Editorials

Editorial: Let’s Celebrate Progress in South Campus Business Climate

By Becky O'Malley
Friday October 27, 2006

Wednesday night the genteel old Berkeley City Club (I’m so old that I remember it as the Women’s City Club) was the scene of a discussion between the two candidates for Berkeley’s District 7 City Council seat. Present in the audience and on their best behavior were some distinguished graying veterans of the venerable group known as People’s Park activists, as well as a number of members of the Telegraph Avenue Merchants’ Association which sponsored the event, some neighborhood residents and a small but enthusiastic claque supporting candidate George Beier. (An overheard conversation as the audience left suggested that some of these were from Oakland and Concord, but it’s OK if they came to cheer for a friend or family member—one was his sister.)  

It was billed as a debate, but it wasn’t the kind of no-holds-barred debate I remember from high school or which you can see in the British Parliament on late-night TV. The format was more like what Americans have gotten used to accepting, where docile representatives of big media ask predictable questions of polite centrist candidates. Much to my eventual discomfort, I was cast in the reporter role for this event, somewhat unsuitable since I’m currently an editor and have already endorsed candidate Kriss Worthington. But our small reportorial staff is more than tied up on Wednesdays with multiple city meetings to cover, so it was me or no one.  

The invited Chronicle reporter bailed, so the questioners were just the Planet’s O’Malley and the Daily Cal’s Sean Barry, along with Al Geyer, representative of the merchants’ association and the owner of the Annapurna head shop on Telly. (Gloss for younger and older readers, from Wikipedia: “A head shop is a retail outlet specializing in paraphernalia related to consumption of cannabis, other recreational drugs, and New Age herbs, as well as generally selling counterculture art, magazines, music, clothing, and home decor.” 

Geyer (a handsome sixtyish boomer with a sleek grey pompadour) and his associate Mark Weinstein (younger, with a frizzy balding shoulder-length ‘do), proprietor of Amoeba Records, met with Barry and me before the show started. They explained the format and told us what questions they thought we should ask. But I’m certainly too old (and Sean is probably too young) to take instructions like that, so we ended up generating our own questions more or less on the fly, though Sean did write his out beforehand.  

Geyer and Weinstein seemed most interested in the nine-point plan for improving Telegraph which was floated by Mayor Bates and Councilmember Worthington after Cody’s Books pulled out, just before it was sold to the Japanese conglomerate. In particular, they hoped that someone would ask a question about how the bad behavior of people on the street could be controlled, and they went on, chapter and verse, about how some of the street people were saying dreadful things using awful words. The anecdote which seemed to shock them most was that someone called a policewoman a bitch, and “she just rolled up her window and drank her smoothie.” She couldn’t do anything about it, they said, and that needed to be fixed. Both of them clearly hoped that some ambiguous verbiage in the Nine Points about future (read: post-election) measures meant that the Berkeley city authorities were going to try once again to put a stop to all of that. 

I bit my tongue, not wanting to start a fight just before the cameras rolled, but REALLY, guys. Free speech, remember? That tiresome old First Amendment? Those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat it?  

Anyone who wants a thumbnail update of what happened the last time the City of Berkeley tried to stifle speech on the street should look at the excellent website maintained by volunteers at Berkeleycitizen.org. The whole history of the city’s expensive and illegal attempt to control street speech with Measures N & O is recounted at www.berkeleycitizen.org/poorlaws.html. It was a colossal mistake, as original backer Andy Ross, Cody’s owner at the time, later admitted. 

My colleague Barry did ask the candidates a question about street activities, and both gave answers which showed that they understood that trying to control unpleasant behavior by making it illegal has limited value. I think Worthington did a bit better at conjuring up the kind of trouble such a course of action would make for Telegraph merchants (but he is my horse in this race.) Last time it was boycotts, demonstrations, picketing, sit-ins … bad for business, always. Don’t go there, please. 

This whole discussion got me thinking about how Telegraph Avenue and its problems have been misused as an icon in this campaign. The city of Berkeley in general, and the mayor and his council allies in particular, have adopted a policy of benign neglect in the last few years, de-funding police and mental health service that are desperately needed and then blaming the victims for the inevitable consequences. Worthington has fought hard for services for his district, but got little support from the likes of Bates and Wozniak (both of whom, not coincidentally, endorse Beier) until Cody’s left. 

Beier actually put his finger on the cause when he said during the debate that South of Campus’s real problem is the drug culture. And it’s not just the aging potheads who buy their bongs at Annapurna and their ’60s hits at Amoeba, it’s also the ageless alcohol victims and cocaine users who come up to the Ave for their drugs of choice who contribute to the seedy atmosphere. The majority of the stores on Telegraph evoke what’s left of the counter-culture, which inevitably attracts young people whose brand of nostalgia includes deliberate, self-conscious anti-social street behavior.  

It seems the height of hypocrisy for today’s merchants to act shocked by this. I’ve been going to Telegraph longer than any of them. I remember when Amoeba’s building was a Lucky’s grocery store, when Pauline Kael ran her movie theater in what is now a fraternity bar, and when the clothing stores featured mostly Oxford-cloth button-down collared shirts. Today the newest tenant is a tattoo parlor, and is it any surprise that there are surly tattooed and pierced kids on the street, some of whom might even use rude language and sit defiantly in doorways displaying their piecings?  

When I was an undergraduate living on the corner of Channing and Telegraph, the building which now houses Rasputin’s was Frazier’s, a famous mid-century modern home furnishing emporium. We started our software company in the loft space of the same building in the early ’80s, which we could afford because the turmoil of the ’60s had brought rents down dramatically. There were plenty of victims of alcohol and other drugs on the streets then too. A suit-wearing visitor from the East was pursued from the parking garage to our office by a fellow yelling “Businessman, Businessman.” But he (and we) survived. The current owners of the building have restored it and seem to be surviving too, even in the face of fierce Internet competition.  

That’s the real villain in this picture. Beier, who has a business school degree and should know better, is trying to use the percentage decline in Telegraph retail revenues and Cody’s closure as campaign issues. But the major businesses there in recent decades have been the kinds of stores which are losing out nationally to Internet sales. Books and music, once Telegraph’s anchors, are now much easier to buy online. You can get vintage clothes and medicinal herbs on Ebay as well as on Telly, and there’s probably even a source for hash pipes somewhere online. And the counterculture itself is slowly dying. None of this can be blamed on Kriss Worthington or even on street people.  

There are some real signs that things are looking up in the South of Campus business district. Peet’s has finally gotten a permit to move into the old Krishna Copy location, and Krishna has moved down the street into even fancier digs in a newly restored historic building. (Let’s hear a cheer for Krishna, without whose help our early business would not have survived.) The library of another landmarked historic building, old Westminster House, designed by Walter Ratcliff, has been adapted for re-use as the elegant and successful Adagia restaurant. New owners promise to spruce up the Med. There are still too many nasty chain fast-food places, but interesting new owner-operated ethnic restaurants, Indian, Jamaican, Korean and more, have opened. A charming Solano Avenue world art store, What the Traveller Saw, has taken over some of Cody’s abandoned space.  

It adds up to a lot of positive progress which should be celebrated. Candidates and merchants alike need to pay attention to Marketing 101: advertise the many improvements on the Avenue and environs, and stop knocking the product.