Features

Landmarks Commission Deadlocks on BHS Gym

By Richard Brenneman
Tuesday June 12, 2007

Berkeley landmarks commissioners failed to reach a consensus on the old Berkeley High School Gymnasium Thursday, with a motion to declare the aging structure a landmark failing on a 4-3-1 vote. 

A minimum of five votes—the bare majority of the nine members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC)—is required for a legally binding decision. 

Four other would-be landmarks—and a proposed historic district that would’ve included three of them—went down to defeat during a meeting that lasted until midnight. 

The meeting also served as the occasion for a passionate statement from Commissioner Gary Parsons and as the inaugural session for the LPC’s newest member, Anne Wagley, arts and calendar editor for the Daily Planet. 

Wagley, appointed by City Councilmember Kriss Worthington after term limits forced the departure of Lesley Emmington, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the city’s settlement of its lawsuit against UC Berkeley that resulted in the current effort to draft a new downtown plan. 

The landmarks commission and the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, which is helping draft the plan Wagley’s suit challenges, have a joint subcommittee which is working out a position paper on the role of historic buildings in the new downtown plan. 

Though Parsons, an architect, has generally sided with preservationists on the LPC in favor of several recent landmarking decisions, he used the opportunity of the gymnasium vote to air his concerns with his fellow commissioners. 

“[T]onight I am not going to seem like the most landmark-happy fellow,” he said, “but I must say that I am very excited about the larger issues that are raised by the applications that are before us, as I feel that these issues are essential to a process that can be respected by the city at large.” 

After declaring that the gym had lost whatever distinction it may have had originally during a subsequent seismic retrofit, Parsons said commissioners pondering a vote on “a building such as this ... must think long and hard about the integrity of the true landmarks in this city.” 

“In order to make this process and the buildings it honors have any meaning at all we must exercise discretion and elevate only truly worthy buildings to landmark status,” Parsons said. “Otherwise the LPO, the commission, and all of the city’s worthy landmarks stand to be devalued.” 

Parsons said neglect of the building by the Berkeley Unified School District had transformed the gym into “a health hazard and a toxic mess.” 

“There is no way that kids or anyone else should be using this building,” he said. “As an aside, I couldn’t help but notice that all but one of the kids using the building when I toured it were students of color. Whether the building is saved or not I think that the ghetto-ization of this part of the student population in this derelict building is completely unacceptable.” 

Parsons cast one of three votes against the designation, joined by Miriam Ng and Fran Packard. 

Carrie Olson—who with Wagley, Jill Korte and Steven Winkel voted for landmarking—cited some of the famous athletes who had trained at the gym, including fitness guru Jack LaLanne, baseball manager Billy Martin, tennis star Helen Wills-Moody, and former Green Bay Packer and current Berkeley Police Sgt. Steve Odom. 

While Korte agreed that the seismic retrofit had compromised the original design by architect Walter H. Ratcliff might be restored, and said she hoped that nothing in a landmarking decision would prevent restoring the original facade, the loss of which Parsons had called an act of vandalism. 

Olson argued that preservation of such a massive building was clearly a “greener” decision that demolition, and cited the example of the restoration of King Middle School, where preservationists won a battle to preserve and rehabilitate a building the district want to demolish. 

Wagley said neglect wasn’t a reason not to landmark a building, and said that in reaching a decisions, commissioners should consider “the many remarkable people whop got their start in that building.” 

With the deadlock apparent before the vote, Johnson announced he would abstain, meaning that no final decision was likely unless a commissioner underwent a change of heart. 

The school board plans to demolish the building, which currently houses the East bay’s only warm water pool, used by the disabled as a medium for exercises and activities otherwise difficult or impossible for them to perform. 

Berkeley voters passed a $3.25 million bond issue in to “reconstruct renovate, repair and improve the warm water pool facility at Berkeley High School,” but the work was never begun. 

School district officials have said a new pool could be built at the site, but the district won’t provide any funds. The district voted to approve demolition of the gym on Jan. 17, precipitating a lawsuit now working its way through the court system. 

Declaring the gym a landmark wouldn’t halt the district plans, because the school board is a separate governmental agency from the city, not bound by decisions of the commission. 

 

Summit Road homes 

Despite a plea from architect Jacob Robbins, who designed two of the three homes proposed as landmarks in the 1300 block of Summit Road, the commission voted both to deny the applications for the individual homes and also to deny a petition to include the dwellings in a new historic district. 

Robbins, a practitioner of modernist architecture, designed the two homes at 1365 and 1375 Summit 40 years ago both to compliment each other and to harmonize with the home at 1363, built in 1963 to plans by architect Germano Milano. 

While proponents said the homes deserved the designation as small-scale, ecologically friendly designs, neighbors charged the designations were sought as a ploy to halt the possible demolition of one of the houses, and as a continuation of a struggle to control a public access road through the area. 

The two attorneys most frequently used in Berkeley land use battles appeared on opposite sides, with Rena Rickles arguing in favor and John Gutierrez in against landmarking. 

Irwin Shapiro, who still lives in the house built for him at 1375 Summit, argued in favor, as did R.K. Janmeja Singh, the original owner of 1365. Singh said his former home had served as the hub of the Bay Area’s Sikh community for many years. 

But Helen Degenhardt, the architect for the current owner of 1365, said the home was both aging badly and hugely energy inefficient, lacking any insulation in the ceiling and walls, and had been significantly altered since construction. 

With renovation impractical, she said, a new home was the owner’s best option. 

Winkel and Parsons, the commission’s two architects, said they regretted that Robbins had been brought into the argument, and the decision was especially hard for Johnson, who had been inspired to enter his careers by the venerable designer. 

But in the end, no one voted for the designations. 

 

2474 San Pablo 

The fourth example of modernist architect on the commission’s agenda was 2474 San Pablo Ave., currently the site of a medical marijuana clinic. 

Developer David Mayeri plans a condominium project at the site, now occupied by a modernist, curved-front glass and concrete structure originally built as a car dealership. 

One of those on hand to praise the building Thursday night was Alan Hess, architect and architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury-News.  

Hess praised the building as a notable and presrvation-worthy example of the Googie style, the futuristic style popular in the 1950’s and geared to the car culture of the age. 

The author of a dozen books, Hess devote a volume to the style in his 1986 volume Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture. “I don’t know of a building that typifies this style and this era better,” he said. “It’s a part of our legitimate heritage, and this is a good example, rare in Berkeley.” 

The debate pitted preservationists like Laurie Bright, Daniela Thompson, Lesley Emmington and Julie Dickinson against the developer, his project manager, and a vocal cast of supporters. 

For the preservationists, it was about preserving a style that embodied an era, while many of the opponents said it was precisely that era’s dangerous celebration of the car that should mark the building out for demolition to make way for Berkeley’s first truly “green” housing project. 

“Welcome to the new Celia’s, poster child for the coming LPO referendum,” said Parsons, referring to the restaurant building that played a significant role in last year’s defeat of an initiative to save and bolster save the city’s current Landmarks Preservation Ordinance. 

In a decision later overturned by the city council, commissioners landmarked one of two buildings at the site of a planned block-square retail and housing development at 700 University Ave. 

That decision was used by opponents of the current landmarks ordinance in their successful effort to defeat Measure J. 

While Olson bridled at her colleagues disparaging of the Celia’s vote, she joined him and four other colleagues in opposing the designation, while Wagley abstained and Ng, a real estate broker and developer, recused herself because of a conflict of interest.