE RAILROAD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A recent Daily Planet article reminded me of the many happy times our family spent riding on the Southern Pacific train through all the winding tracks and tunnels in the Santa Cruz mountains to our summer home one block from the beach at Seabright. 

I recall eating sandwiches and apples sitting on the passenger car seats and smelling the smoke from the locomotive each time we went through a tunnel. And the taxi ride from the Santa Cruz station to the house at Seabright with all our baggage.  

I remember how we ran out to the gate each time we heard a train coming, to watch the plumes of smoke approaching until the fire breathing, clanking monster rolled across Seabright Avenue pulling its train of sand-filled cars from Felton behind it. 

The sheer awesome power of those massive clanking locomotives with fire flickering in their belly and an engineer in the cab was fascinating to a 10-year-old. You had to experience it first hand to truly appreciate it. 

There was a camel bridge over the railroad that if we were lucky we could stand on top of as the train went under. Smoke all around us and steam too if the engineer blew the whistle. Those are memories I will never forget. 

Stephen Jory 

• 

STATE OF THE UNION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One word to describe the State of the Union Address: boring! Not that I held high expectations but how much non-information can someone squeeze into an hour (or 40 minutes minus the applause)? Aside from the blatant overuse of culturally latent words like “liberty” “diplomacy” and “freedom” (that all mean essentially the same thing) I am unable to draw a single conclusion as to what Mr. Bush plans to do with our country and the world for the next 1,000 days. One thing is clear: Bush and his supporters are not taking global warming seriously. The goals to cut our dependence on foreign oil, cut down CO2 emissions, and to stabilize an economy that is not based on oil are admirable. However, the methods proposed last night, such as investing more money in technology, are minimal measures at most. There is a bill in the House of Representatives that addresses all of these issues and doesn’t cost Americans a dime. It’s called the Energy For Our Future Act. This bipartisan initiative will raise fuel-efficiency standards for cars, trucks, and SUVs to 40 miles a gallon. This new standard for American car makers would save as much oil as we now import from the Middle East. It would slash our contribution to global warming by 250 million tons over a decade. Last, but not least it would save consumers 45 billion at the pump on gas. 

Bronwyn Dietel 

For Peet’s Sake 

“In Alameda County, the whitest tract isn’t in the outlying suburbs. It’s in progressive, university-town Berkeley.” 

—San Francisco Chronicle 

Pretty soon, 

A black man will have to 

Present a visa 

In order to enter 

Berkeley  

Even the well-dressed 

Ones 

But look at it this way 

At the downtown Peet’s 

You get your own 

Salesperson  

—Ishmael Reed 

?

Since I have had experience with redevelopment projects, I have been asked to discuss redevelopment and the current Ashby BART station proposal now before you. Frankly, this task is impossible because the Caltrans grant application which the City Council voted to support on Dec. 13, 2005 is in direct opposition to what the grant’s major proponents are saying it means. Let’s look at three areas as examples: 

First, eminent domain. The grant’s proponents assure us eminent domain will never be used and that the BART air rights would be the ONLY place where construction will occur. The grant itself is silent on the subject of eminent domain, saying neither that it will or will not be used. However, the application does state that vacant and underutilized properties will be identified which can be secured for purchase. The area affected extends a mile into the residential neighborhoods around the station. No explanation is given as to why those properties are included in the application, IF, as proponents say that construction will occur only on BART property. The application does state that BART’s planning criteria goes beyond the station.  Logic might support extension to commercial properties, but why should any residential neighborhoods be included at all. Objectives stated in the application are: “There are several vacant or underutilized parcels within four blocks of the site. Ownership, potential for acquisition or transfer of development rights, etc. will be explored.” Further, “Land trusts, land swaps, creation of commercial condominiums held by non-profit groups and other mechanisms in addition to direct purchase of parcels, will be explored, along with financing sources.” “Other mechanisms” and “etc.” are not explained. This gives every indication that the project involves changes in ownership of at least some property, but neither the application itself nor its proponents offer any further explanation or reassurances. 

The second point is the question of the number of housing units that will be included in this project. Proponents have stated they don’t know why the community mentions that number when speaking about the proposal, yet the application in several places says not “300” units but “at least 300 units.” The author of the application told the council that the number would be “more like 300.” A councilmember voting for the proposal said at that City Council meeting that the number of people in 300 units could be 1,000. That’s all on the record, but raises the glaring question of how the final number will be decided upon. At least in redevelopment areas (which I oppose), people have a chance to comment on individual projects within the designated area.  This application gives the appearance that there will be a single vote on the total project presented by the developer.   

The question of why include any mention at all of the number of units in the application leads to the most important point of all—the process. The application is riddled with statements regarding the vital importance of an open and inclusive process involving the community at an early point. It cannot be explained away that this application give every appearance of having already decided several important issues such as the proposed number of housing units. Further, the application has been in discussion for six months without the knowledge of the full community affected by it, the first notice to the public was Dec. 13, 2005 when council approval for the application was sought, the request for council approval occurred 60 days after the application had been submitted to Caltrans, the request for council approval was placed on the part of the council agenda reserved for non-controversial items, and the application was discussed by the council only because a single member of the community, Jackie deBose, stood up and objected.  

This is unprecedented. I cannot think of any other instance of bringing something to the council and having it approved in such a manner.  Councilmembers used to raise huge objections if applications for grant proposals were brought to them if there was too short of a period of time before they had to be submitted. 

Further, there is no built-in accountability. The SBNDC which is to lead the process can appoint whomever they want to the group that will select the developer who will submit the final project. These decision makers may or may not be experienced in such matters, they may or may not be able to devote time to the process, they may or may not have a questioning nature or they may or may not be geographically distributed around the project area, and, there is no way, community members will be able to hold members of the SBNDC, or their appointees accountable. 

The proposed Ashby BART station project is not redevelopment. However, it is indicative of the pattern that goes back 15 years when a redevelopment project area for South Berkeley was fortunately rejected because of community opposition and further, of the commercial up-zoning in the area that was unfortunately approved despite objections of the community.   

We should not be afraid of development. However, development on the Ashby BART station should not be the same as development that which occurs downtown. It should be appropriate to the specific Ashby BART site, and sensitive to the surrounding residential uses and take into consideration the uses and density that already exist in the community. The question of how dense the community should be has never been asked nor has it been answered. Development should proceed from a community consensus as to how dense you want this community to be and not from some predetermined number or concepts in a confusing and premature grant application that was written without your comment. 

This Caltrans grant application should be withdrawn and the city should begin a process to write a new application to be submitted next year, one that will be built on a foundation of participation of all residents of the affected area that want to be involved. 

Shirley Dean is the former mayor of Berkeley. 



I urge the City Council to vote against Mayor Bates’ proposal to alter the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, or LPO. (This is item 17 on their Feb. 7 agenda.) Among many good reasons to oppose the mayor’s proposal, let me emphasize two. 

First, there is no evidence that the current LPO is broken. On the whole, it is serving all of Berkeley’s constituencies well—allowing vigorous housing construction, while helping to preserve the city’s historic fabric. So let’s not “fix” what ain’t broke. 

Second, I’m particularly disturbed by the mayor’s proposal to severely restrict structure of merit designations to certain “historic districts.” To be blunt, this would further segregate the city. It would force more teardowns, and force more replacement structures of low quality, on poorer neighborhoods. 

I write as someone who’s fortunate to live in a North Berkeley neighborhood with several landmarked Maybeck houses. And then there are houses like mine: designed by no one famous (reportedly by one of Maybeck’s students) and maybe not an outstanding example of any particular style. Still, it survived the 1923 fire, and it fits in nicely with nearby houses. If a future owner wanted to demolish it, my neighbors would have no trouble winning “historic district” status and inhibiting the teardown. 

Under the mayor’s proposal, this tool would become almost unavailable to residents of many South, West, and Central Berkeley neighborhoods that already suffered from whirlwind redevelopment in the 1950s through 1970s. What the mayor really seems to propose is a vicious cycle: Because some parts of town are now stuck with a large share of the tilt-up eyesores from that go-go period, they won’t qualify as “historic districts,” so they can’t restrict further new developments that might look just as mistaken within a few years. 

There are many respects in which Berkeley needs to move beyond rhetoric and really strive harder to be “one city.” Selectively restricting development controls in the flatlands would move us in exactly the wrong direction. Maintaining all neighborhoods’ ability to protect their architectural fabric and livability would be a small, but important, step in the right direction. 

For that reason, I encourage councilmembers to reject the mayor’s proposed changes, and to instead keep the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance intact.  

Michael Katz is a Berkeley resident.

There are a number of people in this community, who are taking a pretty hard line position regarding the Ashby BART planning proposal submitted to CalTrans by Max Anderson, Ed Church and the city, particularly Mayor Tom Bates. This group of hardliners includes, among others, the ad hoc steering committee, a group of people who volunteered to keep working on this issue following the large community meeting that many of you attended, and myself. 

We are taking a position that includes the following:  

1. The only course of action that we find acceptable is that the city withdraw the proposal they have made to CalTrans. 

2. We will not consider supporting any modified version of that proposal. 

3. We are unwilling to support any project in which either Max, Ed Church, SBNDC or the city play a leading role. 

In addition, we are proposing that the community take the initiative itself to begin a fully inclusive visioning and planning process for South Berkeley. We are willing to put our energies into making this happen. The goal of this process would be a vision generated by all the diverse voices of South Berkeley. It would acknowledge all of the wonderful things that groups and individuals are already contributing to our neighborhood, bringing all of this together in a collective effort based on a vision we will build together. No one will be excluded, replaced or left out. It would also include making the commitment and taking the collective action necessary to make this vision a reality. Any plan for developing the Ashby BART station would grow out of this vision and this process. What we are saying to the City is “No thanks, we’ll do it ourselves.” 

Imagining the prospect of working together to create a community vision has been quite inspiring. It has brought together a wonderfully diverse group of people, some of whom have, in the past, not gotten along so well together. It is exciting to feel the energy that is growing out of this new meeting of diverse voices in an open and collaborative spirit. It has shown us what we can do if we work together. We are getting excited about possibilities for the BART site that could come out of such a process. 

But first, we have to stop this initiative. 

Since many of you may be wondering what brought us to this thinking, let me explain. I think you will find it is not as extreme a position as it might sound. 

First, we are not taking this position because we are opposed to developing the BART site. I think it is fair to say that, among those taking this strong stand, there are many opinions on whether to develop the site or how. It is my sense that most of us would like to see something done at the site. What all of us agree on is that if anything is developed at the BART station, it has to grow out of a full and open community process. It can’t be an idea cooked up by Ed Church on which we get to comment. 

This is what we mean by a full and open process: 

1. All community voices are included from the very start. 

2. The process is not driven by pre-existing constraints or assumptions.  

3. Anything that is done at the BART station or elsewhere grows out of a larger vision for South Berkeley that is the result of a true community-wide planning process.  

This is all predicated on a shared belief: “If we can imagine it together, we can make it happen!” 

The reason we are unwilling to allow Ed, Max, SBNDC or the City to have any directive role in any future proposal is because we believe they have violated and continue to violate, even in the face of our protests, our core value of full community participation. At this point, we think they do not hold community participation as a high priority; we don’t believe they even know how to support that kind of participation. This is some of what we have observed: 

• They developed the vision detailed in the CalTrans grant on their own with no process that included our community to any meaningful degree. The community is merely advisory. 

• Their proposal puts Ed completely in control of the project and all of its funds, as well as being in control of all public input and all final decisions.  

• Their proposal explicitly constrains public input at every stage with detailed prior constraints, regarding funding, density, scope, project control, etc.  

• They continue to exclude us as they attempt to justify and modify their proposal in the hope of winning our support.  

• When a group of community folks organized a meeting to provide information to the larger community, they tried to hijack that effort and, when that failed, they tried to isolate it.  

• When hundreds of people showed up at that meeting, they tried to organize a competing meeting, making an abortive nod to planning it with community voices. They abandoned that planning effort when they couldn’t control the planning process.  

• They have continually refused to acknowledge our protests about the process they have pursued, dismissing them as procedural attempts to block a proposal we don’t like or claiming they were based on our irrational prejudice against Max and the City or as “personal attacks.”  

• To add insult to injury, they even failed to inform us as to what they were planning to do before presenting their plan for action by the City Council. 

We are not making personal attacks on Max and Ed; we are observing what they have done and expressing our disapproval. We are holding them accountable for their actions. 

We are not willing to give them another chance on this issue; as far as we are concerned, any visioning or planning that goes on in South Berkeley will be driven by the community, not Max, Ed, SBNDC or the city. 

In addition, there are specific issues raised in the proposal that make it clear that they have made prior determinations regarding their plans for the site and continue to misrepresent this fact in public. Robert Lauriston has done an excellent job of detailing these issues, so I will not repeat them here. Robert’s article can be seen in the Feb. 3 issue of the Daily Planet or on the Planet’s website. 

All in all, what we are standing for is an exciting and active community that takes responsibility for its own future. We are even excited by what might develop at the Ashby BART station out of a shared community vision. We care about this so much that we are willing to commit to working toward creating a community wide process that will include every voice in South Berkeley in imagining and implementing a shared and integrated vision for South Berkeley, including but not limited to the Ashby BART station. 

We invite every member of the Berkeley community to join us. The first thing we need to do is to stop the proposal that has been pushed on us. 

Let’s make the city withdraw the CalTrans proposal! Then let’s get together and build the community we want to live in. 

“No thanks, we’ll do it ourselves.” 

Kenoli Oiler is a Berkeley resident. 

To view Justin DeFreitas’ latest editorial cartoon, please visit  

www.jfdefreitas.com To search for previous cartoons by date of publication, click on the Daily Planet Archive.



BLACK & WHITE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to offer my congratulations to the Zoning Adjustments Board for finding a balanced and reasonable path to take in handling the issues over Black & White Liquor. 

I would also like to commend Mr. Banger for being earnestly engaged and responsive to the concerns raised. Relinquishing the grandfathering of the site under zoning regulations is a graceful, meaningful, helpful, and (in my opinion) quite welcome development.  

South Berkeley can just keep getting better and better, one step at a time, as the fantastic and inclusive community it really is at heart. 

To my friends who fought well and hard for a nuisance finding—I think we did very well here without doing too much harm; we can declare victory. (And, even better, nobody has to admit defeat.) 

Thomas Lord 

• 

GO SOLAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

By unanimous vote, Wednesday night, the Willits City Council took the first step toward the development of solar electric installations to power major city operations. 

If Willits can do it, the City of Berkeley should all be able to do it. 

Harvey Sherback 

• 

ALBANY MALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding your article, “Residents, Environmentalists Debate Albany Mall,” as an Albany resident and member of the Sierra Club, I obviously support and enjoy parks and open space. However, after a careful reading of the newly unveiled CESP/CAS initiative (the “Citizens’ Planning Initiative to Protect Albany’s Shoreline”), there seems to be a major problem for Albany schools. 

The Albany Unified School District receives approximately $500,000 annually in parcel-tax assessments from Golden Gate Fields race track. In the new CESP/CAS initiative, (quote) “Planning shall assume that a large portion of the Albany Waterfront District will be dedicated or acquired for public park, open space, and environmental restoration purposes.” The remaining portion available for development will be (quote) “located as close to the Interstate 80 freeway as possible” and not within 600 feet of the shoreline. Looking at a map, I estimate this remainder at about 50 percent of the existing property. 

The developer of this small remainder—located right next to a roaring, polluted freeway—will then be obliged to build a “green, sustainable” development that somehow will generate $1,200,000 in revenue annually for the City, to replace that lost from the race track. That’s unlikely, to say the least. But there’s worse to come: the developer will only pay parcel tax to the school district based on the square footage they own. That means the schools will lose about 50 percent of the current $500,000. That is, Albany schools will lose $250,000 per year, every year, if this initiative passes. 

Albany residents need to study this initiative very carefully. Our city and our schools are depending on it. 

Trevor Grayling 

Albany 

• 

‘FALSTAFF’ FANTASTIC! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Olivia Stapp’s review of Berkeley Opera’s current production of Falstaff in the Jan. 31 Daily Planet did not describe the opera I saw that night. In fact, the review had much more to say about Ms. Stapp’s in-depth personal knowledge about Verdi’s final opera than it does about what I believe to be one of the most highly entertaining productions ever staged by Berkeley Opera. 

I was impressed by the quality of the performance and its direction, as were the members of the audience with whom I spoke. People simply loved it and lauded Jo Vincent Parks (as Falstaff) both for his stunningly beautiful voice and great comedic acting. Then there was Ann Moss (as Nanetta) whose pure voice touched our hearts, Jillian Khuner (as Alice), Katherine Growden (as Meg), Mark Hernandez (as Bardolfo) and Isaiah Musik-Ayala (as Pistola) for their perfect singing and great acting, Igor Vieira (as Ford), Donna Olson (as Mistress Quickly), Norman DeVol (as Dr. Caius), David Briggs (as Robin), and Tony Ambrose (as the innkeeper). Well ... we really couldn’t decide whom we liked the best! 

The audience was also delighted at the exquisite ballet in the final act and the thunderous applause and cheers at the end of the performance perfectly expressed the audience’s appreciation of this production. 

I know several people who are going to see it again. I would encourage everyone, not just opera lovers, to catch the production this weekend. There are performances at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5. 

Jane Kelly 

• 

ASHBY BART 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We are very concerned about the grant for development at Ashby BART. The democratic process has been ignored by Max Anderson. He and the SBNDC do not possess community support that they claim. This grant was applied for in an underhanded (hiding it from the community) and unorthodox manner.  

There is evidence from the Jan. 17 community meeting from SBNDC members, that they have known of this grant for some time, which refutes the fact that the grant was submitted without council approval because of time constraints. Max Anderson has had numerous opportunities to inform the public about these actions, but has failed to promote a transparent process and environment.  

Is this the kind of Berkeley we want? Berkeley should set an example for the rest of the country, as we have in the past, and be the model for a truly open and transparent democracy.  

We do not see how this grant process can move forward on this type of foundation. We ask the City Council to please withdraw the proposal, reject Max Anderson’s resolution, and instead discuss how we can all create a community-driven process to determine the future of the Ashby BART site.  

Dan B. Bristol 

Anona A. Bristol 

• 

TRANSIT VILLAGE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I like near Ashby BART and am thinking about the proposal to develop the West Parking lot for housing/commercial use and was wondering if anyone could help me understand why we need development at the Ashby BART parking lot in specific and more large developments in Berkeley in general. I know there is a lot of knowledge and reasoning ability out there amongst the readers of this paper. 

It has been said that Berkeley already has one of the highest population densities of any city in the area. That may be good, bad or indifferent depending on what side of the social policy/engineering discussion one lands on. If one were to promote denser urban areas in order to save some green space out on the edges of the cities/suburbs, one could say Berkeley was currently leading the way with our already high population density. I do not think Berkeley should operate in a vacuum. Is there a regional planning entity that can decide what type of development is appropriate and beneficial to a specific locale, as well as the region, and then enforce any development allotments? 

Others may say that we need to build whatever infill housing we can to provide for the demand for new units in Berkeley (be they market-rate, low-income, senior, accessible etc.). Will this demand ever be able to be filled? If the city wants to sponsor the housing of city workers in town, they may have to get into the landlord business on a bigger scale. I do not think the market will take care of that. 

How much does the current and future well being of the existing residents factors into the development plans for an area of the city or the city as a whole? From my personal viewpoint of living in and around Berkeley for 25 years, there may already be enough people in this city. In the Lorin District of South Berkeley where I live, we are able to observe much of what is good and bad of Berkeley’s high population density. We have a rich diversity of cultures and social values that makes for interesting conversations and learning opportunities when one takes the time to get out and meet the neighbors. One the other hand, our area suffers from some of the problems associated with this same density: street crime and trash, as well as poverty that may or may not result from increased density. 

Will living in our neighborhood be more or less enjoyable with an extra 100-600 (or how many) new residents? I wonder if it is possible for the city to sponsor the improvement of the lot of the existing residents and businesses before we rush ahead with increasing the number of people in the same space. 

Sorry if I have offended anyone. I really need to get educated in order to decide what is best for the city and my family. 

Andy DeGiovanni 

• 

MORE ON ALBANY MALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have resigned from the Albany Parks and Recreation Commission to protest the undemocratic actions of PRC Chair Alan Riffer. Mr. Riffer has politicized the commission by offering Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso an entire special meeting of the commission as a forum for continuing his PR campaign for Caruso’s proposed waterfront mall. 

Mr. Riffer even relocated the special meeting to City Council chambers to provide a camera-equipped stage for Mr. Caruso’s presentation, which will enjoy multiple replays on our local public access TV station. When I asked that open space/park advocates be offered equal time for a presentation at the meeting, this request was denied. This charade of a planning process illustrates the very real need for the proposed Citizens’ Planning Initiative to Protect Albany’s Shoreline to ensure an open community process versus the current Caruso PR campaign. 

It’s outrageous that Mr. Riffer and other pro-mall politicians think they can control public debate by banning open space advocates from having an equal voice at public forums. Mr. Riffer’s stand on the mall is well known (he has hosted Caruso PR events at his home). It is not wrong for a city official to have a strong stand, but it is wrong for him to use his position to promote it and quash open debate. 

Brian Parker 

Albany 

• 

CLEAN MONEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s article about the public campaign financing law just passed by the CA Assembly bemoans the fact that there was no Republican support. I agree. On the Assembly floor the Republicans complained about how bad the current system of campaign finance is but they offered no solutions. 

In Arizona the Clean Money system has already been working though three elections. More Republicans use the Clean Money funding than Democrats in Arizona. 

The problem of funding election campaigns with special interest contributions affects both Democrats and Republicans. If Republicans do not join in the solution then they will remain part of the problem. 

Bill Walzer 

• 

MORE ON CLEAN MONEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s gloomy article about the vulnerability of the California Clean Money bill, AB 583, seems strangely out of step in the wake of the passage of the bill by the full Assembly on Jan. 30. The bill passed 47-31 on a party-line vote, with two Republicans abstaining and one Democrat voting against. The bill will now go to the Senate. 

Yes, Clean Money is an uphill battle and yes it will be difficult to get it passed into law. But there is a major grass-roots action behind Clean Money involving thousands of Californians who wrote letters and made phone calls to their assemblymembers in support of AB 583. Several of the assemblymembers who spoke on the floor Monday in support of the bill remarked about the strength of this grassroots support as well as about the recent PPIC poll that revealed how 78 percent California voters feel that the government is in the hands of big corporate interests. It is clear to California’s elected officials that real reform, as opposed to a little tweaking of lobbying laws, is required to win citizens’ confidence in government. 

Although in the past some have criticized earlier versions of the bill for being too favorable to major parties and incumbents, the bill has been amended to be more friendly to third parties. Thus, in December the Green Party of California formally endorsed AB 583 with its amended performance-based system that allows candidates regardless of party an opportunity to get full funding in the general election if they can show substantial community support. 

Less cynical hand wringing about the obstacles and more energy and creativity put into overcoming them will bring publicly financed election campaigns to California. It has happened in Maine and Arizona, it can happen here. 

AB 583 enjoys huge popular support and a growing number of activists are getting involved in helping with its passage. In addition, there are a number of decent, well-meaning legislators who are working hard to create a well-crafted law that will really work to restore democracy to our state. So be part of the solution to our myriad political woes, and join the Clean Money campaign! 

Lynn Davidson 

• 

OAK ORDINANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a follow-up to my Jan. 31 letter published under the headline “Oak Ordinance Violations Ignored by City Staff,” I would like to add the following information. 

Apparently as a result of my warnings to a local homeowner, he stopped short of removing a Coast Live Oak from his property. City Forestry Unit staff, to whom I forwarded my letter, visited the site on Monday, Jan. 30, and found “a large Coast Live Oak that had been excessively pruned.” 

Staff informed me that this type of excessive pruning (I prefer to call it mutilation) is not addressed in the present Oak Removal Moratorium, but it will be in the future. At last week’s City Council meeting, the council passed the first reading of an ordinance change that would prohibit excessive pruning (over 25 percent in a 24-month period) of Coast Live Oak trees. This change is expected to go into effect in about two months, and all local tree-service companies will be notified. 

This won’t address the problem of property owners hiring off-the-street laborers to do the work, but let’s hope that while strengthening the Coast Live Oak Ordinance, the City Council will also impose fines stiff enough to deter scofflaws. 

Daniella Thompson 

›

I am a member of the Steering Committee of Neighbors on Urban Creeks and a member of the Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Board. I have spent considerable time attending meetings, studying this complex issue and speaking to people about it. Because I don’t live on or near an open or culverted creek that is regulated under the city’s current Creeks Ordinance, you might well ask why I spend my time this way. I do it because besides being a creeks issue, it’s also a people and neighborhood issue.  

In order for you to better understand the importance of this issue, I would like to give you a little background about the Creeks Ordinance. It was first approved by the City Council in 1989. The legislative history of that 1989 action indicates that the ordinance applied only to open creeks on vacant land. However, in 1991, unbeknownst to the City Council, the city attorney ruled that the ordinance also applied to culverted creeks. When the council was informed of that ruling many months later, the council still believed that it applied to vacant land. It was not until 2003 that it finally became clear that the ordinance regulating both open and culverted creeks applied to existing homes and commercial buildings. Up to this time, the city had not enforced the ordinance except as it applied to vacant land and hundreds of permits had been issued by the city for construction on affected properties that were not in compliance with the regulations in the ordinance. It was not until 2004, 15 years after the ordinance was first adopted, that the city identified the specific properties affected by the ordinance and informed over 2,000 property owners about the regulations. 

People who lived near an open creek obviously knew that the creek was there, but they didn’t know anything about the 30-foot setback from the centerline on each side of the creek, a total of 60 feet around the creek, where construction was prohibited.  

The same setback rule applied to culverted creeks. However, the vast majority of private property owners had no idea that a culvert on their property even existed. They hadn’t been informed about this when they purchased their property, nothing was recorded on their deeds, and you can’t see the culvert. The rationale for not allowing anything to be built within the setback of a culvert on private property, is that some day the culvert should be opened and the creek restored, a process known as “daylighting.” How this was to be accomplished when the culvert ran under the house, or when the house was too close to the culvert was never explained. 

The amendments made to the ordinance in 2003 by the City Council made it impossible to rebuild if your property was damaged in a disaster. As you can imagine when people found out about this the protests were huge. The council responded by eliminating the 2003 part of the ordinance and establishing a task force to revise the ordinance. Many property owners believed that the right to re-build was given by the City at that time, but I regret to inform you that at this time such a right is still not guaranteed, but more about that later. 

The City holds the individual property owner responsible for proving the exact location of any culverted creek on their property. Property owners with culverts have reported costs ranging as high as $6,000 to $10,000. The city also holds the individual property owner responsible to pay the cost of repair and maintenance of culverts on their property. The city’s reasoning is that private contractors built culverts in order to increase their profits because it would enable them to build more houses. Culverts range in size from 10 inches to seven feet and repairs can run up to $6,000 per foot. Problems are occurring along Strawberry Creek and currently some 15 homeowners are suing each other, the city and the university over who is responsible for the costs of repairing the damages. One property owner where the culvert does not run directly under the existing house cites over $400,000 of damages. Others in the lawsuit have homes built directly over the failing culvert.  

This reasoning ignores the fact that culverts and open creeks, along with the streets, function as the city’s storm drain system providing benefit to everyone and that storm drains where they do exist were built to a capacity that has long since been exceeded. The flooding during the recent heavy rains illustrates the inadequacy of our storm drain system. 

The city’s task force has met for almost a year. Neighbors on Urban Creeks, a group of residents, some directly affected by the ordinance, and some not, was formed in 2004 and has attended every task force meeting. Neighbors on Urban Creeks believes in preserving creeks AND protecting property rights. To that end, NUOC has taken the position that culverts should not be included in the Creeks Ordinance, that any “daylighting” should occur only on public property, that “daylighting” on private property must be voluntary, and that the individual property owner should not have to bear the financial burden for the storm drain system alone, nor pay for finding the exact location of the creek/storm drain on their property. 

Neighbors on Urban Creeks led the fight to grant owners of property with open or culverted creeks the right to re-build. We have since discovered there is no right to re-build after your home has been destroyed. If your home is destroyed, whether or not you are near an open or culverted creek, unless you have an existing use permit (which the vast majority of us do not have), you would have to go through a public hearing use permit process to re-build the exact same house you had before it was destroyed. Under the use permit process, the city could deny, amend or approve your application. Neighbors on Urban Creeks want all of us to be able to rebuild the exact same house you have today as a matter of right. If you want to build higher or larger, or place it differently on your lot, we maintain you should go through the zoning review process, but not if all you want to do is to re-build what you have today. 

The city’s task force doesn’t seem to want to take up this larger issue, nor has it indicated it will address the serious problems of the city’s inadequate and deteriorating storm drain system. They have been told by the council that they should not talk about who has the financial responsibility for replacement or repair of culverts because of the current litigation. They are still talking about a one-size fits all creeks setback in which construction would be prohibited, including playhouses and fences, and potential “daylighting” of culverts on some private property. Neighbors need your help to turn this around.  

Neighbors on Urban Creeks is holding a town meeting on Saturday morning, Feb. 4 from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Alternative High School on the corner of Derby and Martin Luther King Jr. Way. At that meeting they will provide the latest information on the task force’s recommendations and give people a chance to engage in a discussion with other property owners before a public hearing which is to be held by the task force later that month. 

This is a critical issue to everyone, whether you are a property owner affected by the Creeks Ordinance or not. The Creeks Ordinance has serious regulatory and financial consequences for every property owner directly affected by Ordinance. The value of property, including re-financing, re-sale and mortgage, and insurance will be directly affected. Because there are so many properties involved and because the impacts can be so severe, there is no way that every other property in the neighborhood will not be affected, so it truly is a neighborhood issue for all of us. 

Please, come to the Feb. 4 meeting to learn more and have all of your questions answered.  

Martha Hamilton Jones is a longtime resident on the Derby-Warring corridor. 

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District 3 representative Max Anderson has placed a resolution on the Tuesday, Feb. 7 City Council agenda specifically excluding declaration of a Transit Village Development District or a Redevelopment Area, or exercise of eminent domain, as part of Ashby BART development. That’s good. (That resolution, and the other documents mentioned below, can be found on nabart.com.) Anderson’s resolution also reaffirms support for the city’s Caltrans grant application. That’s bad. Here’s why: 

Public participation 

The grant application highlights the importance of public participation: “In almost all cases, public input is obtained after significant portions of the project have already been determined. In too many cases, the result is a less-than-desirable project, acrimony, lawsuits, delay and disenfranchisement.” 

Fine words. Yet that same application indicates that, before any public input, the most significant elements of the project have already been determined: 

• Developer to be selected by June of this year. 

• For-profit rather than nonprofit. 

• Mixed-use project with residential, retail, and arts space. 

• At least 300 units of housing. 

• South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation and application author Ed Church to disburse money. 

• End result is a request for qualifications for the previously selected developer. 

Moreover, the 2004 feasibility study found that a six-story, 553-unit rental project would not be practical. So effectively it has already been determined that the project would have to be condos. 

Flea Market 

The proposed development would displace the flea market. The grant application envisions moving it to Adeline Street. As detailed in the flea market’s attorney Osha Neumann’s Jan. 11 letter to the City Council, this proposal is unworkable, and there is no other practical location in the area. 

Ed Roberts Campus 

The Ed Roberts Campus partners already have a permit to build an 86,000-square-foot office building in the east parking lot and construction is scheduled to start next year. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put off contracting with a developer for development of the west lot until we see the ERC’s impact on the neighborhood? 

Affordable housing 

The for-profit development envisioned by the grant application is similar to the large apartment/condo projects recently built just over the border in Emeryville. The proponents’ main selling point for such a project is that 20 percent of the units would be affordable. Unfortunately, under current law, so-called “affordable” units with less than three bedrooms can rent at market rates. (For details, see my commentary “Is a Transit Village Economically Feasible?” in the Jan. 27 Daily Planet.) Building truly affordable housing requires significant contributions from government or charitable organizations, such as the $4 million in federal funds the City Council just pledged to the Brower Center. 

Feasibility 

A 2001 study concluded that development of the west parking lot was not feasible, due primarily to the high cost of providing the same number of BART parking spaces as currently exist. A more detailed 2004 study found that a six-story project with 553 rental units (76 units per acre, 50 percent higher than envisioned by the grant application) was not feasible, but that the cost of providing BART parking was not a major factor. Anderson’s resolution implicitly rejects condos by saying that the “affordable” housing would be for “households making no more than 80 percent or 50 percent, respectively, of the Area Median Income.” By Berkeley law, “affordable” condos may be sold to households making 120 percent of AMI. 

SBNDC as grant recipient 

The South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation is the city’s co-applicant on the grant application, which specifies that the money would flow through the SBNDC. The organization’s track record does not inspire confidence. For example, it did a survey to find out what sort of retail people wanted at its 1995 Lorin Station Plaza project (3253 Adeline), and neighbors asked for a cafe, a produce market, and a laundromat. Instead of finding retail tenants, the SBNDC leased the commercial spaces to an accountant’s office, a Comcast service center, and a nonprofit job-training program. 

Ed Church as project manager 

The legitimacy of the $120,000 Community-Based Transit Planning grant application, which would give its author Ed Church primary control over how the money is spent, hinges on his commitment to (in his own words to the City Council) an “open and transparent” process of public participation. The process to date has been anything but: 

• Neither the 2001 nor the 2004 feasibility study was shared with the public until the grant application brought them to neighbors’ attention and we asked for copies. 

• The grant application was submitted on Oct. 14, but not made public until early December, and then only through an entry on the consent calendar for the December 13 City Council agenda. 

• No one informed the flea market, neighborhood associations, Ashby BART patrons, or other stakeholders about the City Council agenda item so they could comment. 

• Ed Church, Max Anderson, and Mayor Tom Bates, the main drivers behind the grant application, met with various South Berkeley neighborhood groups between the time the grant application was submitted and the Dec. 13 agenda was published, but said nothing about it. 

Ed Church has put a lot of time and effort into developing his vision for Ashby BART development, and thus has much to contribute to a real community-based planning process. But the Ashby BART neighborhood doesn’t need a paid professional “smart-growth” advocate—or any other individual—to direct that process. We can and will do it ourselves. 

Bottom line 

The process to date has been anything but open and transparent. The community was inappropriately excluded from that process. Caltrans giving $120,000 to Ed Church and the SBNDC would tend to diminish rather than promote community participation in decisions about what will happen at Ashby BART. The City Council should thus withdraw support for the grant proposal and let the community take the lead. I invite everyone who supports that outcome to join me at 6:15 p.m. Tuesday on the steps of 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way for a pre-council meeting rally. 

Robert Lauriston maintains the Neighbors of Ashby BART website (nabart.com) and invites submissions from all points of view. 

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It is 1963. Americans across the South—white activists, black ministers and plenty of ordinary folks—are rising up against segregation, against the hypocrisy of separate but equal. They are sitting-in at lunch counters, fighting for the right to vote, the right to earn equal wages, the right to live in decent homes and send their children to good schools. 

The whole world watches while black people are beaten by cops and fire hoses, bitten by vicious dogs. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. comes into national prominence in Birmingham, Alabama, leading marches in protest of continued maltreatment at the hands of local government officials. 

Months later, the Ku Klux Klan and its supporters bomb a local church and four little girls are murdered. Dr. King then leads over two hundred thousand civil rights advocates in the historic March on Washington. As the multitudes gather to hear Dr. King deliver his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech, somewhere in Wyoming, two white cowboys are on the downlow.  

What does one thing have to do with the other? Not a durn thang. Or maybe . . . 

I am writing this little ditty on Super Bowl Sunday while most black folks I know are frying and barbecuing and stirring and pouring, entertaining friends, family and a few strangers in honor of the big, fun football sit-down. Although invited to one of these events, I am not in the mood to deal with more than three hours of this. So while everyone else is pigging out between whoops and shouts, my 16-year-old daughter and I head to downtown Berkeley to see Brokeback Mountain.  

With all the hype, I expected to be moved by a tender love story between two guys who find each other amidst the mountain ranges, in between the horses, sheep and the macho world of ropin’ and ridin’.  

Tender it was not. Their first sexual encounter was almost like a rape. But then, Hollywood has a history of mixing sex with violence, most often with both participants coming away from it mysteriously satisfied. To each his own, I suppose.  

Brokeback Mountain opens with two cowboys awaiting work, one Marlboro-weathered with squinty eyes whose mumbling is often uncomprehensible; the other dark-eyed, lively, more comfortable in his skin. He sneaks peeks at his future lover and it is he who eventually initiates their intimate relationship.  

But how intimate is it? The film is more about emotional repression than intimacy. Both characters come from poor, working-class families who are isolated and living in bleak circumstances. They are emotionless, rigid, cold. Growing up, both men were estranged from their fathers. They may have admired their fathers’ strengths from a distance but there was no sense of warmth between them. 

As the cowboys continue their relationship over a period of perhaps 20 years, they each marry, have children and lie to their wives about who they are and what they are doing.  

They never discuss homosexuality in any depth. After their first encounter they each declare: “I ain’t queer.” They refer to their ongoing relationship as “this thing that’s got ahold of us.” One of the wives, bitter over her husband’s deception refers to it as “nasty,” but that’s about it. No discussion of how they feel inside or what it means. Are they gay and pretending to be straight? Bi-sexual? Are they so ignorant and isolated that they are unaware that there are others in the world who are like them and that there are other places that would be more accepting of who they are?  

Remember, this romance takes place in 1963. I have to wonder if these two cowboys have any clue as to what is happening in the world around them; any knowledge of the scores of black people who are simultaneously being beaten, lynched and stuffed into jails cells for demanding that they be granted equal rights. It seems not. But still, I have to ask: Would these two lovers empathize with black people who had even fewer rights than they did? Would they see any connection? Would they care? 

But, you say, this movie wasn’t about that. No it wasn’t and I’m not saying it should have been. I’m simply describing what most black folks bring with them to the movies—a gnawing sense of invisibility—that is, unless we are bouncing a ball, brandishing a gun, dancing, singing or helping white folks rescue white girls. 

After viewing the film, I spoke with a good friend, Patricia Rambo, to get her take on it. She is the mother of a gay, African-American man and she brought me back to what the film did have to offer. 

“Relationships don’t have gender,” she told me. “They consist of emotional energy that must be balanced between the two people involved . . . If I were to close my eyes and just listen to the dialogue in the film, I wouldn’t be able to tell the gender  

. . . that’s why I related to it as just a love story.” 

I agree with Patricia wholeheartedly. Relationships cannot be stereotyped, they are particular to the two individuals involved. Just because I didn’t see much tenderness doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Just because they didn’t communicate they way I would choose to doesn’t mean that they didn’t share a deep bond. They obviously did.  

Patricia and I also noted the lack of courage in either man to stand up and claim who they were, accompanied by the silent suffering of their wives. We both observed a seemingly unspoken agreement between all parties to keep mum in order to keep up appearances, financial and/or familial stability. In this sense, their relationship was not unlike many heterosexual relationships that rest more on convenience than honesty. Perhaps this was the underlying message: that too many of us, regardless of our sexual orientation, move through life in fear, choosing to live only partially fulfilling lives for fear that our honesty might mean that we are forced to face the world alone. 

My daughter and I arrive at the tail end of the super bowl party. (She actually found the film to be a bit boring and fell asleep twice.) There are just three minutes left, which drag on for another half an hour.  

It seems that everyone in the house has been pulling for the Steelers, so the mood is decidedly upbeat.  

“Sorry we’re so late,” I say. “We went to a movie.” 

“What’d you see?” asks the hostess. 

“Brokeback Mountain,” I reply. 

“Did you like it?” she asks. 

“Well, I wasn’t really that into it,” I say, looking around to see if there’s any barbecue chicken and potato salad left. “It was OK.” 

“That’s what I thought,” she nods her head as she hands me a plate. “It was a white folks’ movie, wasn’t it?” 

Well . . . yes and no. 

Last week I went out to the Legion of Honor to see the show “After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.” The exhibit pairs archival pictures of a devastated San Francisco with shots of today’s city taken from the same viewpoints. As I contemplated the stunning contrasts between the ruined townscape and the reconstructed one, I began to think about the different ways we perceive radical urban change.  

When transformation is catastrophic, as it was in San Francisco in 1906, it’s hard to deny, even when you’d like nothing better than to deny it. In one of the most moving photographs at the Legion of Honor, a crowd stands on a hill, backs to the camera, and watches the huge clouds of smoke rising from the burning city in the distance. Anyone who lived though the Oakland firestorm or who just followed Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on TV can imagine what those men and women were thinking and feeling: shock and fear in the face of sudden, sweeping destruction.  

Not all ruin, however, is the result of calamity. Civic character can also be transfigured by change that’s incremental, and hence much harder to detect. There are increasing signs that Berkeley is on the verge of just such an insidious identity crisis, one brought about by construction as well as destruction.  

I’m not only thinking of the rampant development of recent years, though certainly that’s part of the story. The face of central Berkeley—Downtown and its environs—has already been altered by big, new mixed-use projects that one by one, have gone up in recent years. The Gaia Building, known to some as the tallest seven-story building in the world, led the way. The glassy, six-story façade of the new Berkeley City College (formerly Vista) facility now looms over Center Street. On Kittredge, west of the Berkeley Public Library, construction of the five-story, 176-unit Library Gardens apartment complex is well under way. This is but a partial inventory of what’s already built or being built.  

There’s much more to come. The nine-story, 149,000 square-foot Arpeggio (né Seagate) luxury condominium building on Center, across the street from Berkeley Community College. The 168,00 square-foot (not counting the underground parking) Oxford Plaza/Brower Center complex on Oxford between Allston and Kittredge. A five-story, 148,249-square-foot, 186-unit apartment building on the Kragen Auto site at MLK between University and Berkeley Way.  

And that’s only the scene at city center. Consider a few of the projects that are planned for other parts of town. In south Berkeley, the 86,000-square-foot Ed Roberts Campus is going to be built at the Ashby BART station’s east parking lot. In October the City of Berkeley submitted a grant to Caltrans for planning a development with at least 300 residential units over the west parking lot at Ashby BART. On Solano Avenue, Safeway wants to tear down its existing store and erect a bigger grocery with 40 to 50 apartments on top. The site’s in Albany, but the development will significantly affect the nearby Berkeley residents living just over the city line. In West Berkeley, a 91,000-square-foot West Berkeley Bowl store (two to three times the size of any other Berkeley grocery store) is planned to go at 916 Heinz, off Ashby and Seventh—more to the point, just off the freeway, where regional superstores like to be.  

Add to the above the University of California’s projected growth, on and off campus. The UC administration intends to build 1 million square feet of new development and 1,000 new parking spaces downtown, exactly where they have yet to tell us. On College Avenue there’s the Underhill Parking Structure, expanded to 1,000 spaces. Further up the hill, university planners are moving forward with the massive, Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP), which includes a 135,000 square-foot expansion of Memorial Stadium (which sits directly over the Hayward Fault), a new parking structure that will increase the university parking supply by 300 spaces, a 132,500 square-foot Student High Performance Center dedicated to intercollegiate athletics, and 180,000 square feet of new facilities for the Law and Business Schools.  

Some of these projects are extremely worthy. But that’s beside the point here, which is that taken together, they add up to a staggering amount of growth for our medium-sized city. As a community, we have yet to ask how that growth’s cumulative impact is affecting Berkeley’s character and quality of life, and whether that change is desirable.  

The good news is that those questions are now being raised in neighborhoods all over the city, including some districts that are ordinarily thought to be insulated from major development. The neighborhoods most threatened by the colossal amount of traffic to be generated by the Southeast Campus Integated Projects are the Elmwood and Claremont districts. Watching Janice Thomas’s eye-opening slideshow presentation on SCIP at last week’s Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association meeting, I realized that growth has become an issue for all of Berkeley.  

So far I’ve discussed only the built environment. But a city is more than its structures and spaces; it’s also what goes on inside of them. I’m talking about culture and class. I used to think that Berkeley was in danger of being Emeryvilleized (I refer of course to the “new” Emeryville.) That may still be the case. Now I wonder if our civic future isn’t symbolized by another place—Blackhawk.  

The February newsletter of Berkeley Design Advocates describes the Read Brothers Building being proposed for the corner of Fourth and Addison, the site of the old Sierra Design Building, across the street from Celia’s. One half of the first floor will house five small retail spaces. The other half will be a private museum for the Reads’ collection of Aston Martins and Ferraris. The second floor will be devoted to offices. According to BDA, “On the third floor, which measures 3,000 square feet plus a roof deck of 2,400 square feet, [the architect] will create a large Manhattan penthouse surrounded by roof gardens [which] will be used by Read Investments for parties, guests, board meetings, and other corporate and charitable functions. The finishings and woodwork are all of outstanding quality, with lime stucco being imported from France to create first class Continental look and feel . . . Construction cost is expected to exceed $300 per square foot.”  

Sure, it’s only one building. But it’s the “it’s only one building” mentality that’s the problem. The Read Brothers program needs to be viewed in the context of the accelerating gentrification of West Berkeley. The project’s five retail spaces will extend upscale consumerism south on Fourth Street. I’m all for a high end, tax revenue-generating commercial zone, but not if it means the continuing erosion of our manufacturing and artisanal sectors. What’s made Berkeley more than another pretty college town is its mix of blue collars and white, high culture and low. That mix is now at risk, and not only in the flats. Like growth, high-rent gentrification has become a citywide issue. The price of single-family homes in this city has soared far beyond the reach of most middle-class people, especially young, would-be first-time homeowners. Only a fraction of the thousands of rental apartments that have been or are about to be built in Berkeley over the past few years are officially affordable. And as Robert Lauriston keeps pointing out in his precise commentaries in the Daily Planet, many units on craigslist are cheaper than what’s officially affordable.  

The first goal of Berkeley’s 2002 General Plan is, “Preserve Berkeley’s unique character and quality of life.” Carrying out that goal doesn’t mean recreating a local version of Colonial Williamsburg. It does mean recognizing that we live in a special place, and that its specialness can withstand only a certain amount and kind of change without being degraded or even destroyed. Unlike the citizens of San Francisco in 1906 or New Orleans in 2005, we still have time to make that recognition and to act on it.  



Michele booked some friends and me into an all-inclusive Jamaican resort—one of those places where you can kill yourself doing activities, drink yourself to death, or eat until you can’t move. I chose the former, though I did some of the latter as well. 

Upon arrival I ate a big meal, downed a couple of Red Stripes, and swam half a mile. I gorged and imbibed some more before going to bed. 

The next day I swam another half-mile, did yoga and aerobics, rode a horse, and kayaked. In-between sporting events I sat on the beach, lounged in a Jacuzzi, and lingered at the all-you-can-eat buffet tables. 

The following day I waterskied, sailed, and took step and ab classes. Then I joined a cliff-jumping party cruise. 

I wasn’t interested in leaping off a 35-foot cliff but Michele was jumping so I felt I should too. Michele was jumping because her daughter, Jessica, had leaped off a Jamaican cliff last year during Spring Break. Michele had something to prove. She was going feet first off that cliff if it killed her. I had nothing to prove but what the hell, if Michelle could do it then I could do it, and if Jessica did it then I had to do it because, after all, Jessica is 21 and I’m 53, almost 54. You know the logic. It has to do with age, wrinkles and menopause, but I don’t really want to go there. 

From the deck of the boat the rocky precipice appeared a quarter-mile high. An announcement boomed at us through a loudspeaker: “You have 15 minutes to swim to the cliff, climb up the ladder, jump, and swim back before the boat departs. Leap at your own risk. The country of Jamaica is not responsible for your safety, or possible demise.” 

Michele and I dove in. From the water’s surface the cliff looked even higher. We swam toward the rickety ladder which was inside a cave. Waves tossed us back and forth, and I realized I could die before I reached the entrance. Once there, the incoming tide lifted me high enough to whack my head against the grotto roof. I thought about turning back, but Michele was ahead of me, and a huge wave flung and spun her toward the ladder. She grabbed a rung. Another wave crashed and pitched me forward. I swirled past Michele, then fought my way back. “Hurry up,” she yelled. “Before you drown!” 

We clawed up the ladder, crawled through a small hole, and emerged into bright sunlight. Two young Jamaican men greeted us. We each handed over our two soggy, crumbled dollar bills, the price for this opportunity. One of them gave us each a shot of rum, to fortify us for the plunge. 

Michele walked to the edge. She looked down once, turned to me and said, “If I don’t go now I never will.” Then she stepped over the lip, into the abyss. I heard her scream. 

I saw a splash and her head pop out of the water. She looked tiny. “Get out of the way,” I called, my hands forming a megaphone around my mouth. I jumped. Hitting the water hurt, but not as much as learning that no one on the boat saw me hurtle through the air. They were busy having another cocktail and watching the impending sunset. 

Back at the hotel, Michele called Jessica. 

“I jumped off the cliff,” I heard her say. 

There was a pause while Jessica responded. 

“The cliff down by Rick’s Cafe,” Michele explained. “Where the party boat stops.” 

Another pause. 

“Thirty-five feet, but who’s counting?” 

Pause. 

“What? You mean I didn’t have to do it?” Michelle looked at me, her eyes wide. She put down the receiver. 

“Jessica didn’t jump off that cliff,” she said. 

“Why not?” I asked. 

“Too high,” said Michele. Then she laughed. We gave each other a high five. 

“What shall we do tomorrow?” I asked. 

“Absolutely nothing,” suggested Michele. 

I’ve spent lots of time, breath, and column inches here and elsewhere in the past telling people how not to kill their trees. Don’t top trees; don’t hack away most of their limbs; don’t leave stubs; don’t hire inept bozos who do any of the above. Don’t plant them in the wrong place, or too deeply. Don’t irrigate native live oaks. Don’t let the base of the trunk get smothered in soil or mulch.  

But suppose you have a dead tree on your hands through no fault of your own. (Or because you really blew it.) Now what—the takedown crew and the chainsaws? Well, maybe. But unlike the average large rotting animal, a tree is still useful after it’s dead.  

Useful to us, of course; we surround ourselves with dead trees. We live in them, sit on them, perch our computers on them, transmit copy across town over wires they support to be printed and read on sheets made out of them. Wood is handsome and feels nice to touch; paper is sure as heck easier to make and use and re-use than, say, parchment or vellum or clay tablets. So, yay dead trees! At least processed ones. 

A dead tree standing in your yard, that’s another matter, pure liability. Or is it?  

Lots of our wild neighbors actually make intense use of standing dead trees. Such trees host more bugs—and many of the new bugs are specialists, who don’t go on to eat every live tree in sight—and often in tasty, juicy larval form, which makes them a free buffet for insectivores like woodpeckers. In Berkeley, we’re most likely to see red-shafted (“northern”) flickers, especially in winter. Flashy as they are, you’ll hear them first, that scornful brazen “Fnaah!” from the top of a tree. They are one woodpecker you’ll see on the ground too, sometimes “anting”: sitting on an anthill and spreading their feathers, mashing a beakful of ants and rubbing it all over their skin. I’ve heard several speculative explanations for this, but I’m sure it’s a rush. I’m waiting for the crystal-aura-magical spa types to latch onto it and offer a formic acid skin peel, you know, As Nature Intended. Remember, you read it here first. 

We get downy or hairy woodpeckers, depending on whether we’re in the more urban flats or the woodsy hills. They’re very similar; listen for a squeaky-toy noise or a small but piercing “peent” and look for a white back, then grab the field guide. If it has a barred rather than a white back, and if it gives a rolling “bb-bbb-bbbbbbt” sort of call, it’s a Nuttall’s woodpecker. I believe that species is extending its range over the last decade or so; we used to see them only well east of the hills, and lately they’re all over here, including the one who has a drumming post on the telephone pole out front of our house.  

Woodpeckers are pioneers; other species live in the natural hollows caused by decay, or in holes that woodpeckers have excavated. Those indomitable chickadees and titmice need a hole. The red-breasted nuthatch, tooting merrily? Same requirement. Don’t they just cheer you up on a gray winter day? 

If you’re lucky and/or semirural, you might get western bluebirds, ash-throated flycatchers or tree swallows nesting in your stump. Our native gray squirrels, so rare here in the urban umbra, might winter in a tree hole. Arboreal salamanders, who turn up in places as unlikely as big apartment complexes near Dwight and Shattuck—I’ve seen them there, in multiples—need tree hollows to hide and reproduce in.  

And those who like owlboxes—barn owls, for example—or any critter—possum, wood duck, kingfisher—who’d use a birdhouse would likely prefer a hollow tree.  

So, a dead tree, lucky you. Rethink it. One smart person I know had her dead Doug fir limbed and topped at about ten feet up, and left it there. It’s not about to topple onto anybody, her neighbors are OK about it, and she’s got Nuttall’s woodpeckers moving in and a barn owl in the neighborhood.  

Consider her example. You’ll want to calculate, and see if the tree’s base is rotting out and what’s in range of a fall. But here’s another instance where careful “neglect” is the best kind of gardening.  

“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” 

—Article VI, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968 

“The United States will not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon party state to the Non-Proliferation Treaty…except in the case of an attack on the United States, its territories or armed forces, or its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear weapon state…” 

—Addendum to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1978, agreed to by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and endorsed by France. Reaffirmed in 1980 and 1995. 

“The leaders of states who use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using, in one way or another, weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part. This response could be a conventional one. It could be of a different kind.” 

—French President Jacques Chirac visiting the nuclear submarine Vigilant,  

Jan. 19, 2006. 

Treaties are rarely scintillating, but the 30-year old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) has a certain sparseness of language and precision of meaning that makes it an engaging read. Boiled down, it commits the 177 non-nuclear nations that signed it not to acquire nuclear weapons and the Big Five nuclear powers—the U.S., Britain, France, China and the USSR—to dismantle theirs.  

The theory behind it was simple: non-nuclear weapons states would forgo developing nukes on the conditions that, 1) they are never threatened with nuclear weapons, 2) the Big Five get rid of their arsenals.  

All of this seems to have gotten lost in the recent uproar over Iran. While Tehran is being accused of trying to scam the NNPT by secretly developing nuclear weapons, the open flaunting of the Treaty by the major nuclear powers is simply ignored.  

For almost 38 years the vast majority of the world’s nations have adhered to the NNPT. Only India, Pakistan, Israel, and possibly North Korea have joined the Big Five, although, at the time the Treaty was signed, a dozen more were on the verge of developing them. In short, the vast bulk of the signers have held to what they agreed to. 

The Big Five, however, have ignored the obligation to dismantle their nuclear arsenals or to even discuss general disarmament. At the NNPT Review Conference last summer the issue did not even come up. 

Not only have the Big Five refused to consider eliminating their nuclear arsenals, in 2002 the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unilaterally overturned the 1978 pledge and threatened to use nukes on Syria, Iran and Iraq, all non-nuclear states. The administration’s rationale is that the NNPT is not just about nuclear weapons, but “weapons of mass destruction,” which it argues, includes chemical and biological weapons. It is a re-interpretation the French appear to embrace as well. 

But chemical and biological weapons were specifically excluded from the NNPT for the very good reason that they are not weapons of mass destruction. 

Chemical weapons are certainly nasty, but generals in World War I found them more an annoyance than a serious threat. Out of the 8.5 million deaths from 1914-1918, gas only killed about 100,000. Chemicals are simply too difficult to deliver and too volatile to do much damage.  

Bacteriological warfare is spooky, but even more difficult to make effective. Anthrax may have shut down Washington, but it only killed five people. 

Nuclear weapons are quite another matter. 

The fireball that consumed Hiroshima reached 18 million degrees in one millionth of a second. It evaporated 68 percent of the city, demolishing structures built to withstand an 8.5 earthquake. It charred trees five miles from ground zero, blew out windows 17 miles from the city’s center, and killed 100,000 people in a single blow. Another 100,000 plus would follow in the months ahead. 

The bomb that flattened Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The standard warhead in the U.S. arsenal today—the W-76—is 100 kilotons. A substantial number of our weapons are 250 kilotons, and they range as high as five megatons. One of the latter can eliminate a small country. 

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), there are presently about 27,000 such warheads in the world, many of them capable of being launched within a half hour.  

This is the price the world is paying for not insisting that the Big Five do what they agreed to do.  

And the danger is getting worse. Not from countries like Iran, but from the nuclear weapons establishment—particularly in the U.S.—that is systematically trying to dismantle the fragile barrier of treaties that hold the beast in check.  

One of the key threads in this increasingly tattered web is the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The theory behind the CTBT was that banning tests would prevent any further developments in nuclear weapons technology. It was also assumed that no one would risk deploying a weapon which had not been tested. 

But the ink was hardly dry when the U.S.—and, it would appear, France—figured out how to redesign weapons without actually setting them off. Using sophisticated computers, weapon labs began to configure a new generation of nuclear weapons. 

Indeed, India pointed to this computer-based U.S. weapons program as one of the reasons why it initiated a round of nuclear tests in 1998. 

Last year, Congress launched the Reliable Warhead Replacement (RWR) program purportedly to ensure that the U.S. nuclear arsenal would continue to work.  

But according to the local anti-nuclear group Tri-Valley CAREs, the program is also retooling warheads to make them smaller in yield (and therefore more likely to be used), capable of taking out deeply buried targets, and able to destroy chemical and biological weapons.  

It is possible the U.S. could accomplish this without resuming testing. But even if the U.S. doesn’t test, other nations will certainly not allow themselves to fall behind just because they don’t have fancy computers. If the U.S. continues on this path, other nations will resume testing, which will, in turn, encourage non-nuclear nations to begin their own programs.  

“The most important thing,” Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, told the Financial Times, “is to make the big boys understand that the major league is not an exclusive club. If you are not going to dissolve that club, others are going to join it. A world of haves and have nots is not sustainable.” 

The major danger in the world today comes not from countries like Iran and North Korea, but from the unwillingness of the major nuclear powers to live up to the promise they made back in 1968. 

“The central problem in halting nuclear proliferation,” says Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program of the Center for International Policy and a former India bureau chief for the Washington Post, “lies in the failure of the original nuclear powers that signed the NNPT to live up to Article 6, in which they pledged to phase out their nuclear weapons.”  

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One of the widely-advertised benefits of a democracy is that it requires politicians and officeholders to periodically come before the public to explain themselves in events we call elections, a process which is supposed to allow citizens the opportunity to help set the future of our city, our state, or our nation. 

In reality, although the leaders of this country are busily bombing the shit out of various people around the world and using various other forms of coercion—military and economic—in an effort to drive them into the state of being that we call democracy, we, ourselves, seem strangely disinterested in taking advantage of the rights and powers that we have right here. 

Thus, politicians who publish position papers and go into great detail in speeches during the election season are systematically ignored for those efforts, while the public gravitates eagerly towards sex-and-corruption scandal and one-liners and other forms of entertainment. Think about it. How many times have you actually visited a candidates’ website and read in detail what they say they stand for? Too much trouble, one imagines. 

Meanwhile most of the media—trying to follow the public’s tastes, in this instance—scramble to find something interesting about democracy’s most sacred rite, often treating the elections as they would a football season, tallying wins, losses, and assorted injuries along the way. Not to single out the San Francisco Chronicle for this—most newspapers and media outlets are guilty of the practice, and our own Oakland Tribune followed dutifully on the day following—but this week we have our good friends across the bay publishing an article on fund-raising in the Oakland mayoral race in which the Chronicle reporter gives us a scorecard on who is ahead—and behind—in the donations race. The title, “Ex-Congressman [meaning Mr. Dellums] Gaining Ground On De La Fuente,” says it all. Before the election season is over, similar articles will be written in all of the area newspapers and announced in other media outlets on who is ahead or behind in the public opinion polls as well as the money race, almost as if we are being told that the San Diego Chargers, having lost two out of three of the first games of the season, have now won four in a row, and are only a game behind the Raiders in the standings. Sad, isn’t it? 

With three gifted, experienced, and thoughtful candidates in the Oakland mayoral race—Councilmember Nancy Nadel, Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, and former Congressmember Ron Dellums, all of whom have taken clear stands on controversial issues in the past—the Oakland public ought to demand more, both of the candidates, and of ourselves. We won’t get this chance again to set the direction of our city, not for a long time. 

So boring or not, back to a discussion of the issues. 

A couple of weeks ago in this column, I wrote that Oakland was being kept in the dark about the explosion of violence in our city that began towards the end of last year, and concluded that “Oakland needs some straight talk and some serious, adult conversation on this recent explosion of violence in our city, where it’s coming from, and where it may be leading.” 

Since that time, we’ve had something of an explosion of newspaper coverage of Oakland’s violence. On Jan. 16 the Oakland Tribune reported the drive-by shooting death of a 15-year-old Berkeley youth near the corner of East 15th and 26th Avenue, and while stating that “police have not determined if the killing was gang related,” the article added that “the East Oakland neighborhood where he was shot is known for [Latino] gang activity.” The next day the Tribune reported a second drive-by shooting, this time of three men on Cooledge Avenue, noting that “Police said they believe the three were ‘mistaken for someone else,’ possibly members of a street gang.” The next day, the Tribune published a long article entitled “Gangs Tighten Grip In City; Police, Officials Acknowledge Violent Surge, Which Claims 2nd Victim Of 2006.” The Tribune article reported that “Police estimate several hundred Hispanic gang members occupy neighborhoods throughout Oakland, mostly in East Oakland from the Fruitvale district to Elmhurst, with International Boulevard the closest traffic artery. 

A week after the Tribune’s “Gangs Tighten Grip” article, the paper reported another shooting at a 37th and International gas station that, the paper said, “left a driver brain-dead, and wounded his two passengers and an innocent bystander.” Four days after that five people were shot—two of them fatally—near the Manzanita Recreation Center on 22nd Avenue. While the victims in the earlier slayings had Latino names, the victims in the Manzanita Rec shooting did not (this being Oakland, one speculates that they were African-American, just by the law of averages, but that’s just speculation). The Tribune reported that the Manzanita Rec shooting may have been “retaliation for another killing or narcotics.” 

And finally, on Feb. 2, the Tribune reported the shooting death of a 25-year-old San Leandro man outside a West Oakland grocery store in an African-American neighborhood (following the scorekeeping tradition, the newspaper informed us that “the killing was Oakland's ninth homicide of the year. Last year at this time there were three homicides” on the theory, I suppose, that we need to know that we are ahead or behind.) The article added that the Adeline Street area where the shooting death took place “is known for drug activity, and there have been several shootings between rival groups.” 

In my earlier column, I asked if Oakland was in the midst of a drug war, and, if so, what was being done about it at City Hall and the Police Administration headquarters? In light of the two weeks of shootings that followed, it’s clear that Oakland police and at least some of Oakland’s public officials believe that a Latino gang war is ongoing, with a possible African-American-based drug war as well. 

In its “Gangs Tighten Grip” story, the Tribune reported that in response to the rash of gang shootings, “Mayor Jerry Brown said [that] the police department was developing a plan to add officers to the gang unit and more quickly deploy them to hot spots identified by commanders.” That’s the type of sound-bite response you expect from someone who is running for California Attorney General in the June Democratic primary, and needs to be quoted as showing that he is being tough on crime in the city he’s supposed to be running. 

That may be good for Mr. Brown’s future political career, but that’s not what Oakland needs right now. 

If there is a Latino gang war—and an African-American-based drug war as well—going on in Oakland, the citizens of this city ought to be brought in on the discussion right now, before the direction of the city response is set. Actions often have unintended consequences, after all, even when those actions are done with the best of intentions. 

In their defense over charges that they illegally beat suspects and planted evidence, the members of the so-called Oakland Police “Riders” squad argued during their trials that they’d been given the “wink-and-nod” green-light for their operations by Mayor Brown and former Chief Richard Word, who, the “Riders” claimed, indicated that they wanted the city’s drug activities cleaned up at any price. The result was a major assault on the civil liberties of Oakland citizens, a stain on the city’s reputation and prestige, and a huge hit to our pocketbooks in the Allen v. Oakland consent decree settlement. 

Mr. Word has gone, but Mr. Brown remains, and so, too, is the danger of jumping too soon into solutions of serious problems without first determining the nature of those problems. 

What is causing the sudden explosion of violence in Oakland? It’s a subject that ought to be a serious topic of discussion in the Oakland mayoral race, as well as in classrooms and meeting rooms across the city. As I said in my previous column on the subject, our lives and our future depend upon it. 

In the late 1800s, Berkeley was a favorite retirement spot for sea captains. A number of them built imposing Victorians overlooking the Golden Gate in the North Berkeley hills, but few people know that the Southside boasted its own enclave of sailors’ residences at the intersection of Fulton and Blake Streets. 

This intersection retains its Victorian character to this day, with four intact houses—one Italianate and three Queen Annes—gracing its northeast and southwest corners. The original owners of all these houses had been seafarers. 

Captain John H. Whitham’s house stands at 2198 Blake St. This elegant Queen Anne, still surrounded by its original cast-iron fence, was designed and built in 1889 by prominent Alameda architect A.W. Pattiani. Two years l ater, Pattiani went on to build Captain James H. Bruce’s sumptuous Queen Anne at 2211 Blake St. Both residences were featured in BAHA’s 2004 house tour, Berkeley 1890: “At Home” along Fulton Street. 

But the oldest house in the Blake-Fulton maritime corne r is the Alfred Bartlett residence at 2201 Blake St. Erected in 1877, it is probably the most unspoiled Italianate dwelling in Berkeley. 

An Englishman born in 1841, Alfred Bartlett served in the British navy in his early teens. Discontented, at age 15 he stowed away on a ship to New York. In 1857 he worked passage on a ship to California in a stormy voyage of 152 days around the horn. Once arrived in San Francisco, he bought a wagon and horses and began selling books. 

Following a checkered and adventurous career, by 1877 Bartlett was prosperous enough to invest in real estate. Early that year he bought two lots on Blake Street in Berkeley and built the Italianate dwelling “for the sake of the health of my wife and two daughters,” then 3 and 5 years old. The same year, Bartlett joined with four other prominent businessmen—James L Barker, William B. Heywood, George D. Dornin, and Charles K. Clarke— in forming the Berkeley Land and Building Company. The Berkeley Advocate of Aug. 25, 1877 reported that “The y intend to do a real estate business in conjunction with building and improvements that will contribute to the growth and prosperity of the town.” The company’s office was located at the Berkeley terminus, on the Shattuck Avenue island now known as Berkeley Square.  

At the time the Bartlett residence went up, the surrounding Blake Tract, newly subdivided in 1876, was still mostly farmland, yet on Nov. 24, 1877 the Berkeley Advocate was calling for “a separate incorporation of Berkeley, like Cambridge, (Mass.), or any other university town.” Berkeley would incorporate the following year.  

In addition to selling books and real estate, Alfred Bartlett also dabbled in local politics. In 1886, he ran for the office of Berkeley town marshal. In this campaign he was defeated by the popular contractor-builder and amateur painter A.H. Broad, who had been a member of Berkeley’s first Board of Trustees, was a founder of Berkeley’s first library, and later would serve as town engineer and as superintendent of reconstruction of Berkeley schools injured by the earthquake. 

In 1892, the Bartletts built a second house next door, at 2205 Blake St. Rumor has it that this Queen Anne residence was a wedding present for one of the Bartletts’ daughters, but it appears to have been used as a rental property, as demand for housing increased as the district grew around the thriving downtown and Dwight Way Station commercial areas along Shattuck Avenue. 

The two Bartlett houses, situated in their original setting with virtual ly no exterior alterations, are probably the most pristine representation of Victorian Berkeley remaining. They were designated a City of Berkeley Landmark in December 2005. Sadly, their owner has removed several of the old Coast Live Oak trees around the se graceful old houses.  

Photo by Daniella Thompson 

The Captain Whitham house, 2198 Blake St. ,

If you’re a weekday plant shopper, you have only a week to get on down to Magic Gardens on Heinz Street and grab some of those nifty Japanese red-twigged variegated willows or those ’lebenty-seven rose varieties all in a row. If you’ll stoop to rubbing elbows with the weekend crowd and want to keep the place open as a retail nursery, plan on spending time and bucks there some Saturdays. As of Feb. 11, Magic Gardens, sole location will be open for retail sales only on Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to start. 

Magic Gardens has been through changes in its relatively short life, so many that the rest of us get dizzy trying to keep track It started out an instant star, with arrays of plants jewel-like in their condition and rarity—big enthusiasm. Aerin Moore’s charismatic promotion of gardening in general and his and other local genius’ techniques in particular certainly helped make the place popular. There were classes and nifty things to buy and all was apparently hunky-dory in this welcome new item on our nursery smorgasbord. (Today’s spread here features mashed metaphors with a piquant gossip gravy.)  

Then the place got to looking a bit ratty for a few years, and its hours and ambition seemed to contract somewhat. Rumors abounded in the garden community, heads were shaken, tuts were tutted, the usual. Then suddenly Magic Gardens was open in a new location, up the frontage road from Central Avenue toward Richmond alongside American Soil’s new retail place and The Urban Gardener. Then it was bi-locating like somebody’s patron saint. Then it had returned to concentrate on its original Berkeley location, on Heinz Street west of Seventh. Now it’s de-concentrating, as it were, by limiting its retail hours and spending most energy on the landscaping arm of its business. 

Over a decade ago, a fellow garden pro pointed out a couple of Magic landscapes that she found scandalous. One was imaginative enough, with a flag-circled lawn and pie-slices carved out of the ivy slope and planted with azaleas for visual impact. But those azaleas (and that turf) were under old California live oaks, which tend to dwindle and die slowly with summer irrigation. The water-lovers were planted downslope from the trees, which would help, but it’s an opportunity for oak-dangerous fungi to flourish. The other scandal was basically a heap of deer chow, planted in deer-friendly Orinda. It had evidently impressed the deer; what I saw looked like the wedding buffet after the guests had gone. 

But they’ve done much better things too, and there’s some good stonework around with Magic’s fingerprints on it. Evidently they’ve learned better. Certainly one can expect imaginative plant choices from these folks. I hope the rest of us will still get to have a taste of that, at least on Saturdays, and that the landscaping part of the business can support the retail nursery. Magic has been offering Saturday classes with some of our best garden mavens. I hope that continues too; it’s certainly a good omen that speaks well for its learning curve. 

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Little houses have their own heating issues and so I’d like to ask those of you who own ranchos grande to bear with me for a few minutes while I focus on the heating needs of the little houses.  

Small houses are often under-heated or minimally heated. It seems to go along with the low economy which these small homes express in so many ways. Many of the small houses I see are heated with either gas floor furnaces or gas wall furnaces or some combination of the two. A few are heated with electric heaters and, believe it or not, some have no heat at all (which some folks, amazingly, prefer). 

Wall furnaces are the most common heating I find in small houses so let’s start with them. If you have a house heated by a single wall furnace, one of the things you may have noticed is that they don’t really transmit much heat beyond the room in which they are located.  

If you close your bedroom door, it’s likely that the heat will be sucked out of those old single-glazed windows faster than the furnace can push it in through the door. If you leave the bedroom door open, this system might work for you. Floor furnaces create the same problem.  

Sometimes there is more than one wall furnace in the house and this may provide enough distribution to pass muster. You may also have noticed that, in order to get the coldest room warm enough, the room where the heater is located has to be baking hot. This raises questions about the efficiency of the system because you know you are wasting heat if you’re overheating any space. Wall furnaces also toss quite a bit of their heat up through the flue into the night sky, and if you’re really heat hungry, you may be helping to put some PG&E exec’s daughter through Stanford. 

If you have a wall furnace in a bedroom, you may be chancing a carbon monoxide poisoning because you are in an enclosed space with the unit for long periods of time and wall furnaces are more apt than other designs to draft noxious flue gases into the living space. The unit is also using up the oxygen in the room, and I don’t know about you, but I really like my oxygen (and I don’t want to share). 

Again, floor furnaces are similar in these respects and if you have either one of these heaters in a bedroom, I strongly suggest finding another way to heat the space. 

If you have a really tiny house and a single wall furnace that you’ve had checked by a good heating expert and you’re warm enough and happy, well, fine. This kind of heater might be all right for you. Nonetheless, most of the houses I see that are being heated this way prove to have those bothersome traits I’ve described. 

Here are a few more issues specific to floor furnaces. First, kids and especially infants get burned on these ancient devices, and fires can also start if flammables are left sitting on them (listen, I don’t always look to see where I tossed the newspaper). 

If you do want to use a gas “point-source” heater (non-central or unducted, like the wall or floor furnace) to heat your bedroom or all purpose (sleep/live) room, a ”direct-vent” model may be a reasonable choice. These are far less likely to introduce noxious wastes like carbon monoxide into the room and don’t use oxygen from the inside, so they’re a much better choice. These still get quite hot if left on for a long time and also don’t heat the next room very well. Again, this is a reasonable choice for a very small living space. 

If you’re using electric heat, consider that, on average, you’re paying at least three times as much for the same unit of heat. These also heat slowly, which has both plusses and minuses. If you’re in a house that has an older electrical system, the use of electric heaters may pose something of a threat and, at very least, a good electrician should check to make sure everything is properly installed. 

I would like to take a minute to discuss freestanding electric heaters. In short, don’t use them if you can possibly avoid it. They cause loads of fires as well as being real energy hogs. If you absolutely must use one, please don’t sleep with it on. Also, don’t use one with an extension cord. This greatly increases the likelihood of a fire. 

So, having covered the field of point-source heating (the main kind I see in small houses), let’s talk a little about what other choices you might explore. Oddly, one of the things I’d look at first is insulation. If you have a lot more insulation, you might not need much heat at all. Take a look at your leaky windows and consider double-glazed ones. A retrofit type might not cost too much. See if you have plenty of well-distributed attic insulation. If not, you may be fighting an uphill battle to keep the heat you’ve bought inside your house. Distribution really matters and the attic entry door should be insulated as well. Weather-strip your main exterior doors. This can save a lot of heat and keep the house cozier. 

Now the big stuff. If you feel like the house is one you’re going to stay in for a while or has the capability to sell for a good price, a central heating system is probably a reasonable economic choice. These come in very small output sizes and are somewhat cheaper when installed in a small house. If you choose a “condensing” type, they are extremely efficient and will pump warm air through all the rooms of the house at the same time. Ooooo, warmth at last. You may end up with this unit in the crawlspace, the attic or a closet in the interior. If you’re adventurous and willing to try something new, consider one of the new small “hydronic” types, that heat the house with warm water running through tubing below the floor or through radiators. There’s even a nice little unit that also heats the water you shower and cook with and the whole thing hangs on outside of the house. Next time, I’ll spend a whole page on this unit. It’s called the Baxi Luna and it’ll really raise your temperature. 

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The address of Razan’s Organic Kitchen was printed incorrectly in Tuesday’s paper. The restaurant is located at 2119 Kittredge St..t

TUESDAY, FEB. 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

James Gayles’ “East Bay Blues Master” and other works by George Hopkins at the Richmond Health Center, 100 38th St., enter at 39th and Bissell. Celebrating Black History Month. 231-1348.  

FILM 

Women’s Preservation Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marion Nestle discusses her reasearch on culinary history in northern California at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Bernard-Henri Lévy introduces his new book “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville” at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

New Pacific Trio at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. 

Swamp Coolers, cajun, zydeco at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

David Thom Band, Dark Hollow, Grizzly Peak and Marty Varner at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761.  

Mingus Big Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 8 

FILM 

FIlm 50 “The Fall of the House of Usher” at 3 p.m. and Weird America “Olie Noodling” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

An Evening with John Cleese at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988.  

Café Poetry hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568.  

Tim Egan describes “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. 

Camille Paglia describes “Break, Blow, Burn” on poetry and the state of our culture, at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High School Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

North Beach Django Band at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Earth Quake Weather, Love Infinity, Sabre Teeth, Yardsale at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886.  

Four Flea Circus, folk-rock fusions, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lunasa at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

Mingus Big Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, FEB. 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The White Album” works in varying shades of white. Reception at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs through March 25. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

Irie Park All-Stars “Civil Rights and Lefts” Visual history of the African-American experience. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. and runs through March 11. 967-5399. 

“A Retrospective in Black & White and Color” works by photographer Susan Sai-Wah Louie at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., through March 16. 981-6100. 

THEATER 

“Grandma’s Hands” A Black History Month celebration by the fifth graders at Oxford Elementary School at 9 a.m. at 1130 Oxford St. Also on Fri. at 10:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary School. 644-6300. 

FILM 

Mikio Naruse “Summer Clouds” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

“The Greater Circulation” by Antero Alli at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 26th St. Cost is $5-$10. 444-7263. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Regla: Revolution” panel discussion on Cuban political prints by Antonio Canet, at 6 p.m. at the NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond.  

Poets for Peace with Margaret Kaufman, Jeffrey Levine, Ilya Kaminsky and Robert Thomas at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

An Evening with John Cleese at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988.  

Sarah Vowell reads from her book “Assassination Vacation” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Word Beat Reading Series with Michael Kelly and M.K. Chavez at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $32.50-$33.50. 548-1761.  

Bryan Girard’s Soul Jazz Collective at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Full Service at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Duo Mysterioso at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Steve Tyrell at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FRIDAY, FEB. 10 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, “Twelfth Night” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., through Feb. 18. Tickets are $12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theatre “The Master Builder” Wed. through Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through March 5. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “9 Parts of Desire” about women in war-torn Iraq, at 8 p.m. at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through March 5. Tickets are $30-$59. 647-2949.  

Black Repertory Group “The Piano Lesson” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St., through Feb. 25. Tickets are $7-$15. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater, “One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest” Fri. and Sat at 8 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser Lane, El Cerrito, through Feb. 25. 524-9132.  

Impact Theatre, “Hamlet” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through March 18. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

The Marsh Berkeley “Strange Travel Suggestions” monologue by Jeff Greenwald, Thurs. and Fri. at 7 p.m. through March 3, at 2118 Allston Way. Tickets are $15-$22. 800-838-3006.  

Masquers Playhouse "Over the River and Through the Woods" Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through Feb. 25 at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $15. 232-4031.  

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Splinters ... and Other F-Words” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, through Feb. 11. Tickets are $12-$25 sliding scale. 800-838-3006.  

EXHIBITIONS 

Buddhist Relics Opening reception at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley Shambala Center, 2288 Fulton St. through Sun. Donations welcome. 755-1136. 

“The Bancroft at 100 Symposium” Fri. and Sat. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808.  

Katsunori Hamanishi, mezzotints. Reception at 6 p.m. at Schurman-Scriptum Gallery, 1659 San Pablo Ave. Exhibit runs to March 31. 524-0623. 

FILM 

African Film Festival “The Hero” at 7 p.m. and “New Voices from Africa” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Leslie M. Freudenheim describes “Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts & Crafts Home” at 7:30 p.m. at First Church of Christ, Scientist, 2619 Dwight Way at Bowditch. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. 841-2242. 

Chitra Nanerjee Divakaruni reads from “The Mistress of Spices” set in Oakland in the 1980’s at 7 p.m. at The Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2200.  

Istvan Rev on his new book “Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“Celebrating the Arts” Speakers of Color Series with comedian and writer Brian Copeland and artist Arnold White at 7 p.m. at Head-Royce School Pavilion, 4315 Lincoln Ave. 531-1300, ext. 2245. 

George McGovern talks about “Social Security and the Golden Age: An Essay on the New American Demographic” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Lois-Ann Yamanaka reads from her new novel “Behold the Many” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Eileen Ivers & Immigrant Soul, Irish fiddler, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$32. 642-9988.  

Fetish, Intrepid Improv, The Bullheads at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

John Santos Quartet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Vladimir Vukanovich, Peruvian guitarist, at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568.  

Kenny Washington & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Nanette McGuinness, soprano, Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmani, mezzo-soprano, Kathryn Cathcart, piano at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont at Ashby. Cost is $12. 848-1228.  

Albino, Afro-beat, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $32.50-$33.50. 548-1761.  

Larry Vuckovich’s “La Orquesta El Vuco” at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

DJ & Brook at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

All Bets Off, Life Long Tragedy, Dispute at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Lunar Heights at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Flowtilla at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Steve Tyrell at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, FEB. 11 

CHILDREN 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Fran Avni & Bonnie Lockhart at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.  

“Junie Jones and A Little Monkey Business” theater for ages 5 and up, at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. Tickets are $13-$18. 925-798-1300. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Bancroft Library Centennial with their collection of rare and historic documents. Reception at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, UC Campus. 643-4715. 

Andrew Red Hourse Alvarez Jewelry, Sat. and Sun. at Gathering Tribes Gallery, 1573 Solano Ave. 528-9038. 

THEATER 

Big City Improv, comedy, at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby. Tickets are $15. 595-5597.  

FILM 

Mikio Naruse “Anzukko” at 7 p.m. and “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” at 9:10 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Howard Thurman: A Gracious Spirit” with Arleigh Prelow, documentary filmmaker, at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

“The Art of Living Black” Artist talk and slide lecture with Ala Ebtekar and Almudena Ortiz at 2 p.m. at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave. at 25th St. 620-6772.  

Julian Barnes reads from his new novel “Arthur & George” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

“The Bancroft at 100” Curator’s talk with Anthony Bliss at noon in Gallery 4, Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Chick Corea & Touchstone at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $30-$52. 642-9988.  

“Improvisation” with Myra Melford, Mark Sresser, Bob Ostertag and David Wessel at 8 p.m. in Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $22. 642-9988. 

Alexander Tsygankov “The Paganini of Domra” at 7:30 p.m. at New Spirit Community Church, 1798 Scenic Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 704-7729. 

Caminos Flamencos at 8 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave., through Feb. 14. Tickets are $50-$95, includes dinner. 287-8700.  

RebbeSoul World Beat and Jewish roots at 7 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave. at Fairview, Piedmont. Tickets are $25-$60. 547-2424 ext. 214.  

Kirtan, devotional chanting with Jaya Lakshmi at 7 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. Tickets are $15-$18. 843-2787.  

Maria Marquez & Trio with John Santos at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Patrick Ball “O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music” at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Fuga, dance/concert at 9 p.m. at at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$7. 849-2568.  

Prefixo de Verao, Brazilian pre-carnival celebration at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

City Limit, The Wearies, Last Clear Chance at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8-$10. 848-0886.  

Caroline Chung’s “Superbacana Trio” at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Mario Desio & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Ilene Adar and Dana Shellmire at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Future Adults, Leopard Life, Teli Savalas at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $3. 525-9926. 

Mitch Marcus Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SUNDAY, FEB. 12 

CHILDREN  

Asheba at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

EXHIBITIONS 

Craig Baxter, screenprints and etchings. Reception at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

FILM 

Mikio Naruse “The Approach of Autumn” at 4:30 p.m. and “Daughters, Wives, and a Mother” at 6:10 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Andrew Lam reads from “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora” at 1 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

David Kipen considers “The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Poetry Flash with Eileen R. Tabios and Catherine Daly at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Jean-Michel Fonteneau and Roy Bogas at 4 p.m. at Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. Cost is $12, free for children.  

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra “2Bs or Not 2Bs” at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Free. 415-248-1640.  

Organ Recital by Lynn Trapp at 6:10 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Donations accepted. 845-0888.  

Community Women’s Orchestra, “On With The Dance” at 4 p.m. at Zion Lutheran Church, 5201 Park Blvd., Piedmont. Suggested donation $10, children free. 463-0313.  

Les Violons du Roy and Magdalena Kozená, mezzo-soprano, at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56, available from 642-9988.  

Carlos Oliveira & Brazilian Origns featuring Harvey Wainapel at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Julian Waterfall Pollack Trio at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373.  

Tracy Grammer at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Tangria at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

MONDAY, FEB. 13 

THEATER 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Titus Andronicus” Staged reading at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, Fireside Room, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $5. 276-3871. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bharati Mukherjee and Meredith Maran introduce “Why I’m Still Married: Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex and Who Does the Dishes” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Poetry Express with Misha Ferguson at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

Maggie Morley and colleagues, poetry, followed by open mic, at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Valentine’s Day Voices with University Chorus and University Choral Ensembles at 8 p.m. in Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-9988. 

Caminos Flamencos at 6 and 9 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $50-$95, includes dinner. 287-8700. www.cafedelapaz.net 

George Brooks’ Indian Jazz Combo at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $16. Benefit for the Oakland Library. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

The sparsely decorated set, designed by John Iacovelli at The Aurora, says something of the fin-de-siecle Norway in which Henrik Ibsen wrote The Master Builder—simple, functional wood furniture with little adornment. In the parlor, a nosegay of deep red carnations seems almost startling. 

The Master Builder’s office has a ledger on an upright desk, drafting tools laid out on a table, where, later, architectural renderings will be spread. In the back wall—with windows sketched in on blue wallpaper like drafting paper—are French doors, the only visible link to the gardens and vista of other dwellings outside. 

This is the cockpit for the battle of nerves the Master Builder wages like a war with his colleagues, clients, his doctor, his wife—the world, outside and in. James Carpenter’s demeanor in the lead role also says something of exterior and interior worlds—spare, perfectly appointed (Jocelyn Leiser the costumer), but abrupt in mood and movement, with occasional extravagant gestures. He dominates all around him, who seem to do his will with a mixture of awe and resentment. He’s also battling himself, in episodes of exaltation followed by self-doubt, fantastic confidence in his own powers followed by paranoid delusions. 

And through the French doors at the back, his angel or demon strides in, midway through the first act, in the form of a vivacious madcap making her way down from the mountains and into the world, Hilda Wangel (Lauren Grace).  

Hilda is banking on a vague invitation from the Builder’s wife, Aline (Anne Darragh), a woman who seems in perpetual mourning, resigned to “do her duty.”  

But she also wants to cash in on what she takes to be an old promise from Solness, the Master Builder, who at first doesn’t remember her and maybe never really does. Ten years before, inaugurating a church tower he built in her home town, Solness complimented the 13-year-old, telling her she was a princess who deserved a palace, a kingdom. Now Hilda has come to demand her due.  

Solness finds he can talk to Hilda; he doesn’t feel misunderstood by her, as he does by the others. He tells her his view of things we’ve already seen or heard of—how he’s feigned affection for the young woman who works in his office (Kaja, played by Zehra Berkman) in order to keep her fiancé, his assistant Ragnar (Brian Herndon) from leaving his employ and becoming a competitor. He has forebodings of being brushed aside by “the young.” He’s browbeat Ragnar and Ragnar’s father, Knut (Julian Lopez-Morillas), trying to destroy any confidence in the young man’s chance of independence. 

Hilda admiringly says that no one should be allowed to build but Solness—but shows distain when he tells her he secretly agrees. The two revel in their seeming ability to read each other’s thoughts, anticipate each other’s statements. 

Solness further reveals to her his great fear: that his success cannibalized his own and his wife’s disasters (the burning of her family home they’d inherited, the deaths of their twin infant sons). Everybody thinks him lucky and, he thinks, mad. Even his doctor (Richard Rossi), very much the diplomat and counselor, who jokes about what he assumes to be Solness’ affairs with young women, thinks him unhinged. 

Urged by all who see her hold on the Master Builder to restrain his extravagance, Hilda pushes him on to greater heights, to find her “castle in the air.” 

The program notes for the production emphasize the psychological drama of an older creative man driven on recklessly by an infatuation with a younger woman. That is most apparent in the plot, but the excellent performances by the cast, so well directed by Aurora founder Barbara Oliver, and the spartan clarity of the the translation (a world premiere, by past ACTdramaturg Paul Walsh), show the bald contradictions and ambiguities of every statement and action, offering a critique of the middle-class society of the 19th century. The Master Builder was Freud’s favorite play for more than clinical reasons. 

“To be a poet is to see,” said Ibsen. In The Master Builder he shows his ability to see deep into the contradictory matter of modern existence. After an absence of three decades from Norway, his courage in sublimating his own experiences into the character of a provincial enfant terrible grown long in the tooth and afraid of the up-and-coming young, shows the greatest artistic freedom.  

Something the Aurora production doesn’t quite grasp, which seems implicit in the translation, is the precise social tone of the conversation, the constant mention of duty to cover resentment, Hilda’s coquettish demands for an imaginary kingdom, Solness’ thoughtless yet domineering flatteries and condemnations. 

Kierkegaard, whose writings Ibsen knew, waged a campaign against what he called “drivel,” the irresponsible, careless, hypocritical chatter of bourgeois society and press, which tossed off chimeras of the mind as if silly parlor talk, exactly the doubles-entendres Freud found so indicative of true duplicity and neurosis, and which R. D. Laing would later characterize as “double binds,” Catch-22s. The dialogue of the play is, like the character of Solness, wound tight with these, spring-loaded like the stychomythia of Greek Tragedy, where the meaning is what’s ironically missed, not said outright, in the exchange. 

This show has plenty of irony, but maybe not enough of the falsely light touch, both knowing and frivolous, whereby a young lady could demand blood from an older man, yet just sound like a silly, coquettish girl. 

The Master Builder plays at 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through March 5 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St. For more information, call 843-4822 or see www.auroratheatre.org. 

Although there are many indicators of prestige among modern educational institutions—from Nobel prizes to faculty ratings to research dollars and private donations—university libraries remain one of the enduring benchmarks of excellence in higher education. 

Among the many library gems at the University of California campus in Berkeley, the most unique and precious may be the Bancroft Library.  

It’s a great treasury of historical materials—from books to manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and ancient papyrus—a leading center of historical research, and a wellspring of numerous scholarly studies, books, and even novels. 

Founded privately by Hubert Howe Bancroft, a foresighted California pioneer, publisher, and collector, today’s public Bancroft Library dates its campus connections to 1906, the year it was brought to Berkeley.  

The official Centennial of the Bancroft is celebrated this week with a free public conference and exhibit opening at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.  

The event runs from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Friday and Saturday. Some 15 talks and panel discussions are scheduled on topics relevant to Bancroft research and collections, including “Modern Literary Manuscripts,” “Nineteenth-Century California History,” “The Environmental Movement,” “Mark Twain and His Era,” “Biotechnology and the Biological Revolution” and “The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.”  

Speakers and participants come from as far as the University of Leiden and as near as City Lights Bookstore, and include State Librarian Emeritus Kevin Starr, scientists Daniel Koshland, Jr. and John Heilbron, activists Kathleen Cleaver and Sylvia McLaughlin, and poets Robert Hass and Michael McClure.  

Central to the Bancroft are the amazing and eclectic collections of western history and documents collected in the 19th century by its namesake, who came to California in the Gold Rush and ultimately established the largest book and stationery firm west of the Mississippi. 

With profits from his business he got into the habit of collecting records and books and ended up publishing, with the help of a large research and editorial staff, nearly forty volumes of western history.  

Besides collecting existing written and published materials, he sent out researchers to interview early Californians—from Mexican-era officials, to American pioneers—and record their recollections in an early form of oral history. 

Wrapping up his own research activities in the 1890s he worked to find a permanent, secure, home for his collections, especially since his office building—although not the collection itself—had burned in 1886. 

As early as the 1870s the University of California had expressed interest in his library, but financial concerns and public criticisms had prevented a sale.  

As the 20th century began, acquisition efforts were renewed by two new University of California officials—President Benjamin Ide Wheeler and Professor of History Henry Morse Stephens—and by fall 1905, the deal was done.  

Bancroft sold his collection—appraised at more than $315,000—to the University for $250,000, and immediately donated $100,000 back to the institution.  

“The purchase of the Bancroft Library marks a great day in the history of the university,” a University Press release noted. “It marks the emergence of a real university of study and research out of the midst of the colleges of … teaching and training.” 

Then things nearly went up in smoke. Although a ceremonial transfer of the key to the collection took place in late November 1905, the documents were still in San Francisco in April 1906, when the great earthquake shook, and conflagration swept the city.  

For a time, “the University heads went through an anxious period, sadly contemplating … the default of the hopes to make the university a real institution of learning,” historian John Caughney wrote.  

But when the smoke cleared, the Bancroft collection had survived the earthquake and fire, almost alone among the great public and private libraries of San Francisco. This was due to the caution of Hubert Howe Bancroft who had installed his treasures somewhat outside the densely built-up districts in a strongly built, fireproof, structure on Valencia Street.  

Later in 1906 it was carted to Berkeley and its first campus home, the attic of California Hall. It would subsequently move to various floors of Doe Library. 

Although always stressed for funds, the collection grew through an active acquisitions program. Directors, curators, and staff were determined to make it a living collection by adding more material on western history as old materials became available through donation or purchase, and as new history was made. 

By 1946, the collection was three times bigger than it was in 1905, and a little over half a century ago the library moved to the new Annex building next to Doe Library and continued to grow. 

Today, the annex is temporarily closed as it undergoes a multi-million dollar seismic retrofit and interior reconstruction. Bancroft facilities including the Reading Room operate out of temporary quarters on Allston Way in downtown Berkeley, while most of the collections are stored in Richmond. 

In the 1970s and later the Bancroft was administratively united with several other special collections and library programs at the university. Rare books and manuscripts of all sorts, the ancient Egyptian Tebtunis Papyrus collection, the Regional Oral History Office, the University Archives, and the Mark Twain Papers, among others, all operate under its wing.  

Here’s the Bancroft by the numbers. Some 600,000 printed volumes and 60,000,000 pieces of manuscript occupy miles of shelving, along with 2,800,000 photographs and 23,000 maps.  

Operating with an annual budget of around $6 million (only about a third of it funded by the State of California), the Library sees more than 12,000 research visits a year and handles nearly 43,000 research and reference inquiries.  

All of the Bancroft collections are “non-circulating,” making the library’s reading room the sole public access point of the collection.  

Today, any individual with a serious research interest can go to the Bancroft, register, and call up and examine materials. 

When the Bancroft first moved to Berkeley, research access was more limited. A campus commission recommended that only graduate students at work on theses, and “qualified researchers” be allowed access. 

Other visitors “shall be courteously received and shown around the library by the assistant custodian, but shall not be permitted to use books or other historical materials,” the commission admonished. 

In the modern era, no visitors need fear being shunted off to the “assistant custodian.” Instead, they receive careful and expert assistance from a small corps of curators and reference staff adept at suggesting and finding the most obscure materials.  

I’ve been an occasional user of the Bancroft reading room, and have always been amazed at the immense scope of the research materials and the unexpected gems they contain. A small example; once, while researching the history of the University Art Museum, I opened a folder of dry administrative documents to find an original 1934 letter by Bernard Maybeck, commenting on the architecture and uses of a renovated campus building.  

For the next century the Bancroft will undoubtedly continue to accumulate and unfold treasures. In the meantime, now is a great time to get acquainted with the library through its centennial. 

A gallery talk at noon and an evening exhibit reception (6–8 p.m.) on Saturday help open the Centennial exhibit, “The Bancroft Library at 100.” It will remain on display through early December. 

Symposium events take place in the Berkeley Art Museum theater and Pacific Film Archive theater on Bancroft Way, near Bowditch Street. For more information see http://bancroft.berkeley.edu or call (510) 642-3781. The two-page program can be downloaded from the website. 

(The College of California, by the way, gave Bancroft Way its name in the 1860s before the University of California existed. It honors not Hubert Howe Bancroft but 19th century American historian George Bancroft.) 

I’ve spent lots of time, breath, and column inches here and elsewhere in the past telling people how not to kill their trees. Don’t top trees; don’t hack away most of their limbs; don’t leave stubs; don’t hire inept bozos who do any of the above. Don’t plant them in the wrong place, or too deeply. Don’t irrigate native live oaks. Don’t let the base of the trunk get smothered in soil or mulch.  

But suppose you have a dead tree on your hands through no fault of your own. (Or because you really blew it.) Now what—the takedown crew and the chainsaws? Well, maybe. But unlike the average large rotting animal, a tree is still useful after it’s dead.  

Useful to us, of course; we surround ourselves with dead trees. We live in them, sit on them, perch our computers on them, transmit copy across town over wires they support to be printed and read on sheets made out of them. Wood is handsome and feels nice to touch; paper is sure as heck easier to make and use and re-use than, say, parchment or vellum or clay tablets. So, yay dead trees! At least processed ones. 

A dead tree standing in your yard, that’s another matter, pure liability. Or is it?  

Lots of our wild neighbors actually make intense use of standing dead trees. Such trees host more bugs—and many of the new bugs are specialists, who don’t go on to eat every live tree in sight—and often in tasty, juicy larval form, which makes them a free buffet for insectivores like woodpeckers. In Berkeley, we’re most likely to see red-shafted (“northern”) flickers, especially in winter. Flashy as they are, you’ll hear them first, that scornful brazen “Fnaah!” from the top of a tree. They are one woodpecker you’ll see on the ground too, sometimes “anting”: sitting on an anthill and spreading their feathers, mashing a beakful of ants and rubbing it all over their skin. I’ve heard several speculative explanations for this, but I’m sure it’s a rush. I’m waiting for the crystal-aura-magical spa types to latch onto it and offer a formic acid skin peel, you know, As Nature Intended. Remember, you read it here first. 

We get downy or hairy woodpeckers, depending on whether we’re in the more urban flats or the woodsy hills. They’re very similar; listen for a squeaky-toy noise or a small but piercing “peent” and look for a white back, then grab the field guide. If it has a barred rather than a white back, and if it gives a rolling “bb-bbb-bbbbbbt” sort of call, it’s a Nuttall’s woodpecker. I believe that species is extending its range over the last decade or so; we used to see them only well east of the hills, and lately they’re all over here, including the one who has a drumming post on the telephone pole out front of our house.  

Woodpeckers are pioneers; other species live in the natural hollows caused by decay, or in holes that woodpeckers have excavated. Those indomitable chickadees and titmice need a hole. The red-breasted nuthatch, tooting merrily? Same requirement. Don’t they just cheer you up on a gray winter day? 

If you’re lucky and/or semirural, you might get western bluebirds, ash-throated flycatchers or tree swallows nesting in your stump. Our native gray squirrels, so rare here in the urban umbra, might winter in a tree hole. Arboreal salamanders, who turn up in places as unlikely as big apartment complexes near Dwight and Shattuck—I’ve seen them there, in multiples—need tree hollows to hide and reproduce in.  

And those who like owlboxes—barn owls, for example—or any critter—possum, wood duck, kingfisher—who’d use a birdhouse would likely prefer a hollow tree.  

So, a dead tree, lucky you. Rethink it. One smart person I know had her dead Doug fir limbed and topped at about ten feet up, and left it there. It’s not about to topple onto anybody, her neighbors are OK about it, and she’s got Nuttall’s woodpeckers moving in and a barn owl in the neighborhood.  

Consider her example. You’ll want to calculate, and see if the tree’s base is rotting out and what’s in range of a fall. But here’s another instance where careful “neglect” is the best kind of gardening.  

TUESDAY, FEB. 7 

Community Rally to Stop the Ashby BART Grant at 6:15 on the steps of Old City Hall, before the City Council meeting. 

“Hard Ball on Holy Ground” The Religious and Secular Right’s Attack on Progressive Churches with Andrew J.Weaver at 7 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. 524-2921. 

Kalimba Interactive Assembly with Carl Winters on the African thumb piano, in celebration of Black History Month at 10 a.m. at the Oakland Public Library, West Oakland Branch, 1801 Adeline St. and at 1 p.m. at the Temescal Branch, 5205 Telegraph Ave. All ages welcome. 238-7352. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

“Sankofa” A showing of the Black independent film at 6 p.m. at Merritt College, Building A, Room 218.  

“The Conflict Between Lions and Humans: Is Peace Possible in Africa?” with researcher Dr. Laurence Frank at 6:30 p.m. at the Marian Zimmer Auditorium, lower park entrance, Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd., in Knowland Park, Oakland. Cost is $12-$20. 632-9525 ext. 122. www.oaklandzoo.org  

Introduction to Conscious Parenting If you have ever wondered about new ways of parenting, or struggled with things not going how you expected, come and find relief, community, and a host of new tools at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby near Ashby BART. 415-312-1830. 

Turn Stress into Success Workshop at 7:30 p.m. at Creating Harmony Institute, Atrium Plaza, 828 San Pablo Ave. Suite 115B, Albany. Free but registration required. 526-1559. 

Paris & Provence with photographic adventure guide Don Lyon at 7 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 654-1548.  

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss Love and Sex in the 21st Century from 7 to 9 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 601-6690. 

California Shakespeare Summer Theater Camp Open House to meet with potential campers and their families from 7-8:30 p.m. at the Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. 548-3422 ext. 127. 

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Free Handbuilding Ceramics Class 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at St. John’s Senior Center, 2727 College Ave. 525-5497. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 8 

Richmond Southeast Shoreline Community Advisory Group Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Richmond Convention Center, Bermuda Room, 403 Civic Center Plaza at Nevin and 25th Sts. 540-3923. 

Presentation about the Albany Shoreline and the Citizens’ Planning Initiative to Protect Albany’s Shoreline with Robert Cheasty, president of Citizens for East Shore Parks and former Mayor of Albany at 10:30 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., Albany. 558-9639. www.albanyshoreline.org 

“African American Health Awareness 2006” A cummunity forum at 10 a.m. at African Methodist Episcopal Church, 530 37th St., Oakland. 444-9655. 

Lead-Safety for Remodeling, Repair and Painting of older homes. A HUD & EPA approved class held in Oakland from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. To register, call Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program at 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

“The Rebirth of Environ- 

mentalism” with George Lakoff and Mark Danner at 7:30 p.m. at Buttner Auditorium, College Prep School, 6100 Broadway. Tickets are $5-$10 at the door. 339-7726.  

Rhoda Goldman Lecture in Health Policy “A Conversation with Robert Klein” at 7:30 p.m. at Chevron Auditorium, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave., UC Campus. 642-4670. 

Film Series on 9/11: “The Great Conspiracy” at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. Oakland. Free, but donations of $5 accepted. www.HumanistHall.net 

“Indigenous Peoples And Diabetes: Community Empowerment And Wellness” edited by Mariana Ferreira and Gretchen Lang, book release at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

East Bay Genealogical Society Robert Lindquist will about the Swedish immigration at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room of the Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave. Oakland. 635-6692. 

Poetry Writing Workshop, led by Alison Seevak, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library ,1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at USDA, 800 Buchanan St., Albany. To schedule an appointment, call Steven at 559-6188.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, FEB. 9 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll search for our amphibian friends, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Grandma’s Hands” A Black History Month celebration by the fifth graders at Oxford Elementary School at 9 a.m. at 1130 Oxford St. Also on Fri. at 10:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary School. 644-6300. 

“Can the US be a Global Good Neighbor” Panel discussion with Ann Wright, Tom Barry, John Gershman, Laura Carlsen, Stephen Zunes, and Conn Hallinan at 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Donations suggested. Sponsored by The International Relations Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“North Koreans Beyond the Border” Four UCB Journalism students report about their travels to South Korea and Northern China where they met North Korean migrants and defectors, at 5:30 p.m. at North Gate Hall Library, UC CAmpus. http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2006.02.09.html 

East Bay Mac Users Group meets at 6 p.m. at Expression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound St., Emeryville Learn how to sync your Mac to almost any PDA or handheld. http://ebmug.org 

American Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at MLK Student Union, East Pauley Ballroom, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVELIFE. www.BeADonor.com 

Lead Funding Info Meeting for Landlords to learn about financial assistance to reduce lead hazards at 6 p.m. at Oakland Housing Authority, 1619 Harrison. Free, presented by Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, FEB. 10 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Michael Perleman, international financier. Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.  

Memorial Service for Jean Siri at 11 a.m. at the Miller-Knox Shoreline, Dornan Drive, Pt. Richmond. For infromation call the East Bay Regional Parks District at 544-2206. 

“Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts & Crafts Home” with Leslie M. Freudenheim at 7:30 p.m. at First Church of Christ, Scientist, 2619 Dwight Way at Bowditch. Tickets are $15. Sponsored by the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. 841-2242. 

“Whooping Cranes: Recovering from the Brink of Extinction” with Dr. George Archibald, Co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, at 7:30 p.m. at San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum, corner of 9th Ave/Lincoln Way, San Francisco. Sponsored by The Golden Gate Audubon Society, Berkeley. 843-2222. www.goldengateaudubon.org  

Womansong Circle An evening of participatory singing for women at 6:45 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. DOnation $10-$20. 525-7082. 

Berkeley Critical Mass Bike Ride meets at the Berkeley BART the second Friday of every month at 5:30 p.m.  

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5 to 7 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., room 17. 843-0150. 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, FEB. 11 

Toddler Nature Walk for 2-3 year olds. We’ll look for our salamander friends from 2 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

War Tax Resistance Workshop from 2 to 4 p.m. at 3122 Shattuck Ave. Sponsored by Northern California War Tax Resistance. 843-9877. www.nowartax.org 

Energy Efficiency Workshop for your home, from 9 to 11 a.m. at Truitt and White Conference Room, 1817 Second St. Free, but registration required. 649-2674. 

Open Conference on the Electoral Crisis on the failures of the “two party system” at 2 p.m. at Redwood Gardens, 2951 Derby St. MrPlutocrat@aol.com 

East Bay Impeach Bush Group meets at 5 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 527-9584. 

“Women in Ancient Arabia” a visual presentation by Max Dashu, at 7:30 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave., near Alcatraz, Oakland. Cost is $10-$20 sliding scale, no one turned away. 415-561-7752. 

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk at the Emeryville Marina Meet at 3:30 p.m. on the west side of Chevy’s Restaurant. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

The Rotary Club of Albany Second Annual Celebration, “Service Above Self” at 7:30 p.m. at Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. Tickets are $20. 558-1534. 

Lead-Safe Painting & Remodeling Free class to learn about lead safe renovations for your older home at 10 a.m. at the Eastmont Branch Library 7200 Bancroft Ave #211, Oakland. Presented by Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

Bridging the Gap Conference with hip hop historian, and community activist Davey D and Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on the UC Campus. Free and open to all ages. Benefit for the Graduate Minority Students’ Project. 642-2876, ext. 4. www.struggle4reparations.com 

Sistaz N Motion, helping women start their own business, meets at 12:30 p.m. until 3:30 p.m. at Crescent Park Multi-Cultural Family Resource Center, 5004 Hartnett Ave., Richmond. Cost is $10 for non-members. Please RSVP to sistaznmotion@hotmail.com 

Make a Valentine Workshop with Adria McCuaig from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Free for all ages. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Love Mission to Mars A simulated space mission to share with your Valentine at 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center. Also on Sun. at 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. Tickets are $60 per couple. 336-7373. 

The Great War Society meets to discuss “General George C. Marshall, Organizer of Victory” at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

“Let’s Talk About It: Jewish Literature - Identity and Imagination” Discussion led by Led by Dr. Naomi Seidman, at 2 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Registration is recommended. 524-3043. 

Small Business Seminar on Market Analysis at 9 a.m. at Vista College, 2075 Allston Way. Cost is $26. To register see www.peralta.cc.ca.us 

“Self Image/God Image” Writing workshop for believers and doubters with Beth Glick-Rieman from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Donation $40. Bring a bag lunch. To register, call 524-2858. 

“Scars of War/Wounds of Peace” with Shlomo Ben-Ami, fromer Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $5. 839-2900, ext. 253. 

Preschool Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Jack van der Meulen on Opening the Heart Yoga from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. Cost is $80, registration required. 843-6812.  

SUNDAY, FEB. 12 

Reptile Rendevous Meet the resident reptiles of the Tilden Nature Center from 11 a.m. to noon at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Waste Not, Want Not A recycling adventure for 8-12 year olds from 1 to 3 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Green Sunday: Why Three Alameda County Greens are running for state-wide office at 5 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland. 

Mending Bee and Repair-a-thon Bring your latest repair project, share skills and materials, and watch a slideshow by local artists of their recent small and largescale repair projects. From 4 to 7 p.m. at Rock Paper Scissors Gallery, 2278 Telegraph Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 238-9171. www.rpscollective.com 

Love, Kisses, Wills, Trusts Get your legal affairs in order. Open forum discussion and private consultations from 9 a.m. to noon at Chapel of the Chimes, 449 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Free. 228-3207. 

Celebrate Black History Month with interactive storytelling and jazz from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. Nubia at 1 p.m., Derique the Clown at 3 p.m. Free. 647-1111.  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Jewish Holiday of the Trees and support Rabbis for Human Rights at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley/Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Cost is $10. RSVP to 415-789-7685.  

Family Film Sunday Series “101 Dalmations” at 11 a.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Tibetan Buddhism with JSylvia Gretchen on the Buddhist writings of Longchenpa at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, FEB. 13 

Sweatshop Workers Speak Phannara Duangdej from Thailand, Branice Linugu Musavi from Kenya and Siti Malika from Indonesia, speak of their experiences working in the global garment industry at 6 p.m. at FSM Café at Moffitt Library, UC Campus. 760-519-7725. 

“The Global Class War” with author Jeff Faux, founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, and a critic of pro-business free-trade, at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Ave. 486-0698. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Business Loan and Business Plan Writing Boot Camp Mon. and Fri. from 9 a.m. to noon at 519 17th St., 2nd Floor, Ste. 200, Oakland, through March 31. 395-6003. 

World Affairs Discussion Group for seniors at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center. Cost is $2.50.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Introduction to Meditation at 6:45 p.m. at Bay Zen Center, 315 Alcatraz near College Ave. Suggested donation $10. Advance registration required. 596-3087. www.bayzen.org 

Spice Up Your Love Life A workshop with Dot Claire at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Cost is $27. 925-287-9594.  

ONGOING 

“Sprout Hope” Half-Pint Library Book Drive to benefit the library at Children’s Hospital, Oakland, is looking to register schools in the book drive. To register see www.halfpricebooks.com 

Free Tax Help—United Way’s Earn it! Keep It! Save It! program provides free filing assistance to households that earned less than $38,000 in 2005. To find a free tax site near you, call 800-358-8832 or visit www.EarnitKeepitSaveit.org 

Albany Library Free Drop-in Homework Help for students in third through fifth grades, Mon. - Thurs. from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Emphasis is placed on math and writing skills. No registration is required. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Feb. 7, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Feb. 8,, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Feb. 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. r

FRIDAY, FEB. 3 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, “Twelfth Night” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave., through Feb. 18. Tickets are $12. 649-5999. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theatre “The Master Builder” Wed. through Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through March 5. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “9 Parts of Desire” about women in war-torn Iraq, at 8 p.m. at the Trust Stage, 2025 Addison St., through March 5. Tickets are $30-$59. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

The Bright River at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Tickets are $20. After party at Epic Arts.  

Book Burning Comedy Showcase with Will Franken, John Hoogasian, Philip Watson, Samantha Chanse at 8 p.m. at AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Cost is $5. 208-1700. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater, “One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest” Fri. and Sat at 8 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser Lane, El Cerrito, through Feb. 25. 524-9132. www.ccct.org  

Masquers Playhouse "Over the River and Through the Woods" Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through Feb. 25 at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Splinters ... and Other F-Words” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, through Feb. 11. Tickets are $12-$25 sliding scale. 800-838-3006. www.raggedwing.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Lawn Jockey” An exhibition of works exploring the social, psychological and phenomenological implications of sod. Opening at 7.p.m. at Center Street Art Works, 1431 Center St., Oakland. csawgallery@gmail.com 

“Light Form Texture” Black and white photography of landscapes and architecture by Mark Swanson. Reception at 7 p.m. at Fertile Grounds Cafe, 1796 Shattuck Ave. at Delaware. Exhibit runs to Feb. 28. 

“Lost & Found” Boontling's One Year Anniversary Celebration Reception at 7:30 p.m. at 4224 Telegraph Ave. 

FILM 

African Film Festival “Sisters in Law” at 7 p.m. and “The Colonial Misunderstanding” at 9:05 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

James Janko and Maxine Hong Kingston discuss Janko’s new book “Buffalo Boy and Geronimo” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Team I-Themba, South African dance and drama, in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Black History Month at 6:30 p.m. at the Little Theater, Berkeley High School, 1980 Allston Way. Tickets are $12, $6 students and go on sale at 5 p.m. 

Blues and Jazz by The Soul Sisters Band, The Dave Mathews Blues Band & Denise Perrier and Anna De Leon from 6 to 11 p.m. at The Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $25-$30. Benefit for Berkeley Food and Housing. For reservations call 649-4965, ext. 304. 

Berkeley Opera “Falstaff” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $15-$40. 841-1903. www.berkeleyopera.org 

Fib and Quibble Showcase, in celebration of Black History Month, at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. at Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St. Donation $5. 839-9192. 

Four Shillings Short with Christy Martin, Adrianne and Kyler England at 8 p.m. at Rose St. House of Music, 1839 Rose St. Donation $10-$20. 594-4000, ext. 687. www.rosestreetmusic.com 

Nik Phelps and The Sprocket Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. between Durant and Bancroft. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. http:// 

trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Slammin, all-body band, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Pamela Rose, accompanied by Danny Caron, John R. Burr, Jason Lewis, Wayne de La Cruz and Charles McNeal at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Ghetto Retro Review at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Shotgun Wedding Quintet, Felonious, Ryan Greene at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$7. 548-1159.  

Ligia Waib’s Brazilian Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Al Howard and the K23 Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12. 525-5054. 

Crooked Jades at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Slydini with saxophonist John Ingle at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Mariospeedwagon and The Pickin’ Trix at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Steve Taylor, songwriter for Cowpokes for Peace, at 7 p.m. at A Cuppa Tea, 3200 College Ave. Free, donations accepted. 654-1904. 

The Phenmenauts, The Bananas, Shruggs, Touch Me Nots at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

McCoy Tyner with Bobby Hutcherson, Ravi Coltrane, Charnett Moffett & Eric Harland at 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$35. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, FEB. 4 

CHILDREN 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Jerry Kennedy singing folk songs at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.  

Chinese New Year Books for Children with authors Ying Chang and Oliver Chin at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Claim the World of Art as Our Own” Artists’ talk at 1 p.m. at Pro Arts, 550 Second St., Oakland. www.proartsgallery.org 

Photographs by Larry Wolfley Reception at 6 p.m. at Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. Exhibit runs to March 15. www.photolaboratory.com 

THEATER 

Mixtape Vol. 2, new works showcase by Everyday Theatre at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Tickets are $20. http://everydaytheatre.org 

Imago Theater “Biglittlethings” at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $20-$32, discounts for children under 16. 642-9988.  

“Walkin’ Talkin’ Bill Hawkins ... In Search of My Father” performed by W. Allen Taylor Sat. and Sun. at 7 p.m. at the Marsh-Berkeley, 2118 Allston Way. Tickets are $15-$22. 800-838-3006. 

FILM 

African Film Festival “The Golden Ball” at 4 p.m. and Mikio Naruse: “Flowing” at 7 p.m. and “Floating Clouds” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Chesa Boudin introduces “The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions - 100 Answers” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. 845-7852.  

African American Celebration through Poetry from 1 to 4 p.m. at the West Oakland Branch of the Oakland Public Library, 1801 Adeline St. Free, all welcome. 238-7352. 

Poetry Reading Annual Contest with the Bay Area Poets Coalition from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, dining hall, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “The Violin Triumphant” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Opera Alive, an introduction for the whole family at 7 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Donation $10-$20. 525-0302. 

“Arte y Pureza” gypsy flamenco from Andalucia, Spain, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Tickets are $30. 849-2568.  

Celebration of the Energy of Yemanja, Yoruban Goddess of the Oceans and Maternal Love, with Brazilian and Latin dance and music at 9 p.m. at the Capoiera Café, 2026 Addison St. Cost is $10. 528-1958.  

The Snake Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Lee Waterman’s Brazilian & Afro-Cuban Quintet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Jenna Mammina at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Winston Jarrett and Wadi Gas & Jahbandis, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

Lo Cura and Avi Vinocur at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Daggermouth, Sabertooth Zombie, Barricade at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Peau de Chagrin, jazz, at at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

SUNDAY, FEB. 5 

CHILDREN  

Crosspulse Family Show at 3 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

FILM 

Mikio Naruse “Sudden Rain” at 4:30 p.m. and “A Wife’s Heart” at 6:20 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Chesa Boudin introduces “The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions - 100 Answers” at 3 p.m. at Casa Cuba, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 658-3984. 

Poetry Flash with Geraldine Kim and Tessa Rumsey at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Opera “Falstaff” at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Theater. Tickets are $15-$40. 841-1903.  

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “The Violin Triumphant” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Dana and Durant Sts. Tickets are $28-$62. 415-392-4400.  

Opera Alive, an introduction at 3 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Donation $10-$20. 525-0302. 

Oluyemi Thomas and Positive Knowledge at 7 and 8:30 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. Tickets are $15. 

Mark Little-Ricardo Peixoto Duo at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Shaykh Yassir Chadly at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. 

Brook Schoenfield at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Head Royce High School Jazz Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

MONDAY, FEB. 6 

THEATER 

Subterranean Shakespeare “Othello” Staged reading at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship, Fireside Room, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $5. 276-3871. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Spoken Word by Charles C. Blackwell and Poetic Grove in celebration of Black History Month at 5:30 p.m. at Oakland Public Library Golden Gate Branch, 5606 San Pablo Ave. 597-5023. 

Mary Burger and Rob Halpern at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Actors Reading Writers “The Dangers of Romance,” stories by Jonathan Franzen, David Schickler and Don Shea, at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave.  

Po Bronson discusses “Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Poetry Express with CR Jacobs at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

Last Word Poetry Series with Teka-Lark Lo and Dan O at 7 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

El Cerrito High and Portola Middle School Jazz Bands at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, FEB. 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

James Gayles’ “East Bay Blues Master” and other works by George Hopkins at the Richmond Health Center, 100 38th St., enter at 39th and Bissell. Celebrating Black History Month. 231-1348.  

FILM 

Women’s Preservation Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Marion Nestle discusses her reasearch on culinary history in northern California at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Bernard-Henri Lévy introduces his new book “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville” at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

New Pacific Trio at 8 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. 

Swamp Coolers, cajun, zydeco at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

David Thom Band, Dark Hollow, Grizzly Peak and Marty Varner at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761.  

Mingus Big Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 8 

FILM 

FIlm 50 “The Fall of the House of Usher” at 3 p.m. and Weird America “Olie Noodling” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

An Evening with John Cleese at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Café Poetry hosted by Kira Allen at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña. Donation $2. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tim Egan describes “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Camille Paglia describes “Break, Blow, Burn” on poetry and the state of our culture, at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High School Jazz Ensembles at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

North Beach Django Band at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Earth Quake Weather, Love Infinity, Sabre Teeth, Yardsale at 9 p.m. at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $8. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Four Flea Circus, folk-rock fusions, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Lunasa at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mingus Big Band at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $12-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, FEB. 9 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The White Album” works in varying shades of white. Reception at 6 p.m. at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs through March 25. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

Irie Park All-Stars “Civil Rights and Lefts” Visual history of the African-American experience. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., Oakland. and runs through March 11. 967-5399. 

“A Retrospective in Black & White and Color” works by photographer Susan Sai-Wah Louie at the Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., through March 16. 981-6100. 

THEATER 

“Grandma’s Hands” A Black History Month celebration by the fifth graders at Oxford Elementary School at 9 a.m. at 1130 Oxford St. Also on Fri. at 10:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary School. 644-6300. 

FILM 

Mikio Naruse “Summer Clouds” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“The Greater Circulation” by Antero Alli at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 26th St. Cost is $5-$10. 444-7263. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Regla: Revolution” panel discussion on Cuban political prints by Antonio Canet, at 6 p.m. at the NIAD Art Center, 551 23rd St., Richmond. www.niadart.org 

Poets for Peace with Margaret Kaufman, Jeffrey Levine, Ilya Kaminsky and Robert Thomas at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

An Evening with John Cleese at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$56. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Sarah Vowell reads from her book “Assassination Vacation” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Word Beat Reading Series with Michael Kelly and M.K. Chavez at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $32.50-$33.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bryan Girard’s Soul Jazz Collective at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Full Service at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Duo Mysterioso at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Steve Tyrell at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.comª

Celebrating 81 years of good fellowship among magicians, the Oakland Magic Circle marks the installation of a new board of directors with a banquet and gala magic show featuring a tribute to Charles Dickens, himself a conjurer. Open to the public, the fun starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, with strolling close-up magicians, at Bjornson Hall (home of The Sons of Norway) on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. 

Festivities begin with members of the Magic Circle performing as strolling close-up entertainers, br inging tricks to the table for some intimate mystification. Dinner will follow at 7, with a prearranged choice of entrees for ticket buyers. At 8:15, the gala show will begin, with host Timothy James, followed by “A Touch of Opera” with David Miller and M lle. Jamie, then Dick Newton’s “Tribute to Charles Dickens,” and Incoming Circle President James Hamilton with some “Classic Conjuring,” followed by a grand, if wild, finale with The Flying Calamari Bros. in “Total Insanity.”  

“Timothy James is a young performer who’s appeared at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and here and there,” commented James Hamilton. “He performs comedy magic, offbeat, fun stuff. David Miller will show his marvels—like the Floating Ball—interactively with opera singer Mlle. Jamie.”  

It’s well-known that Dickens performed in amateur theater and read his stories to crowds on his popular lecture tours. The grandfather of today’s solo performance was “Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens,” the great Welsh actor and playwright reenacting the spectacular Victorian as storyteller and actor behind the lecture podium. But Dickens’ career in conjuring, which Dick Newton recreates, is something less familiar about the great novelist, social reformer and humorist.  

James Hamilton is a longtime Bay Area practitioner of the magic arts; his “Classic Conjuring” is an act aptly named. Hamilton is every inch what’s implied by the moniker of Stage Magician: elegant in dress, eloquent and witty with patter or expressive in silence and pantomime, a master of the repertoire of conjuring, from edgy illusions to mind-boggling conundrums. Familiar to local audiences as The Magician at the Christmas Party in San Francisco Ballet productions of “The Nutcracker,” Hamilton is also a historian of the art, sp ecializing in late 19th century magician Hermann The Great, and is the author of numerous magazine articles, as well as lectures he’s delivered around North America and in London.  

Asked about The Flying Calamari Bros., Hamilton just smiles. “Two big guys go crazy—it’s a wild and crazy comic magic act. The title says it all.” 

Hamilton also spoke a little bit about the Oakland Magic Circle. “It was founded in 1925 by Professor El-Tab, a professional magician who lived in Oakland. Luminaries of th e world of magic have appeared at gatherings of the Circle; in recent years, conjurers of the stature of Harry Blackstone, Jr., Mr. Electric, The Great Tomsoni, John Carney, Charlie Miller ...  

“We’re an organization for both amateur and professional mag icians,” he continued, “a social organization. We hold auctions, lectures—open to members of the public—and in the fall host an interclub magic contest, to which the different clubs around each send a contestant. That’s an open event, too, with a big spag hetti dinner. We also have competitions within the Circle, and sponsor seminars for magicians.” 

Although stage magic is experiencing a new high of popularity, and has changed outwardly in a variety of ways over the years, the classic routines—though some times with a different spin—still entrance aficionados and new spectators alike. Styles change, but the old standbys keep coming around, although, as James Hamilton points out, “all those tricks with cigarettes seem to be passé.” 

The Oakland Magic Circle: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, Bjornson Hall, MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland. Adults, $22; children 12 and under, $15. All children will receive a free magic gift. Reservations are required; no tickets will be sold at the door. Tickets and information are ava ilable at www.brownpapertickets.com/events/3036 or 1-800-838-3006.› 

Courtesy of James Hamilton 

Magic arts practitioner James Hamilton.›

In the late 1800s, Berkeley was a favorite retirement spot for sea captains. A number of them built imposing Victorians overlooking the Golden Gate in the North Berkeley hills, but few people know that the Southside boasted its own enclave of sailors’ residences at the intersection of Fulton and Blake Streets. 

This intersection retains its Victorian character to this day, with four intact houses—one Italianate and three Queen Annes—gracing its northeast and southwest corners. The original owners of all these houses had been seafarers. 

Captain John H. Whitham’s house stands at 2198 Blake St. This elegant Queen Anne, still surrounded by its original cast-iron fence, was designed and built in 1889 by prominent Alameda architect A.W. Pattiani. Two years l ater, Pattiani went on to build Captain James H. Bruce’s sumptuous Queen Anne at 2211 Blake St. Both residences were featured in BAHA’s 2004 house tour, Berkeley 1890: “At Home” along Fulton Street. 

But the oldest house in the Blake-Fulton maritime corne r is the Alfred Bartlett residence at 2201 Blake St. Erected in 1877, it is probably the most unspoiled Italianate dwelling in Berkeley. 

An Englishman born in 1841, Alfred Bartlett served in the British navy in his early teens. Discontented, at age 15 he stowed away on a ship to New York. In 1857 he worked passage on a ship to California in a stormy voyage of 152 days around the horn. Once arrived in San Francisco, he bought a wagon and horses and began selling books. 

Following a checkered and adventurous career, by 1877 Bartlett was prosperous enough to invest in real estate. Early that year he bought two lots on Blake Street in Berkeley and built the Italianate dwelling “for the sake of the health of my wife and two daughters,” then 3 and 5 years old. The same year, Bartlett joined with four other prominent businessmen—James L Barker, William B. Heywood, George D. Dornin, and Charles K. Clarke— in forming the Berkeley Land and Building Company. The Berkeley Advocate of Aug. 25, 1877 reported that “The y intend to do a real estate business in conjunction with building and improvements that will contribute to the growth and prosperity of the town.” The company’s office was located at the Berkeley terminus, on the Shattuck Avenue island now known as Berkeley Square.  

At the time the Bartlett residence went up, the surrounding Blake Tract, newly subdivided in 1876, was still mostly farmland, yet on Nov. 24, 1877 the Berkeley Advocate was calling for “a separate incorporation of Berkeley, like Cambridge, (Mass.), or any other university town.” Berkeley would incorporate the following year.  

In addition to selling books and real estate, Alfred Bartlett also dabbled in local politics. In 1886, he ran for the office of Berkeley town marshal. In this campaign he was defeated by the popular contractor-builder and amateur painter A.H. Broad, who had been a member of Berkeley’s first Board of Trustees, was a founder of Berkeley’s first library, and later would serve as town engineer and as superintendent of reconstruction of Berkeley schools injured by the earthquake. 

In 1892, the Bartletts built a second house next door, at 2205 Blake St. Rumor has it that this Queen Anne residence was a wedding present for one of the Bartletts’ daughters, but it appears to have been used as a rental property, as demand for housing increased as the district grew around the thriving downtown and Dwight Way Station commercial areas along Shattuck Avenue. 

The two Bartlett houses, situated in their original setting with virtual ly no exterior alterations, are probably the most pristine representation of Victorian Berkeley remaining. They were designated a City of Berkeley Landmark in December 2005. Sadly, their owner has removed several of the old Coast Live Oak trees around the se graceful old houses.  

Photo by Daniella Thompson 

The Captain Whitham house, 2198 Blake St. ,

If you’re a weekday plant shopper, you have only a week to get on down to Magic Gardens on Heinz Street and grab some of those nifty Japanese red-twigged variegated willows or those ’lebenty-seven rose varieties all in a row. If you’ll stoop to rubbing elbows with the weekend crowd and want to keep the place open as a retail nursery, plan on spending time and bucks there some Saturdays. As of Feb. 11, Magic Gardens, sole location will be open for retail sales only on Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to start. 

Magic Gardens has been through changes in its relatively short life, so many that the rest of us get dizzy trying to keep track It started out an instant star, with arrays of plants jewel-like in their condition and rarity—big enthusiasm. Aerin Moore’s charismatic promotion of gardening in general and his and other local genius’ techniques in particular certainly helped make the place popular. There were classes and nifty things to buy and all was apparently hunky-dory in this welcome new item on our nursery smorgasbord. (Today’s spread here features mashed metaphors with a piquant gossip gravy.)  

Then the place got to looking a bit ratty for a few years, and its hours and ambition seemed to contract somewhat. Rumors abounded in the garden community, heads were shaken, tuts were tutted, the usual. Then suddenly Magic Gardens was open in a new location, up the frontage road from Central Avenue toward Richmond alongside American Soil’s new retail place and The Urban Gardener. Then it was bi-locating like somebody’s patron saint. Then it had returned to concentrate on its original Berkeley location, on Heinz Street west of Seventh. Now it’s de-concentrating, as it were, by limiting its retail hours and spending most energy on the landscaping arm of its business. 

Over a decade ago, a fellow garden pro pointed out a couple of Magic landscapes that she found scandalous. One was imaginative enough, with a flag-circled lawn and pie-slices carved out of the ivy slope and planted with azaleas for visual impact. But those azaleas (and that turf) were under old California live oaks, which tend to dwindle and die slowly with summer irrigation. The water-lovers were planted downslope from the trees, which would help, but it’s an opportunity for oak-dangerous fungi to flourish. The other scandal was basically a heap of deer chow, planted in deer-friendly Orinda. It had evidently impressed the deer; what I saw looked like the wedding buffet after the guests had gone. 

But they’ve done much better things too, and there’s some good stonework around with Magic’s fingerprints on it. Evidently they’ve learned better. Certainly one can expect imaginative plant choices from these folks. I hope the rest of us will still get to have a taste of that, at least on Saturdays, and that the landscaping part of the business can support the retail nursery. Magic has been offering Saturday classes with some of our best garden mavens. I hope that continues too; it’s certainly a good omen that speaks well for its learning curve. 

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Little houses have their own heating issues and so I’d like to ask those of you who own ranchos grande to bear with me for a few minutes while I focus on the heating needs of the little houses.  

Small houses are often under-heated or minimally heated. It seems to go along with the low economy which these small homes express in so many ways. Many of the small houses I see are heated with either gas floor furnaces or gas wall furnaces or some combination of the two. A few are heated with electric heaters and, believe it or not, some have no heat at all (which some folks, amazingly, prefer). 

Wall furnaces are the most common heating I find in small houses so let’s start with them. If you have a house heated by a single wall furnace, one of the things you may have noticed is that they don’t really transmit much heat beyond the room in which they are located.  

If you close your bedroom door, it’s likely that the heat will be sucked out of those old single-glazed windows faster than the furnace can push it in through the door. If you leave the bedroom door open, this system might work for you. Floor furnaces create the same problem.  

Sometimes there is more than one wall furnace in the house and this may provide enough distribution to pass muster. You may also have noticed that, in order to get the coldest room warm enough, the room where the heater is located has to be baking hot. This raises questions about the efficiency of the system because you know you are wasting heat if you’re overheating any space. Wall furnaces also toss quite a bit of their heat up through the flue into the night sky, and if you’re really heat hungry, you may be helping to put some PG&E exec’s daughter through Stanford. 

If you have a wall furnace in a bedroom, you may be chancing a carbon monoxide poisoning because you are in an enclosed space with the unit for long periods of time and wall furnaces are more apt than other designs to draft noxious flue gases into the living space. The unit is also using up the oxygen in the room, and I don’t know about you, but I really like my oxygen (and I don’t want to share). 

Again, floor furnaces are similar in these respects and if you have either one of these heaters in a bedroom, I strongly suggest finding another way to heat the space. 

If you have a really tiny house and a single wall furnace that you’ve had checked by a good heating expert and you’re warm enough and happy, well, fine. This kind of heater might be all right for you. Nonetheless, most of the houses I see that are being heated this way prove to have those bothersome traits I’ve described. 

Here are a few more issues specific to floor furnaces. First, kids and especially infants get burned on these ancient devices, and fires can also start if flammables are left sitting on them (listen, I don’t always look to see where I tossed the newspaper). 

If you do want to use a gas “point-source” heater (non-central or unducted, like the wall or floor furnace) to heat your bedroom or all purpose (sleep/live) room, a ”direct-vent” model may be a reasonable choice. These are far less likely to introduce noxious wastes like carbon monoxide into the room and don’t use oxygen from the inside, so they’re a much better choice. These still get quite hot if left on for a long time and also don’t heat the next room very well. Again, this is a reasonable choice for a very small living space. 

If you’re using electric heat, consider that, on average, you’re paying at least three times as much for the same unit of heat. These also heat slowly, which has both plusses and minuses. If you’re in a house that has an older electrical system, the use of electric heaters may pose something of a threat and, at very least, a good electrician should check to make sure everything is properly installed. 

I would like to take a minute to discuss freestanding electric heaters. In short, don’t use them if you can possibly avoid it. They cause loads of fires as well as being real energy hogs. If you absolutely must use one, please don’t sleep with it on. Also, don’t use one with an extension cord. This greatly increases the likelihood of a fire. 

So, having covered the field of point-source heating (the main kind I see in small houses), let’s talk a little about what other choices you might explore. Oddly, one of the things I’d look at first is insulation. If you have a lot more insulation, you might not need much heat at all. Take a look at your leaky windows and consider double-glazed ones. A retrofit type might not cost too much. See if you have plenty of well-distributed attic insulation. If not, you may be fighting an uphill battle to keep the heat you’ve bought inside your house. Distribution really matters and the attic entry door should be insulated as well. Weather-strip your main exterior doors. This can save a lot of heat and keep the house cozier. 

Now the big stuff. If you feel like the house is one you’re going to stay in for a while or has the capability to sell for a good price, a central heating system is probably a reasonable economic choice. These come in very small output sizes and are somewhat cheaper when installed in a small house. If you choose a “condensing” type, they are extremely efficient and will pump warm air through all the rooms of the house at the same time. Ooooo, warmth at last. You may end up with this unit in the crawlspace, the attic or a closet in the interior. If you’re adventurous and willing to try something new, consider one of the new small “hydronic” types, that heat the house with warm water running through tubing below the floor or through radiators. There’s even a nice little unit that also heats the water you shower and cook with and the whole thing hangs on outside of the house. Next time, I’ll spend a whole page on this unit. It’s called the Baxi Luna and it’ll really raise your temperature. 

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The address of Razan’s Organic Kitchen was printed incorrectly in Tuesday’s paper. The restaurant is located at 2119 Kittredge St..t

FRIDAY, FEB. 3 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with The Hon. David Sterling, on “Issues Before the Pacific Legal Foundation” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925. 

Benefit for Berkeley Food and Housing with blues and jazz by The Soul Sisters Band, The Dave Mathews Blues Band & Denise Perrier and Anna De Leon from 6 to 11 p.m. at The Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $25-$30. For reservations call 649-4965, ext. 304. 

“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris” A documentary by Derri Berkani with a discussion with Annete Herskovits, a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust in Occupied France, at 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

American Red Cross Blood Drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at MLK Student Union, 5th Floor Tilden Room, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVELIFE.  

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5 to 7 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., room 17. 843-0150. 

Meditation, Peace Vigil and Dialogue, gather at noon on the grass close to the West Entrance to UC Berkeley, on Oxford St. near University Ave. People of all traditions are welcome to join us. Sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. 655-6169. www.bpf.org 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, FEB. 4 

“Francis Albrier and Social Change in South Berkeley” with local historian Donna Graves at 2 p.m. at the Frances Albrier Community Center in San Pablo Park. 981-7533. 

Progressive Democrats of America, East Bay Chapter, strategic planning meeting for the 2006 elections from 1 to 3 p.m. at Temescal Library, 5205 Telegraph, Oakland. All welcome. 524-4424. www.pdeastbay.org 

Redwood Park Mushroom Walk with the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. Meet at 10 a.m. at the last parking lot, next to a meadow and well past the trout monument, on the road inside the Redwood Gate entrance. www.berkeleypaths.org  

Brooks Island Kayak and Walk with Save the Bay. All equipment and instruction is provided. Minimum age 16. Trip departs from Richmond Harbor at noon. Cost is $70. For information call 452-9261 ext. 109. www.savesfbay.org 

Sick Plant Clinic from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

Volunteer on Cerrito Creek Join Friends of Five Creeks volunteers planting natives and removing invasives to restore habitat along the new Cerrito Creek walkway. Meet at Creekside Park, south end of Santa Clara St., El Cerrito at 10 a.m. Wear shoes with good traction and clothes that can get dirty. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

French Broom Removal Work Party at 9:30 a.m. at the Skyline Gate Staging Area, Skyline Blvd., Oakland. We walk to the work site so arriving on time is important. Please bring your own gloves. Weed wrenches and other tools will be provided. Rain cancels. 684-2473. californica@mac.com 

East Bay Atheists Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education will speak on “Who’s Winning the Evolution Wars?” at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor, 2090 Kittredge St. 

Disaster Mental Health Workshop from 9 a.m. to noon at 997 Cedar St. Sponsored by the Office of Emergency Services. To register call 981-5506. 

Turn Stress into Success Workshop at 10 a.m. at Creating Harmony Institute, Atrium Plaza, 828 San Pablo Ave. Suite 115B, Albany. Free but registration required. 526-1559. 

“New Era, New Politics Walking Tour” at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum, 659 14th St., at Jefferson, Oakland. A two-hour guided tour of the points of interest in African American history in Oakland. 238-3234. 

Mindful Drumming for Opening Minds and Healing Hearts in celebration of Black History Month at 7 p.m. at 3278 West St., Oakland. Cost is $20, scholarships available. 652-5530. 

Kids’ Night Out Party for ages 4.5 to 10 years at The Berkwood Hedge School in Berkeley. Cost is $25-$40. Proceeds benefit Monkey Business Camp’s scholarship fund. To register call 540-6025.  

“Careers in International Trade” workshop at Vista College, 2075 Allston Way. Cost is $13 for California residents. To register call 981-2913. 

Preschool Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, FEB. 5 

Natural Wonders Explore nearby trails to discover what amazing offerings nature has for us. Meet at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Help Clean Up Strawberry Creek from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lodge, 1320 Addison. RSVP to Tom Kelly kyotousa@sbcglobal.net 

“Are You Good Enough to be Published” A symposium with Alan Rinzler at 3 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Tibetan Buddhism with Abbe Blum on “Freedom to Change” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, FEB. 6 

National Read a Black Book Day A read-a-thon in celebration of Black History Month, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Merritt College Library, 12500 Campus Drive, Oakland. 436-2557. 

National Organization for Women, Oakland/East Bay Chapter meets at 6 p.m. at the Oakland YWCA, 1515 Webster St. The speaker will be Helen Isaacson, a member of Grandmothers’ Against the War who will discuss the group’s plan to enter Army Recruiting Offices on Valentines Day to attempt to enlist. 287-8948. 

“150 Years in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: Where Do We Go From Here?” with Jeff Hart at 7 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., at Masonic. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org 

Peltier Action Coalition Paryer and Drum Circle at noon at the Oakland Federal Building, 1300 Clay St. 496-6011. 

“Sacred Run” Send Off Benefit at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Donation $10. 496-6011. 

Basic Balkan Singing Workshhop led by Janet Kutulas Monday evenings at 7:30 p.m. at KITKA/Children's Advocates, 1201 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, at 12th St., Oakland. Four-session series for $60. Individual class $20. 444-0323.  

Sing-A-Long from 10 to 11 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

Beginning Bridge Lessons at 11:10 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Cost is $1. 524-9122. 

World Affairs Discussion Group for seniors at 10:15 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center. Cost is $2.50. 

McGee Avenue Toastmasters meets on the first and third Mondays of the month at 7:30 p.m. at McGee Ave. Baptist Church, 1640 Stuart St. 501-7005. 

American Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVELIFE. www.BeADonor.com 

“Healthy Eating Habits Seminar” at 6:30 p.m. at Lakeview Branch Library Meeting Room, 550 El Embarcadero. 238-7344. 

Free Business Loan and Business Plan Writing Boot Camp Mon. and Fri. from 9 a.m. to noon at 519 17th St., 2nd Floor, Ste. 200, Oakland, through March 31. 395-6003. 

Critical Viewing An ongoing group to examine the art/craft(iness) of short films and television productions and its effects on our daily lives, at 1 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, FEB. 7 

Community Rally to Stop the Ashby BART Grant at 6:15 on the steps of Old City Hall, before the City Council meeting. 

Kalimba Interactive Assembly with Carl Winters on the African thumb piano, in celebration of Black History Month at 10 a.m. at the Oakland Public Library, West Oakland Branch, 1801 Adeline St. and at 1 p.m. at the Temescal Branch, 5205 Telegraph Ave. All ages welcome. 238-7352. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

“Sankofa” A showing of the Black independent film at 6 p.m. at Merritt College, Building A, Room 218.  

Introduction to Conscious Parenting If you have ever wondered about new ways of parenting, or struggled with things not going how you expected, come and find relief, community, and a host of new tools at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby near Ashby BART. 415-312-1830. 

Turn Stress into Success Workshop at 7:30 p.m. at Creating Harmony Institute, Atrium Plaza, 828 San Pablo Ave. Suite 115B, Albany. Free but registration required. 526-1559. 

Paris & Provence with photographic adventure guide Don Lyon at 7 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 654-1548.  

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss Love and Sex in the 21st Century from 7 to 9 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 601-6690. 

California Shakespeare Summer Theater Camp Open House to meet with potential campers and their families from 7-8:30 p.m. at the Cal Shakes Rehearsal Hall, 701 Heinz Ave. 548-3422 ext. 127. 

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Free Handbuilding Ceramics Class 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at St. John’s Senior Center, 2727 College Ave. Also, Mon. noon to 4 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Materials and firing charges not included. 525-5497. 

Brainstormer Weekly Pub Quiz every Tuesday from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Pyramid Alehouse Brewery, 901 Gilman St. 528-9880.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 8 

Richmond Southeast Shoreline Community Advisory Group Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Richmond Convention Center, Bermuda Room, 403 Civic Center Plaza at Nevin and 25th Sts. 540-3923. 

Presentation about the Albany Shoreline and the Citizens’ Planning Initiative to Protect Albany’s Shoreline with Robert Cheasty, president of Citizens for East Shore Parks and former Mayor of Albany at 10:30 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., Albany. 558-9639. www.albanyshoreline.org 

Lead-Safety for Remodeling, Repair and Painting of older homes. A HUD & EPA approved class held in Oakland from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. To register, call Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program at 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

“The Rebirth of Environ- 

mentalism” with George Lakoff and Mark Danner at 7:30 p.m. at Buttner Auditorium, College Prep School, 6100 Broadway. Tickets are $5-$10 at the door. 339-7726.  

Rhoda Goldman Lecture in Health Policy “A Conversation with Robert Klein” at 7:30 p.m. at Chevron Auditorium, International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave., UC Campus. 642-4670. 

Film Series on 9/11: “The Great Conspiracy” at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. Oakland. Free, but donations of $5 accepted. www.HumanistHall.net 

“Indigenous Peoples And Diabetes: Community Empowerment And Wellness” edited by Mariana Ferreira and Gretchen Lang, book release at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

East Bay Genealogical Society Robert Lindquist will about the Swedish immigration at 10 a.m. in the Library Conference Room of the Family History Center, 4766 Lincoln Ave. Oakland. 635-6692. 

Poetry Writing Workshop, led by Alison Seevak, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library ,1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at USDA, 800 Buchanan St., Albany. To schedule an appointment, call Steven at 559-6188. www.BeADonor.com  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. 548-9840. 

Prose Writer’s Workshop An ongoing group made up of friendly writers who are serious about our craft. All levels welcome. At 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting and other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, FEB. 9 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll search for our amphibian friends, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Grandma’s Hands” A Black History Month celebration by the fifth graders at Oxford Elementary School at 9 a.m. at 1130 Oxford St. Also on Fri. at 10:30 a.m. at Jefferson Elementary School. 644-6300. 

“Can the US be a Global Good Neighbor” Panel discussion with Ann Wright, Tom Barry, John Gershman, Laura Carlsen, Stephen Zunes, and Conn Hallinan at 7 p.m. at La Peña, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Donations suggested. Sponsored by The International Relations Center. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“North Koreans Beyond the Border” Four UCB Journalism students report about their travels to South Korea and Northern China where they met North Korean migrants and defectors, at 5:30 p.m. at North Gate Hall Library, UC CAmpus. http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2006.02.09.html 

East Bay Mac Users Group meets at 6 p.m. at Expression College for Digital Arts 6601 Shellmound St., Emeryville Learn how to sync your Mac to almost any PDA or handheld. http://ebmug.org 

American Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at MLK Student Union, East Pauley Ballroom, UC Campus. To schedule an appointment call 1-800-GIVELIFE. www.BeADonor.com 

Lead Funding Info Meeting for Landlords to learn about financial assistance to reduce lead hazards at 6 p.m. at Oakland Housing Authority, 1619 Harrison. Free, presented by Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. 567-8280. www.ACLPPP.org 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

ONGOING 

“Sprout Hope” Half-Pint Library Book Drive to benefit the library at Children’s Hospital, Oakland, is looking to register schools in the book drive. To register see www.halfpricebooks.com 

Free Tax Help—United Way’s Earn it! Keep It! Save It! program provides free filing assistance to households that earned less than $38,000 in 2005. To find a free tax site near you, call 800-358-8832 or visit www.EarnitKeepitSaveit.org 

Pee Wee Basketball for ages 6-8 begins Feb. 4, and All Net Basketball for ages 9-11 begins Feb. 23. For further information contact Berkeley Youth Alternatives, 845-9066. www.byaonline.org 

Albany Library Free Drop-in Homework Help for students in third through fifth grades, Mon. - Thurs. from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Emphasis is placed on math and writing skills. No registration is required. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Creeks Task Force meets Mon. Feb. 6, at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Erin Dando, 981-7410.  

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., Feb. 6, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Manuel Hector, 981-5510.  

City Council meets Tues., Feb. 7, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Feb. 8,, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jane Micallef, 981-5426.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Feb. 9, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410. ª