You can find a Sutter Hotel in many cities. Go where the last wave of redevelopment has passed through and see what’s left standing. 

The hotel is seven stories high and 80 years old. A thousand scars have been endlessly painted over. The faucet handles in the room sinks often don’t match. But the rooms are clean and large and the walls are thick, built before the invention of fiberglass. 

It’s the toughest building on the block, tougher than the Oakland Federal Building that looms across the street. 

The hotel survived the big earthquake in 1989 that fatally damaged many residential hotels in downtown Oakland. 

Charlie, the hotel custodian and its institutional memory, said the old, thick walls also are filled with metal. Frank, who has lived at the hotel for 30 years, said there was a lot of alarming shaking that left a long crack across the front wall in the lobby. 

Police and firemen evacuated the hotel but let residents back in after a few hours, Frank said. “People in other hotels were moved to fancy places like the Holiday Inn and got expensive free meals. We got to come back here,” he said, not sounding too displeased. 

After the earthquake and much urban-renewing, operating residential hotels were reduced to 27 in downtown Oakland and along San Pablo Avenue where it runs into Emeryville, according to a 2004 report by the Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency. 

The hotels have 2,240 rooms to rent—not enough. From 85 percent to 95 percent of the rooms are rented out at any time. Hotel managers estimate that 20 percent of their tenants were “substance abusers,” but this is a pretty loose number. 

“Although ... hotel managers and police officers continue to complain of drug activity, prostitution and disruptive behavior ... police records confirm that disturbances of the peace are common at some hotels but do not support the complaints about drug activity and prostitution,” the report said. 

Regardless, many hotel operators are nervous about their customers. They hunker down in semi-darkness in lobby offices behind reinforced-looking glass. Sometimes there’s no light at all and you are talking to a voice coming out of pitch blackness. 

Mike, a resident and employee at the Sutter, said I missed an extreme case, a hotel where the front desk was defended by jail-type iron bars. 

Mike works for the Sutter as a driver of the hotel’s unusual elevator, which is at the heart of the hotel’s eccentric security system. 

The elevator is also very old, operated by a handle moved back and forth, requiring the operator to aim it at each stop to make it level with the floor. 

It used to have regular call buttons but they “disappeared in the mists of time,” according to Charlie. 

Users call the elevator by tapping their room keys on the glass front of the elevator shaft. Tim, who has driven the elevator for eight hours virtually every day for eight years, says he often can tell who is waiting by the style of the tapping. He has settled into a routine, reading almost a whole paperback novel on every shift, never raising his voice, and knowing most everything that goes on in the hotel. 

A crowd of tappers can collect and everybody piles into the elevator, which isn’t very large and is slowed by the weight. (Charlie says the elevator is expensive to maintain. Its parts must be specially milled by a company that mills parts for old elevators.) 

After a while, you have encountered almost everyone and after a longer while you know them and gradually become entangled in the community. 

I lived there for eight months. Shortly before I left, a tenant died from an illness in a nearby room. The guy apparently knew a lot of people. There was a sizable gathering outside his door—friends, relatives, children, staff people—awkwardly trying to be helpful. 

It wasn’t exactly a memorial service. But sort of.

Berkeley’s bid to become the biofuel research capital of academic and corporate America scored another major advance Tuesday, winning funds to start a second lab. 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman awarded $125 million to a coalition headed by the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to create one of three national bioenergy research centers. 

Funds will target development of genetically modified plants and microbes to transform cellulose—the basic building block of plant walls—into fuels. 

The ultimate goal is to create energy independence, with the nation reaping its harvest of crops grown on American soil. 

While the project is separate from the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) funded earlier this year by BP (the company once called British Petroleum), the newly funded Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) features many of the same scientific players—and both are headed by Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering professor and entrepreneur. 

The announcement was met by criticism from some researchers. “It is very disconcerting to see such an overwhelming concentration of research in the hands of scientists whose ideas are not only wrong but dangerous,” said Ignacio Chapela, a UC Berkeley plant microbial ecologist and a leading critic of the increasing ties between the corporate and academic worlds. 

Washington announcement 

Bodman made the formal announcement to reporters gathered at the National Press Club. LBNL’s Keasling stood alongside the Bush Administration cabinet officer as one of three winning project directors. 

All three centers will focus on genetic engineering as a way to create new crops along with new microbes and newly discovered enzymes to design a more efficient process for converting plants into fuels for cars, trucks and airplanes. 

Keasling say he hoped that the Joint BioEnergy Institute—or JBEI, “jay-bay as we call it”—would trigger the start of a new wave of green biotechnological industry in the Bay Area and across the country. 

The Berkeley scientist will lead a partnership headed by his lab in partnership with the Berkeley-affiliated Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories along with UC’s Berkeley and Davis campuses and Stanford University. 

While Bodman said he was barred from saying just how many applications he had received for the three slots, applicants were narrowed to a list numbering “in the teens,” with the winners picked by an international panel of scientists, technologists and figures from the corporate and non-profit realms. 

The Bioenergy Science Center is the name for the winning project for a lab to be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Other partners are Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Georgia, Athens; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. 

The third winner, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is headed by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other partners are: the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; University of Florida, Gainesville; Illinois State University, Normal; Iowa State University, Ames, and the only corporate partner among the winners, Lucigen Corporation of MIddleton, Wis. 

Each lab will receive up to $25 million annually for five years. 

“We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’ve got great confidence,” said Bodman, that the intellectual prowess of the researchers “will lead to great things.” 

The result, he said, will be “a total change in the way we power our homes and our vehicles.” 

GMO linkage 

To make the linkage between the grants and genetics research explicit, DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach told reporters that “seven years ago to this day,” the National Institutes of Health and the DOE announced sequencing of the human genome. 

“That gave us the technological expertise to bring genomics” into the search for new sources of biofuels, Orbach said, and his department “is using genomics to meet this critical need of this nation and our world.” 

Martin Keller of the Oak Ridge center said one of the goals of their research would be manipulating the genes in cellulose to make the tissue more degradable. “We really want to change how biofuels are made in the next five years,” he said. 

Timothy Donahue, director of the Wisconsin project, said researchers had been handed “the largest political, economic and scientific challenge of our time,” with his team located in the heart of the nation’s greatest source of biomass, the Great Lakes Basin. 

Donahue said his team “will have the lead in the way” wood chips and grasses are used to produce biofuels by harvesting microbial and chemical technologies.  

Keasling said JBEI will focus on: 

• Developing new “feedstock” (plants) to provide richer sources of biofuels; 

• Scavenging the environment for enzymes better capable of breaking down plant materials into sugars, the basic fermentation stock used in making fuels; 

• Developing organisms capable of producing higher levels of ethanol as well as “the next generation of biofuels” for uses ranging from diesels to jets, and  

• Developing and refining so-called “cross-cutting technologies,” processes that cut across the different phases and specialties involved in biofuel research and production with a goal of providing techniques for the emerging biofuel industry. 

Keasling said JBEI “will operate much like a start-up company with dynamic allocation of resources” to respond to developments as they arise. 

Chapela was far less optimistic. “I no longer hesitate to use the word fascism,” he said. “That is the idea that we have no difference between the state, the scientific establishment and the corporations. They have finally come into complete alignment, leaving no opportunity for diversity of thought and creativity.” 

Both EBI and JBEI were enthusiastically backed by local government, including Berkeley’s Mayor Tom Bates, as well as by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. The JBEI proposal was aided by the San Francisco East Bay Economic Development Alliance for Business, a quiet but powerful alliance of corporations and local politicians. 

Chapela had been denied tenure after his outspoken critique of the Novartis agreement, an earlier UC Berkeley/corporate pact, and won his position only after filing a lawsuit. 

Starting next month, he will be gone from the Berkeley campus for a year, taking a sabattical with the Institute of Gene Ecology in Promso, Norway. “I will not lose track of what’s happening here,” he said. “I will remain engaged.” 

Geo-petro-politics 

One reporter asked the Energy Secretary about that morning’s announcement that ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips had broken off talks with the Venezuelan oil ministry over demands that the U.S.-based firms grant a majority share of revenues to the government. 

“It’s not a happy thing for Venezuela,” said Bodman, adding that American companies also have problems with Nigeria and Russia. 

He said the administration has “encouraged all countries with indigenous supplies to have laws that will encourage non-indigenous companies to participate in developing their resources.” 

Unmentioned was the fact that two companies with strong local ties—EBI-funder BP and Richmond refinery owner ChevronTexaco—have signed agreement with the Venezuelan ministry. 

A non-UC center 

While the largest share of the local biofuel funding pie has been sliced off for the UC labs, there’s another DOE recipient in Albany. 

Two other grants announced earlier this month went to research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Research Center in Albany. 

Both projects were awarded $600,000 to study the genetics of grasses being considered as possible sources for biofuels derived from cellulose. 

One involves the creation of genetically modified varieties of a variety called Purple False Brome, while the second will provide a more detailed investigation of the genes of switchgrass. 

One project already underway in the lab is involved in a search for biofuel producing enzymes which can be engineered to create more efficient microbes for biofuel production.  

Two other Albany projects are aimed at using wheat as a source of biofuel, using the starches to produce ethanol, while another is looking at a whole range of biofuel issues through the lens of genomics. 

Another Albany project is concerned not with fuel but with finding new ways to engineer crops for domestic production of natural rubber.

An Alameda County Grand Jury report released June 26 on a controversial three-year-old automated check-out system has raised questions about the library’s ability to manage its contracts effectively. 

“While the library is generally satisfied with the installation of the new Checkpoint system, its procurement and management of the Checkpoint contract raises concerns about the library’s lack of policies and procedures,” the report states. 

The report’s criticism of library management, however, was questioned by Councilmember Darryl Moore in an interview with the Daily Planet on Tuesday. Moore sits on the library board as a trustee. 

The checkout system, which uses radio frequency identification devices (RFID), in which chips are imbedded in library materials and scanned by a machine, was purchased from New Jersey-based Checkpoint Systems in 2004 for $643,000. The library paid up front for the system with $143,000 from library funds and a $500,000 loan, which is to be paid in full by next year. The loan will have cost about $57,000 in interest. 

The library has an annual $35,000 maintenance contract with the company and purchases chips at 77 cents each for books and magazines and $2.12 for CDs and DVDs. About 31,000 items were added to the collection in 2006-2007, Library Director Donna Corbeil told the Daily Planet in an interview last month.  

“During the term of the contract, the library did not hire or assign a person to oversee and manage the implementation of this contract nor did it request assistance from the City of Berkeley that has resources to manage and oversee a contract of this size and nature,” stated the report. “Additionally, the library’s financial manager was assigned to work at the City of Berkeley’s housing authority and therefore was unavailable to manage the contract. As a consequence, documentation and management of the project was woefully inadequate.” 

Moore said, however, “To say no one was managing the contract is ridiculous,” noting that the building project manager at the time, Elena Engel, was assigned to do just that. 

Moore also said that the temporary move of the library’s Finance Manager Berverli Marshall from the library to the housing authority took place “way after” the contract was put in place in 2004. Marshall was working at the city housing authority from Feb. 6 to July 30, 2006, according to Library Deputy Director Douglas Smith. 

The report states: “The library is not obligated nor has it historically asked for assistance from the city of Berkeley because it seems to value the independence granted to it by the Berkeley City Charter. “ 

It goes on to say that it’s just by luck that contract disputes did not develop with the vendor: “Use of proven policies and procedures exist to prevent contract compliance issues. Had the library managed this contract properly, it would have obtained assistance on (i) negotiating the terms of the contract, including the timing of payments, (ii) day-to-day management (particularly in a technology context), (iii) scheduling of delivery of services, equipment and training, (iv) contract compliance, and (v) adequate documentation, to name a few.  

“The Board of Library Trustees must realize that adopting proven procedures available through the City of Berkeley in the use of public funds gives the public the assurance that those funds are being managed properly. Its current laissezfaire approach to managing such large contracts is not in the public’s best interest.” 

Moore said that a Trustee subcommittee has been working on new regulations for contracts and procurement for eight months. “They’re looking at the requirements of the city” he said. 

Community members have expressed concerns about the possible intrusiveness into personal privacy that the RFID chips might present—an individual carrying a book being tracked or an individual’s reading habits monitored–and have brought performance issues to the Library Board of Trustees.  

However, the Grand Jury report did not look at the issue of privacy, but did indicate some concern with performance, saying the director “is working with members of her staff and with Checkpoint to improve the system.”  

It concluded, however, that the system “was generally working.” 

Library Director Donna Corbeil, named to the post in December, said on Wednesday that she thinks the system is working well, but noted that she is working with a staff team that is considering doing a survey of the public to see what they think of the system and making the system easier to use by installing signage. 

The library and other Alameda County Grand Jury reports are available at: www.acgov.org/grandjury/reports.htm 

Trustee search 

In other library news, the library board is looking for a new member to replace a trustee whose two four-year terms will end in August. The deadline for applications is Oct. 1, which is Sunday. The application on line at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/library/default.htm and at the City Clerk’s office located at 2180 Milvia St.

Berkeley City College President Judy Walters, who presided over the transition of the downtown community college from its longtime rental quarters to a newly-built Center Street building, has left her position to take up a similar post at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill. 

Her replacement as Interim BCC President is Dr. Wise Allen, a longtime Peralta Community College district employee who was selected to serve through December at a salary to be negotiated. 

No official reason for Walters’ departure from the district has been given, and Walters was not available for comment on Thursday. Walters was named BCC’s permanent president only last October. 

At going-away ceremonies at Tuesday night’s Peralta Board of Trustees meeting, Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris praised Walters while describing her as “the sixth president of Diablo Valley, the last president of Vista Community College, and the first president of Berkeley City College.” 

Walters was named interim president of the old Vista Com-munity College in 2004, and kept that position when the college changed names and buildings last summer. Prior that, she served as Vice Chancellor For Educational Affairs at Peralta and in several positions in the State Chancellor’s Office of the California Com-munity Colleges.  

Harris praised Walters at Tuesday’s meeting, saying that while she was service as Vice Chancellor “she helped keep the district together when I came here after the sudden departure of my predecessor. She doesn’t back up, and she doesn’t back off.” To laughter from the audience, Harris added, “Probably that’s why she isn’t going to be here any more.” Harris said that the district would keep office space open for Walters, noting that “we offer you sanctuary, if you need it.” 

Peralta Academic Senate President Joseph Bielinski, who worked under Walters at Peralta, said his fondest memory of Walters was watching her during meetings with contractors and architects during the BCC construction. “You were the only woman in attendance,” Bielinski said, “and you constantly called them to task. That is an image I will never forget.” 

In her last report on Berkeley City College on Tuesday night, Walters said that the college had significantly jumped in enrollment and staffing over the past year as it moved into its new building, adding almost 600 in enrollment and 100 in staff during the regular school year while virtually doubling both enrollment and staff in the summer sessions between 2006 and 2007. 

Walters’ replacement at BCC, Wise Allen, has held several positions within the Peralta district, including sociology instructor, dean at the College of Alameda and Laney College, vice president at the College of Alameda, president at Merritt College, and vice chancellor of educational services for the Peralta Community College District, the position Walters later occupied. 

Though Safeway’s plans for adding housing to its Albany grocery store on Solano Avenue proved a flop with neighbors, the Pleasanton-based grocery chain is still pursuing its plans for a makeover. 

Reminiscent in scope of the days of the 1960s that ushered in the “ranch style” stores across the nation, the chain’s new makeover campaign is aimed as much at the insides as the outsides of their supermarkets. 

“We are remodeling all our stores across the entire company,” said Esperanza Greenwood, spokesperson for the chain’s Northern California division. 

And through the process, she said, Safeway will be meeting with neighbors—a wise move given the turn of events in Albany. 

Safeway is working on plans to demolish and rebuild three local stores: 

• The Berkeley store at 1444 Shattuck Ave.; 

• The Albany store at 1500 Solano Ave.; and  

• The Oakland store at 6310 College Ave. 

“All stores are being converted to a lifestyle format,” Greenwood said, adding that this means featuring a wider selection of organic products and larger floral departments. “Generally, we’re carrying a more extensive range of organic produce, more extensive fresh food including seafood and meats and a more extensive selection of natural products.” 

What happens with each store will depend on a variety of factors, including whether or not Safeway owns or leases the buildings. “We accommodate to the site,” Greenwood said. 

A proposal floated late in 2005 to demolish the Solano Avenue store and replace it with 40 condominiums behind a new store met with strong opposition and heated comments from neighbors and Solano merchants during meetings with a real estate officer from the chain. 

When Todd Paradis, the chain’s real estate manager, was asked during a community meeting of residents who live near the Shattuck Avenue store if Safeway had plans to building housing there, the response was clear: “It was not our plan.” 

He added than since housing at the Solano Avenue story had gone over “like a lead balloon, we reeled it back in.” 

Paradis had planned another Albany meeting last week, but plans were scrapped and no date for a new meeting has been set, Greenwood said.  

Robert Cheasty, former Albany mayor and president of the Solano Avenue Association, said his organization hasn’t been contacted by Safeway with any new plans. 

While the earlier proposal had drawn fire from association members, Cheasty said there was no fundamental opposition to a store that is locally owned, pays good wages to union workers and has embraced the organic foods that are popular with local residents. 

But for a new Solano store, he said, “we are looking for something that is compatible with our neighborhood and supports sustainability. If they do that, they should do well,” he said. 

Shattuck Avenue residents also praised the embrace of organics and said they liked buying at a union shop. 

A June 21 meeting was held for residents who live near the College Avenue store and a second store at 5130 Broadway in Oakland. 

Greenwood said the store has no firm timeline for completion of the overhauls. 

“We’re dealing with building permits and construction. We will get them all done, hopefully sooner than later,” she said.

At its meeting Tuesday the Berkeley City Council repealed the ordinance that prohibits the city from drug testing employees, approved a $369,000 budget, adding back some social services that had been cut and heard from both citizens and the developer’s representative on the question of a proposed commercial development at College and Ashby avenues. 

The council voted 5-1-2 to rescind the ordinance that prohibits most city employees from being tested for drugs and alcohol. (Federal law allows employees working with heavy machinery to be tested.) While the ordinance that is repealed covers all city employees (except those exempted under federal law), it is aimed at police and firefighters, whose four-year contracts are in negotiation.  

Drug testing would take place only if the unions allow it. 

Human Resource Director David Hodg-kins assured the council that testing would be “under limited circumstances.” It would occur after accidents, use of force and when there was “reasonable suspicion” that an employee was using drugs. 

“We hire officers from the human race,” Chief Doug Hambleton told the council. “Officers have frailties like everyone else.” 

Both Councilmember Max Anderson, who expressed concern around “constitutional issues of privacy,” and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstained on the vote, saying the issue should have been vetted through the city’s Personnel Commission, where it could have a full hearing. And Councilmember Kriss Worthington voted in opposition, saying the discussion should start with the unions, rather than first repealing the law, then going to the unions. 

Jake Gelender from Copwatch asked councilmembers to wait to address the issue until they saw recommendations from a Police Review Commission subcommittee looking at writing new policies as a result of the theft of drugs from the police evidence vault by former police Sgt. Cary Kent, found guilty of three felonies last year. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, who voted with the majority, reminded fellow councilmembers that if they didn’t repeal the law now, they would not be able to negotiate drug testing with police for four years. “We shouldn’t be sticking our head in the sand,” he said. 

In other council actions: 

• The council voted 8-1, with Councilmember Kriss Worthington in opposition, to approve the city’s $369 million budget, in which the mayor had restored a number of social services, following recommendations from the council last week.  

Among the services that did not get the city funding requested were Russell Street House, which houses mentally ill/formerly homeless persons; Sweatfree Berkeley, which wanted funds to support an ordinance in preparation—approved in concept by the council—that will determine which city purchases came from companies where sweatshops produce the goods; and the Telegraph Avenue World Music Festival.  

While Options for Recovery received $100,000 from the city for a counseling program, a second $100,000 was made a priority for funds available in February. 

• The council voted 8-0-1, with Councilmember Laurie Capitelli abstaining, to hold a public hearing on a home proposed to be built at 161 Panoramic Way, approved by the zoning board, but opposed by neighbors. 

• Worthington pulled his resolution formalizing rules to maximize comments from the public, when Mayor Tom Bates said he was going to formalize the rules with which he’s been experimenting. Bates said he would have the rules prepared for the July 17 council meeting, the last meeting before the council’s summer break. 

• The developer’s representative and one neighbor came to the council to speak in favor of the proposal to develop retail space at Ashby and College avenues and several dozen neighbors came to oppose it. The council vote on whether to remand the development to the zoning board failed: 4-2-1. Five votes were needed to remand the project. Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak, who wrote in favor of the project on the Kitchen Democracy website, recused himself from the vote as did Laurie Capitelli who has an interest in a nearby business. Councilmembers Betty Olds and Mayor Tom Bates voted in opposition and Councilmember Darryl Moore abstained. 

Neighbors honed in on the issue of whether it was appropriate for the zoning board to use the website Kitchen Democracy to help them make the determination that the neighbors favored the project. Neighbors and merchants are particularly concerned with the size of a proposed restaurant that could seat 200, a proposed bar as part of the restaurant and the lack of parking. 

Stuart Beattie of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association told the council the neighbors would picket the business. “The neighborhood association is determined that the bar will fail,” Beattie said.  

But neighbor Tom Spivey said the new business “would bring vibrancy to the neighborhood.” 

The Council will hear the matter again on July 7.

Ganna Dharmarajah, a former Berkeley resident whose mother still lives here, was arrested by Swedish authorities on Saturday while vacationing in Sweden. She is now being detained at a center for asylum seekers, even though she says she has never sought asylum and is not now doing so. 

Dharmarajah, 29, had traveled to Sweden in April from Sri Lanka, where she has been living since 2002. In a telephone interview with the Planet Thursday, Dharmarajah said that she didn’t understand why she was arrested and is still being detained. 

“The Swedish police officers came to arrest me from my friend’s house in Umea,” she said. “They did not give me any reason. I was told that the Swedish immigration had sent them a fax to pick me up and that they were following orders.” 

Dharmarajah was then taken to a detention center for asylum seekers. 

On Monday, she was taken to another detention center in Gävle, which is located two hours outside Stockholm, the country’s capital. She currently has access to email and telephone. 

Swedish authorities informed her that she was going to be deported to the United States, something she described as “illegal deportation.” 

“I told them that I came as a tourist under the visa waiver scheme, which permits U.S. citizens to stay in Sweden for three months,” she said. 

“I was planning to leave Sweden in June. I want to visit Japan next. I have a flight ticket to Japan. I am an American by birth. I have an American passport. I don’t want to be deported to the United States and I don’t want to be held in a detention center. I want to continue my plans to travel.” 

Dharmarajah contacted the American Citizen’s Services at the U.S. Embassy in Sweden on Wednesday.  

The Swedish government has paid for her lawyer Maria Guzman. Dharmarajah has also hired another lawyer from the American embassy’s list of legal counselors. 

“My lawyers have told me that they have filed all the papers for me to be released immediately,” she said. “My mother who lives in Berkeley has also contacted the office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee. The people at the detention center also agree that I should not be in here.” 

Dharmarajah’s lawyers could not be contacted Wednesday as it was late at night in Sweden.  

Born to Sri Lankan parents, Dharma-rajah specialized in interdisciplinary studies at UC Berkeley and moved to Sri Lanka five years ago to get married. She has been living there since. 

In a letter addressed to City Manager Phil Kamlarz and emailed to Kamlarz and the press on June 20, five-plus-year transportation manager Peter Hillier tendered his resignation effective July 8. 

Hillier said he was leaving to assume a role as northern California representative for Delcan transportation consultants.  

“As management consultants, we advise top decision makers in the transportation sector on strategy, technology, program and project management, asset management, and finance and economics,” says the Delcan website. 

“My staff and I have made significant contributions to the City of Berkeley, which we should be proud of, yet the work is not complete. The City of Berkeley, and Mayor Bates in particular, have set a high standard for governance in a variety of ways,” Hillier says in his letter.  

Hillier extends gratitude to colleagues in general and in particular, he says: “Those who know me well can forgive me for expressing special appreciation to Weldon Rucker, the long-serving, now-retired Berkeleyan who, as city manager, took a risk and hired me as his assistant city manager for transportation. I am forever grateful to him personally and professionally.”

The Berkeley Board of Education met for the last time Wednesday before breaking for summer. Board members will be back Aug. 22 for the new school year. 

Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michele Lawrence thanked board members for their work in the 2006-07 school year and wished them a good summer vacation. Rio Bauce, who will be taking over from student director Mateo Aceves in the fall, was welcomed by board president Joaquin Rivera. 

The board continued the approval of the upgraded School Safety Site Plan to the next school board meeting. 

Measure BB approval 

Berkeley residents approved Measure BB to fund the district’s facilities department in 2000. The board approved the 2007-08 Measure BB plan Wednesday, which includes planned responsibilities and goals and provides a multi-year budget projection. 

The district currently has 26 sites and over 100 acres of land. Sixteen out of the 26 are K-12 schools and one is dedicated to the Adult School. A major portion of Berkeley’s public schools were built in the 1950s, but have gone through upgrades since then. Four schools were constructed over the last ten years with major new buildings added to Berkeley High School (BHS) and Longfellow. 

Board vice president John Selawsky noted at the meeting that accomplishments of the department included evaluation of the district’s heritage trees. 

The report also stated that trash and recycling expenditures were better organized and that more recycling was occurring. 

Small Schools Grant 

The board approved plans to apply for a renewal of the federal Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) grant that supports small schools at Berkeley High. 

The staff reports states that although the Berkeley High School small schools redesign has been successful since its inception, a lot of work still needs to be done. 

The SLC grant supports the development of the redesign at BHS. The small schools policy and comprehensive school site plan lays out a strong foundation for progress. Community members have also rallied behind the restructuring effort to close the persistent achievement gap at BHS. 

Small schools comprise one-third of the student body, but according to the Small Schools Guiding Principles half the students should be in small schools. Staff recommends the addition of at least one more small school to help lessen this shortcoming.  

According to the report, the racial achievement gap continues to persist at an unacceptable level. 

The last SLC grant along with resources from BayCES brought over $1.5 million to the district and BHS in support of the BHS redesign.  

Special education transportation 

The board approved partial implementation of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) recommendations on special education transportation. 

The team recommended that special education transportation management shift from the Special Education Department to the Transportation Department with regard to the operation of school buses. 

The team also recommended that the board “grant the staff the flexibility to utilize BUSD buses, publicly bid contracts, or a combination of both, to implement a revised special education transportation program sometime during the 2007-08 fiscal year.” 

This, the FCMAT said, could help reduce the district’s dependence on the number of taxi cabs being used to transport special education students. 

Other options to increase economic feasibility includes the purchase of additional buses, or entering into specific bids with district-approved external transportation vendors. 

Williams Case Settlement Report 

The Williams Case Settlement states that every district in California is publicly accountable to ensure that students have sufficient textbooks and instructional materials, safe school facilities and access to classes taught by credentialed teachers. 

Since Jan. 1, 2007, staff has received only one Williams case complaint about the lack of an evacuation plan from the second floor at King Middle School for two orthopedically impaired students. 

According to the report, “the risk management officer for the district has assessed the King facility and will complete an evacuation plan based on her findings.”

Minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 Thursday to limit the consideration of race in school integration plans, Berkeley Unified School District superintendent Michele Lawrence said that she hoped Berkeley public schools would stand the test and become a model for other schools. 

The Court rejected diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky. because they had failed to justify “the extreme means they have chosen—discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.” 

“It’s still a bit early for us to interpret the court’s ruling,” Lawrence told the Planet, “but on the surface we hope that the school district would stand the test of time.” 

“The ruling went against Seattle and Kentucky, but the assignment system in Berkeley is not based on their model. Our assignment system does not take into account an individual’s race but rather a category based on where they live. Therefore it is a blind system.” 

Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued Berkeley Unified on behalf of the American Civil Rights Foundation in October, charging it with violating California’s Proposition 209 by racially discriminating among students during placements at elementary schools and in programs at Berkeley High. 

The lawsuit alleged that BUSD “uses race as a factor to determine where students are assigned to public schools and to determine whether they gain access to special educational programs.” 

The district emerged victorious in the lawsuit when the Alameda County Superior Court ruled in favor of the school district in April. 

In his ruling, the judge stated that the student assignment system applied by BUSD’s elementary schools was legal and that its integration system was fair. 

The assignment system in BUSD lets parents register their first, second and third school choices, and then a computer lottery gives the final placement. The lottery takes into account factors such as race, ethnicity, student background and parental income and education.  

PLF said that they would appeal the decision. The case is still open. 

Reactions about Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling were positive for Berkeley Unified. 

“I don’t think the decision will jeopar-dize what Berkeley Unified has tried to do so far,” said Goodwin Liu, Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law (Boalt Hall). 

“The controlling opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts leaves room for the type of approach Berkeley Unified is trying. It leaves open several avenues for race-conscious measures to achieve integration, including strategic-attendance zoning as well as magnet schools and special programs. The upshot is that the court has sent school districts literally back to the drawing board to devise creative assignment plans to integrate our public schools.” 

Liu added that it was remarkable that the Chief Justice of the United States cited the historic decision in Brown vs. Board of Education—which prohibits segregation in public schools—to defeat, not defend, school integration. 

Congresswoman Barbara Lee condemned the decision. 

“Today's shocking decision undermines the commitment to equality in education that was spelled out in the Brown vs. The Board of Education decision, and threatens to turn the clock back on half a century of advances in racial equality in education,” she said in a statement. 

Residents of Berkeley’s Bateman neighborhood are spending a lot of time looking over their shoulders these days. 

It’s not your average car theft they’re worried about. It’s armed robbery, and in broad daylight. Three robberies in the last two months—one armed—have sent shockwaves through the neighborhood. 

On June 11, at around 2 p.m., an area resident was walking her baby in a stroller when she was robbed at gunpoint on Woolsey at Bateman. Her husband, who did not want to be named, said she was approached from behind by man with a semi-automatic gun. 

“He demanded her purse,” he said. “He had dark skin, with a chipped front tooth, or some kind of a dental tissue in his front teeth, and was wearing a gray camouflage jacket. He spoke strangely, somewhat ‘robot like,’ perhaps with a strange accent.” 

Passers-by in the area chased the assailant but lost him when he jumped into a waiting car and escaped. 

“What’s propelling this?” asked a shaken Laurie Doyle who has lived on Bateman for 12 years. “This used to be a safe neighborhood, a walker-friendly one. These crimes are occurring in broad daylight. They are occurring to women who are walking with their babies or their friends. It’s a very disturbing development.” 

Bordered by College Avenue on the east, Telegraph Avenue on the west, Ashby Avenue on the north and Woolsey Street on the South, Bateman has never had a history of violent crime. 

“Crime has definitely gone up,” said Marcy McGaugh, neighborhood liaison to the Berkeley Police Department and former president of the Berkeley Safe Neighborhoods Committee, the umbrella group for Neighborhood Watch throughout the city. 

“The last time we had an armed robbery was in 1991. The most we get around here is car break-ins and car thefts. People bashing into windows. But armed robbery is different. I have stopped carrying a purse when I go out in the neighborhood.” 

McGaugh, with her degree in criminology and knowledge about the prison system (she served as a probation officer at once), organized the Bateman Neighborhood Watch Groups from 1986 to 1991. 

“Every block had at least one block captain, sometimes two co-captains,” she told the Planet in a phone interview Wednesday. 

“That system stayed in place until a few years ago. My job as coordinator of the Bateman Neighborhood Watch Coalition was to communicate with block captains’ information.” 

Alarmed by the June 11 attack, 80 area residents got together at neighbor Linda Foy’s house last week for a discussion with city officials. Safety tips were exchanged, emergency phone numbers were handed out and every one went to bed feeling safer. But not for long. 

On June 23 Sarita Berry and her friend Xanthe were walking on Woolsey at around 11 a.m. when they saw two women being robbed by two men. 

“We ran into a nearby house where Xanthe called 911 and told them what was going on,” Berry’s email to the community said. “By the time the police arrived, two other witnesses had chased the muggers and managed to hold one of them. The other got away.” 

Berkeley police officer Stephen Burcham, area coordinator for the Bateman neighborhood, said that the person arrested on Saturday could be responsible for the other robberies as well. 

“We haven’t connected the dots yet,” he said. “But we are working with the Oakland Police Department to close some arrests. Oakland police also arrested two people in Berkeley last week for a robbery. It’s been a while since an armed robbery happened in this part of the town. We are asking people to be more aware. It’s an unfortunate upturn but I don’t think it stands above other areas of the city.” 

Lt. Wesley Hester, Berkeley police spokesperson, said that drug usage was one of the main reasons for the current increase. 

“People need quick money for drugs,” he said. “The weather’s nice so they drive around and take advantage of people they see walking about.” 

Jim Hynes, assistant to the city manager said that the rise in crime in the Bateman neighborhood was probably seasonal. 

“School’s out and a lot of people are not focused on anything,” he said. “We generally see an up-spike at this time of the year. There is a lot of transient population in the 18 to 30 age group who throng Telegraph during the summer. The strategy is to work with the police department. It’s important to have adequate lighting in front of the house and clear overgrown vegetation so that perpetrators don’t have a place to hide. It’s really important that the neighbors are organized. Some years back Bateman was better organized.” 

Lt. Hester told the Planet that crime was up over the entire Bay Area.  

“It’s not just Bateman. It’s not just Berkeley,” he said. “It’s all over the country. We are hoping that the arrests made last week will stop the recent robberies in Bateman.” 

Foy said that she would continue to go to sleep with her porch light on. 

“I still don’t see a visible police presence in the area,” said Doyle. “We need increased police protection. We need cops on bicycles.”

As California launches into a dry summer with wildfires raging in both northern and southern California, David Orth wonders if we’re not seeing the start of something far more ominous. 

“It’s possible the whole country could have a bad fire season,” said Orth, deputy chief of the Berkeley Fire Department. Even worse, it could last all year long. 

“Whether it’s just incidental to current conditions or something bigger that is tied to global warming is the question,” he said. 

And current thinking is that global warming may be ushering in an era where fires don’t simply appear in cycles in different regions of the country but become a constant menace for all parts of the country. 

Typically, Orth said, fires appear in different parts of the country according to a seasonal cycle, starting with California’s wildland and forest fires in summer and fall, then moving into Arizona and the states of the Southwest. 

“Texas had big range fires last winter,” he said, the season when heavy fires typically hit the region. 

The cycle then moves to the East Coast, where spring fires are the norm, and then begins to cycle back west, picking up Alaska along the way before the cycle begins anew. 

“All of that happened this year, but the thing is, they’re still happening. There are still significant fires in Florida and Georgia, and in the Southwest and farther north,” he said. 

Southern California is suffering a prolonged drought, one of the worst in recorded history, and while firefighters are battling blazes there, other crews have been struggling to contain the 3,100-acre Angora fire at Lake Tahoe which had consumed nearly 230 homes by Thursday morning. 

“The fact that there is a fire at Tahoe this time of year is really kind of ominous,” said Ken Blonski, chief of the East Bay Regional Park District Fire Department. 

The local fire season usually begins about the first of the month, but this year the start was announced in May, which Orth called a troubling indicator of possible things to come. 

Usually the California fire cycle begins with lowland grass fires, then move into grass/oak woodlands and only later moves up into the pine forest at the higher elevations,” Blonski said. “But this year the snow pack was very low and it’s already dry at the higher elevations. That we have a true forest fire this time of year is not a good omen.” 

Statewide, Orth said, “we can handle one or two major fires at the same time. It’s the three or four fires at once that hurt,” a worry that consumes the thoughts of California firefighters. 

“One of the problems is that when it’s bad here, it’s usually bad all over,” said Blonski. 

And when it is bad here, the conditions that make one fire possible usually result in a second blaze, he said. 

One possible sign of things to come is the 35-acre hillside blaze that forced the evacuation of homes in an upscale San Rafael neighborhood Wednesday night. 

“The bottom line is that it was cool, the moisture content was up and the fog was closing in, and there was only the typical prevailing wind. It wasn’t dry and it wasn’t real windy,” said Orth. 

“It’s important to remember that the fires don’t always happen on hot, dry windy days—and to go over 30 acres is very significant.” 

But windy days are the persistent nightmare everywhere along the California coast. 

“It’s when the east winds and north winds are blowing that you have the real problems,” said Blonski, when the gusts are blowing from off the heated landscape toward the cooler Pacific. 

“They call them Mono winds, Santa Ana winds, Devil winds, the offshore winds,” he said 

Typically their effects are worst in the autumn, when the landscape is full of dying and dead vegetation seared by the hot, dry winds. 

Blonski and Orth said that experience with past fires has produced a well-coordinated system for fighting fires in the Berkeley and Oakland hills. 

“The fire we had recently on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel was a good example. All of the agencies jumped on it right away.” 

Local firefighting agencies just completed a two-day training exercise at Camp Parks, with over 200 pieces of firefighting equipment and their crews converging from around the bay. 

Meanwhile, the state Office of Emergency Services (OES) is maintaining its readiness, Blonski said. 

Through mutual-aid agreements and coordination of the OES, Blonski said, major outbreaks can be met with firefighting forces summoned from across the state. 

In addition to the possible effects of global warming, another and often more immediate concern is the intrusion of housing into areas that abut rich sources of fire fuel. 

“If you had a fire in the Berkeley and Oakland Hills a hundred years ago, you probably wouldn’t have more than a few fence posts destroyed. But not now. So to some extent the dangers come from the fact that more and more people are building where they wouldn’t have built in the past,” said Blonski. 

“While some people accept the danger and just hope they won’t get burned out in their lifetimes, others seem to be in denial,” he said. 

But if California history teaches anything, it’s that the fires will come.

The Board of Trustees of the Alameda County Medical Center approved a $460 million budget on Tuesday, rejecting requests by union members for a no layoff pledge and to set aside $5 million from increased debt payments to Alameda County to fund staff development and training to help staff transition into new positions. 

Following the meeting, SEIU Local 1021 researcher Brad Cleveland, who had made an emotional appeal to trustees prior to the vote, said he was “disappointed” in the board’s decision to reject the set-aside and no layoff pledge. “SEIU would have worked with the board to help secure three votes on the County Board of Supervisors to approve reduction in the debt payment,” Cleveland said. “We just needed the trustees to step up, but they didn’t.”  

The ACMC budget, covering Highland Hospital and several clinics across the county, projects cutting 21 staff positions throughout the system, the bulk of them—twelve—at the sometimes-troubled John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro. 

In late 2003, a doctor was killed by a patient at John George only months after Cal/OSHA had urged the facility to beef up security following earlier patient assaults on staff. 

The budget projects a $1.4 million net operating income for the center, coming halfway to ACMC CEO Wright Lassiter’s three year goal of budgeting one percent operating income. Last year, trustees approved a break-even budget but actually achieved a .2 percent income; this year, operating income is budgeted at 0.5 percent. 

The loan payments from which SEIU wanted to siphon off the job training money comes from some $191 million in money that the county had “loaned” to the medical center over a period of months to meet its operating expenses. County supervisors had not asked for repayment of that money until the summer of 2004, shortly after the Measure A tax money began supplementing the medical center’s income. 

Last year, the medical center paid $10 million in principal payments and $7 million in interest payments to the county on the loan, but this year, county supervisors have called for a $5 million increase in payments. SEIU had asked the trustees vote to request supervisors to rescind the requested $5 million increase so that money could go for staff training. 

The loan payments themselves have been something of a controversy, with some county health care advocates charging that the county’s demand for the payments—coming immediately following the passage of Measure A—violated the provision in Measure A that the money be used to supplement existing health care dollars. 

Shortly before the board rejected the $5 million set-aside, trustee Ted Rose said that the issue of the loan repayment has been “simmering in the background” for several years, and called on the board to adopt a policy on the schedule of repayments. “We never have before,” Rose said. “We’ve always operated under the schedule of the Board of Supervisors.” 

He suggested that the trustees work on a new loan payment schedule “in collaboration with our partners on the board of supervisors. I’m not trying to be confrontational, unless its necessary. But it’s high time we addressed this.”  

Trustees did not act on Rose’s specific suggestion, which was not offered as a motion, but on a 2-6 vote (trustees Floyd Huen and Rose voting yes), they later rejected Huen’s motion to temporarily set aside the $5 million for staff development “while we explore whether or not the supervisors would agree to allow such a reduction.” Huen said he made the motion in part because “we have only had five months of positive fiscal activity. Holding off the loan increase for another year would make me more comfortable.” 

But trustee Valerie Lewis said “we need to pass the budget based upon the situation that is before us, not what we project it to be,” and Finance Committee Chair Stanley Schiffman said that cutting $5 million in payments on the loan principal would cost the medical center money by increasing the amount of the overall payment that would have to go to interest on the loan. 

Before the vote, Crystal Cox, a registered nurse with the county, told trustees that “I worked real hard on Measure A” (the 2004 half-cent transaction tax measure enacted to supplement health care in the county) “so we could maintain services, and I’ve lobbied in Washington for more health care funds. I didn’t do that so we could have layoffs and decreases in services. How can John George maintain quality care with a decrease in staff?” 

And SEIU field representative Wayne Templeton said that without the set-aside money for staff development, “the budget threatens the improvements that have been made under CEO Lassiter. My members have been embattled over the last five years. We are simply asking for equity, now.” 

SB67 Vehicle Speed Contests  

and Reckless Driving  

Senator Don Perata (D-Oakland) 

Renewal of the original 2002 legislation, aimed specifically at Oakland’s sideshows, which allowed cars to be towed and held for 30 days solely on a police officer’s word that the car was being used in “vehicle speed contests” (the legal definition of “spinning donuts” and other auto activity related to sideshows). 

Passed the Assembly Transportation Committee on Monday unanimously (13-0) with additions of what the committee legislative analyst calls “technical amendments.” Now moves to the Assembly Appropriations Committee as a formality, with no hearing scheduled, and will go immediately to the full Assembly. As an “urgency” measure, a two-thirds vote is needed. 

SB1019 Peace Officer Records;  

Confidentiality 

Senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), Co-Author Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) 

Dead, apparently, for the year. 

This bill would reopen civilian review board hearings to the public in cities across the state (including Oakland and Berkeley) that were closed following a recent ruling by the California State Supreme Court in Copley Press, Inc. v. The Superior Court of San Diego County. 

The bill was heard in the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, but after testimony from both sides, committee members decided to hold the bill in committee without a vote, effectively killing the legislation for the year. State Senator Gloria Romero says the issue is not over, and she will reintroduce the bill next year.

Berkeley’s bid to become the biofuel research capital of academic and corporate America scored another major advance Tuesday, winning funds to start a second lab major lab. 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman announced that a coalition headed by UC's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will receive $125 million to create one of three national bioenergy research centers. 

Bodman made the formal announcement to reporters gathered at the National Press Club. LBNL biochemical engineer Jay Keasling stood alongside as one of three winning project directors. 

All three centers will focus on genetic engineering as a way to create new crops along with new microbes and newly discovered enzymes to create a more efficient process for converting plants into fuels for cars, trucks and airplanes. 

Keasling say he hoped that the Joint BioEnergy Institute—or JBEI, “jay-bay as we call it”—would trigger the start of a new way of green biotechnological industry in the Bay area and across the country. 

The Berkeley scientist will head a partnership comprised of Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories along with UC Davis and Stanford. 

While Bodman said he was barred from saying just how many applications he had received for the three slots, applicants were narrowed to a list numbering “in the teens,” with the winners picked by an international panel of scientists, technologists and figures form the corporate and non-profit realms. 

The Bioenergy Science Center is the name for the winning project for a lab to be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Other partners are Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Georgia, Athens; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. 

The third winner, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, is headed by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Other partners are: the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; University of Florida, Gainesville; Illinois State University, Normal; Iowa State University, Ames, and the only corporate partner among the winners, Lucigen Corporation of MIddleton, Wisc. 

Each lab will receive up to $25 million a year for five years, and all three labs are focusing on the transformation of cellulose into fuel. 

Keasling, who holds dual appointments at UC Berkeley and the lab, is also heading the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, a program that will combine academic research with proprietary efforts by program funder BP, the oil company formerly know as British Petroleum. 

That program will be located in a $125 million lab building planned for the LBNL campus in Strawberry Canyon.

From Maudelle Shirek’s roots in the soil of Jefferson, Ark., to the former vice mayor’s seat on the city hall dais, the legacy of the 96-year-old “conscience of the council” and radical civil rights and human rights activist will live in a mural commissioned by the city and created by local artists Daniel Galvez and Mildred Howard. 

The unveiling will be Wednesday at 1 p.m. outside the council chambers, where the mural will be installed. A reception and program honoring Shirek will follow in the council chambers, located in the building that bears her name: the Maudelle Shirek Building, 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

While the mural depicts Shirek’s many facial expressions—contemplative, in the council chambers, determined, while making an anti-war speech in San Francisco, humble, while cooking for seniors, grinning as she poses with Ron Dellums, former congressman and Berkeley city councilmember, now Mayor of Oakland—the art work is not simply portraiture.  

“I was trying to create the essence of all the activities she was involved in,” said Galvez, on Friday in his East Oakland studio, as he put final touches on the creation. Galvez pointed to scenes he had painted showing Shirek’s work creating the New Light Senior Center, her activism getting justice for people living with AIDS and her work at the Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union, where she was the first African American employee.  

“The mural is about who we are. This is Berkeley. It’s not just Maudelle,” said Mike Berkowitz, former aide and longtime friend to Shirek. “It’s what we all stand for. That’s why people love Maudelle. She stands for something—that’s us.” 

The 6-by-11-and-a-half-foot mural has the look of a collage, and is in part a study in the recent history of Bay Area ties through Shirek to a world outside Berkeley. One sees Shirek breaking bread with Fidel Castro and former Mayor Gus Newport and conversing with Rep. Barbara Lee, former South African political prisoner and President Nelson Mandela, activist singer Harry Belafonte and the late civil rights champion Fr. Bill O’Donnell. 

The mural also includes at least three politicos with whom Shirek, a councilmember from 1984 to 2004, often did battle during her tenure on the council—former mayors Shirley Dean and Loni Hancock, and current Mayor Tom Bates. 

Unique to the design of the mural, “the architecture of City Hall [where the mural is to be installed] is integrated into it,” Galvez said. 

Galvez, who will be present at the unveiling, studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts and San Francisco State University. His large-scale murals spanning several decades can be found on the exterior and interior spaces throughout the U.S. One of his best-known works is the 63-foot Homage to Malcolm X (1997) at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, where Malcolm was killed. 

Howard, who did much of the artistry on the backdrop of the mural, is out of the country and will not be at the Wednesday event. She received numerous awards including the Anonymous Was a Woman Fellowship; an NEA grant in sculpture; the Eureka Fellowship; a Rockefeller Artists Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Traveling Fellowship to Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work is included in the collections of the Oakland Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art and more. 

While Berkowitz said he is pleased that the mural highlights much of Shirek’s life, he said the only regret he has is that the work does not include more of Shirek’s many supporters who pounded the pavement in her two decades of campaigning for office. A committee of friends advised the artist on whom to include in the mural, Berkowitz said. 

The ongoing tensions among factions in the struggle over the Berkeley’s evolving landscape surfaced again last week in a joint meeting of two city panels, but the meeting ended in a lopsided 17-2 vote supporting a proposed chapter spelling out the role to be played by historic preservation in Berkeley’s future downtown for the new plan. It had been drafted by a joint subcommitee composed of members of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and of the Downtown Area Plan Commission (DAPAC). Members of the full DAPAC then met with the full LPC to discuss the proposal.  

At issue was the role Berkeley’s historic buildings will play in a city center coveted by developers, city staff and Mayor Tom Bates as a site for intensified development of apartments and transfer-tax-generating condos. 

Chaired by the LPC’s Jill Korte, the joint subcommittee has prepared a 14-page draft Historic Preservation and Urban Design chapter for the new Downtown Area Plan which DAPAC has been crafting for the last 19 months. 

While the chapter has been approved unanimously by the joint subcommittee, it faced tougher scrutiny before the full DAPAC, which has a fast-approaching deadline of completing its mandate by the end of November. 

LPC Chair Robert Johnson said he had been impressed by the collaborative process that led to the plan, with members of the public able to make comments throughout their meetings rather than solely in the public comments session at the start of meetings. 

“We now have the foundation to move into land use policy,” said Jim Novosel, an architect and DAPAC member who served on the subcommittee. 

Land use policies remain the most complex and potentially controversial subject still to be addressed by DAPAC. 

“It actually ended up being fun despite the enormous amount of work,” said Patti Dacey, a DAPAC member who had also served on the LPC. “We all collaborated to make a document” that will set the stage for the future of downtown. 

Among the DAPAC members at last week’s meeting, retired UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor for Property Development Dorothy Walker and architect and Planning Commission Chair James Samuels quickly emerged as the document’s two resolute critics. 

Walker, who had chaired the subcommittee that prepared the policy draft that set out the city’s wish list for items it wants the university to include in the 800,000 square feet of development it plans in downtown Berkeley, opened the criticism of the proposed chapter. 

Though she said she had found “the report generally very useful,” Walker said “all urban design issues, goals and policies should be in a separate chapter” that addresses all design issues downtown. All references to the university should also be relocated to other chapters, she said. 

Korte said the university had been included because of their large land holdings downtown, and because their extensive plans for the city center could benefit from ideas developed in the chapter. 

While the proposal called for acknowledgment of historic districts characterized by clusters of older buildings to preserve the city center’s character as one of the area’s last remaining prototypical early 20th-century downtowns, Walker said the chapter “should add descriptions of possible development districts where new buildings should be encouraged.” 

A former LPC member who often voted against the preservationist majority during his tenure on the LPC prior to moving to the Planning Commission, Samuels said “some of us may have big problems” with the subcommittee’s draft. 

“I really can’t support this as written,” he said, insisting with Walker that urban design be removed from the chapter, and faulting the group for “proposing things involving the university that are quite outside” their mandate. 

Former City Councilmember Mim Hawley also called for separation of urban design from the preservation chapter, a call echoed by others, including Jenny Wenk. 

Wenk, chair of the Downtown Berkeley YMCA board of managers, also challenged inclusion of design in the preservation chapter, and read off a list of questions and proposed changes. 

But Juliet Lamont, like DAPAC Chair Will Travis a Bates appointee, emerged as the chapter’s strongest defender among DAPAC members who didn’t sit on the joint subcommittee. 

Though Travis had announced that the committee wasn’t “scheduled to adopt anything tonight,” and said the information would be collated by city planning staff, then handed over to a new DAPAC drafting subcommittee for preparation of a final draft, Lamont said the existing subcommittee should instead continue in existence to prepare the final draft of the chapter. 

That triggered a prolonged debate and two votes. 

Helen Burke, a planning commissioner and environmentalist, praised the chapter as drafted, and moved that DAPAC vote to support the concepts of the document, and to send written comments to the existing joint subcommittee to shape a final draft. 

After Samuels objected, she withdrew the motion, and more discussion followed. 

Then Lamont moved that DAPAC vote to support, but not formally adopt, the principal strategies and goals included in the chapter, with the joint subcommittee to continue in existence to draft a final version. 

After Lisa Stephens seconded that motion, Walker announced that she had several objections. “Urban design needs to come from people not from that perspective,” she said, urging that the final draft be assigned to a new committee, though members of the current group could participate. 

When Lamont said she had used the word “support” rather than “adopt,” Walker said, “I would have a problem supporting some of these policies.” 

“Later on we will be taking up the drafting subcommittee,” Travis said, adding that city staff wanted to choose the new members for the new drafting committee for the “Historic Preservation and New Construction” section of the final downtown plan. 

Walker then offered a substitute motion to that effect: to accept the “overall principles” of the chapter but to transfer it to a new subcommittee with additional members for a final draft. This got a fast second from Hawley. 

Matt Taecker, the city planner hired to work on the new downtown plan, proposed a joint meeting of the existing joint subcommittee and the proposed new drafting committee, “effectively a group of 10, say.”  

Walker then offered another motion: to support the already-drafted chapter in principle, while taking up the matter of what to do with it separately. 

Her second motion failed on an 8-10-1 vote, with Travis in support. 

Finally Lamont’s motion passed by a 17-2 vote, with Walker and Samuels casting the only dissenting votes. Travis was among those who switched sides. 

Travis also praised the subcommittee for its openness..

Federal officials will announce today whether or not a coalition of UC Berkeley-affiliated labs will capture a $125 million grant to fund a new biofuel lab. 

That project would be in addition to the half-billion-dollar biofuel lab funded by a British oil giant, with would-be contractors for that project scheduled to gather Thursday afternoon to hone their bids. 

Word that the regents had already voted to fund the lab building for the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) lab building stunned critics of the $500 million grant from the former British Petroleum. 

While dissenting faculty and students were still marshaling their opposition to the controversial biofuel program funded by BP plc (the initials stand for “public liability corporation, the British equivalent of “inc.”), UC Regents had already approved plans for the project’s building. 

University officials are now seeking a contractor to build the structure, a $125 million, 160,000-square-foot building planned for a steep hillside site in Strawberry Canyon at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

Meanwhile, LBNL scientists will learn this morning (Tuesday) if they’ve won the $125 million Department of Energy grant to fund the second biofuel lab—a program headed by the same scientists who will direct the BP program. 

That project would be housed in yet another building, possibly at a South Berkeley site that includes property near the Berkeley, Emeryville and Oakland city limits. 

Both projects have won the strong endorsements of Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and would make Berkeley a leading researcher in the rush to replace vanishing petroleum reserves with fuels refined from living plants. 

BP-funded EBI 

In a little-noticed action March 15, the UC Regents approved construction of the building that will house the EBI. 

Their action came one week after Berkeley’s Academic Senate held its first forum on the project, where critics charged that the university was rushing to embrace untried technologies that could wreak havoc on Third World farmers and devastate the world’s last remaining rain forests. 

Even before the forum, the Committee on Grounds and Building (CGB) of the Board of Regents had received a proposal to approve a radical expansion of a building at LBNL they had already approved on a smaller scale in November. 

Schwarzenegger announced in December his intention to provide $40 million in state bond funds to help build the EBI lab if BP awarded the project to one of the two UC campuses it had picked to be among the five university applicants for the funds. 

UC San Diego was also in the running, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University and the Imperial College, London. 

On Nov. 16, CGB had approved $60 million for a building for the Helios Project, the lab’s biofuel project that was already under way before BP announced the $500 million bonanza on Feb. 1. 

Construction had not commenced, so after Berkeley was declared the winner, the proposal was reconfigured, raising the projected size from 90,000 square feet and the project cost to $159.4 million. 

In the months since, the university hired its architect—the Smith Group, a national architecture firm with a staff of 800 and a local office in San Francisco—to design the lab building. 

Both civil and structural engineering firms have also been hired, and the university is looking for a general contractor and a geotechnical engineer to ensure that the structure is isolated from vibrations that might interfere with experiments. 

Two days before the regents’ March 15 vote, the GBC approved the budget for the reconfigured lab building. 

There was no mention of the highly controversial BP-funded program, though a link in the announcement does lead to a document on the regents’ website that cites EBI’s inclusion in the project. 

The next morning, LBNL’s “Today at Berkeley Lab” website announced only that the committee had approved “the 160,000-square-foot Helios Energy Research Facility.”  

One day later, the regents gave their final approval in an action that escaped the notice of the public and press. 

Building details 

The building, which will feature two underground levels and up to four more above them, will be constructed on the steep Strawberry Canyon site near the southern end of the lab complex. 

Of the total building area, only 88,000 square feet would be “assignable” space, specifically allocated to labs. And of that total, 16 percent—or about 14,100 square feet—would be reserved exclusively for corporate-only research by scientists from the British oil giant. 

Of the building’s total useable area, EBI would grab the lion’s share—46,000 square feet—with the Helios Project occupying 32,000, and 10,000 assigned for shared use, including a food service area and a 250-seat auditorium. 

While biofuel research had been included in the original program for the Helios project, lab documents indicate that the program’s emphasis will shift more to photovoltaics and other alternative energy technologies, with the EBI assuming the biofuel role. 

BP would lease space from the university, paying $1.48 million in 2011 and about $2 million a year thereafter, according to a report prepared for the regents prior to the March votes. 

Of the total funds, $70 million would come from state lease revenue bonds (including the $40 million pledged by Schwarzenegger for the EBI), $15 million from gifts, and $74.4 million would be borrowed at interest from the university’s education funds. 

None of the gift money had been raised at the time the regents approved the project in March. 

The lines between Helios and EBI are murky, given that the only “Helios in the News” stories listed on the Helios Project website are newspaper accounts of the BP grant to fund EBI (see www.lbl.gov/msd/helios_site/helios_news.html). 

The two programs share many of the same staff members, as would the Department of Energy lab to be announced this morning. 

News of the building’s approval came as a surprise to several critics of the BP proposal, and though the vote of the Grounds and Building committee to approve the building came just one day after the first academic senate forum on the EBI proposal, neither LBNL Director Steve Chu nor UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau mentioned it during their presentations. 

Neither lab nor university officials mentioned the building’s approval in two subsequent forums, including a second academic senate gathering where faculty voted on competing resolutions calling for oversight of negotiations of the contract between the university and the oil company. 

Concerns 

BP is a controversial firm, with a history of funding and backing covert military and intelligence operations, including a coup that overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 and the alleged sponsorship of murderous paramilitaries in Colombia as recently as last year. 

Campus critics of the BP project have said they are concerned about their university’s involvement in a project which focuses on the development of genetically modified plants and microbes as a means of keeping American cars and SUVs rolling. 

A major concern of researchers like Miguel Altieri and Ignacio Chapela of the UCB College of Natural Resources is the potential of biofuel crops forcing out food crops in Third World nations, as well as the loss of small farms to incorporate biofuel plantations. 

Berkeley’s Academic Senate rejected a call for a strict oversight regime on April 19, opting instead for an advisory-only role for a committee composed primarily of project supporters. 

No mention was made during that meeting that construction of the lab building had already been approved. 

In addition to joining the academic efforts of one of the world’s leading universities to a leading oil giant with a checkered history, the university has also pledged to join its own public relations staff with the oil company’s in what the grant proposal described as an effort “to ensure that the EBI maintains national and international visibility as the world’s premier energy research institute.” 

The proposal approved by the regents in March is available online at www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/mar07/gb4.pdf. 

A detailed description of the building and its uses may be found at the lab’s wesite: http://fac.lbl.gov/DandC/bidinfo/docs/Helios.Facility.Project.Plan_April.2007.pdf. 

Second lab 

Meanwhile, university and lab officials will know today if a coalition of three university-affiliated labs will receive a $125 million DOE grant for a second biofuel project. 

The $125 million Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) would be one of three federally funded centers, each receiving up to $25 million a year over the course of five years. 

Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories made a joint application. 

All three labs are operated under the aegis of UC Berkeley and the regents in partnership with the Department of Energy. 

If the Berkeley affiliates win, one possible site for the new lab would be the Marchant Building at 6701 San Pablo Ave. Recently sold by the university to private developers, the property drew the attention of the lab and the Economic Development Alliance for Business, a partnership of local governments and business organizations which has helped in preparing the application. 

DOE officials announced Monday that the winners would be announced during a press conference at 8:15 a.m. today (Tuesday) Berkeley time at the National Press Club in Washington.  

Both the EBI and the JBEI would be headed by Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering professor with dual appointments at the university and as director of LBNL’s Physical Biosciences Division. Working closely with Keasling is the lab’s Chris Somerville, who also holds appointments at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford. 

Both are GMO entrepreneurs with their own companies.

To protect the community, Berkeley police officers carry guns, drive vehicles at high speeds, arrest suspects and take control of their property, including money and illicit drugs. 

Because a police officer abusing drugs might be a danger to the community, the city’s Human Resources Department wants the right to drug-test city employees, including police.  

This question will be before the council tonight (Tuesday). 

On the agenda 

The city meetings will kick off at 6 p.m. with a meeting of the Housing Authority—the old board consisting of the City Council and two tenants, rather than the new one sworn in two weeks ago. The old board will be cleaning up unfinished business, discussing the lease of office space and adding a staff position. 

Among the issues on the council agenda in addition to drug testing of employees are:  

• Voting on the final budget draft offered by the city staff and the mayor. 

• Addressing two appeals of zoning board decisions, one allowing construction of a single-family house at 161 Panoramic Way and the other, permitting the demolition of Brennan’s and Celia’s restaurants on Fourth Street, re-using the train depot for a new Brennan’s and building a commercial-residential complex on the site that will include 210 apartments.  

• A public hearing on streetlight assessments. 

• Rules on public comment at meetings. 

• A continued appeal of the proposed commercial development at Ashby and College avenues. 

The City Council meeting begins at 7 p.m.  

Last week the meeting ended at 11 p.m. sharp, leaving the issue on public comment still to be discussed and public speakers on non-agenda items without a platform to speak—speakers on non-agenda items will be permitted to speak, even if other council business ends at 11 p.m., according to the mayor’s Chief of Staff Cisco DeVries. 

The absence of notice for speakers on non-agenda items on tonight’s council agenda is an oversight, according to City Clerk Pamyla Means. 

Mayor Tom Bates says he is “experimenting” with various council formats. The prompt end of last week’s meeting was among the newer ideas he has introduced. DeVries said on Monday that the 11 p.m. cut-off rule will likely continue at Tuesday’s meeting. 

Drug testing cops 

The Human Resources staff has placed a measure on the agenda asking the council to rescind the city prohibition against drug and alcohol testing of employees.  

This would give city contract negotiators the ability to go to the council in closed session and get direction on what to do when there is “reasonable suspicion” of drug use, when there has been an “accident causing serious bodily injury,” or when there has been a “use of force causing serious bodily injury,” according to the item that will come before the council.  

Human Resources Director David Hodgkins told the Daily Planet on Monday that once the part of the law prohibiting the city from drug-testing employees has been removed by a vote of the council, he will be able to negotiate with the labor unions on questions of testing. The fire and police contracts are currently in negotiation. 

If the council removes the prohibition, however, he will have to discuss the matter with the councilmembers behind closed doors. The question to be decided in closed session would be the impact a positive drug test would have on the discipline of an officer—for example, there could be counseling, suspension or termination.  

The case of the police officer who pled guilty last year to stealing drugs from the evidence room was among the issues that triggered the call to institute a drug-testing policy, Hodgkins said. 

Currently, if a manager or supervisor “observes behavior or appearance in an employee that is characteristic of drug use or alcohol misuse, the supervisor or manager cannot send the employee for a mandatory drug or alcohol test,” with the exception of operators of certain large equipment that come under federal regulation. 

Andrea Pritchett of Berkeley Copwatch said she welcomes a drug-testing policy for police, but cautions that the critical question in the case of Cary Kent, the former police sergeant who pled guilty to stealing drugs from the evidence room, was that his job performance, according to colleagues and supervisors interviewed in the criminal investigation, had been in decline for perhaps two years and supervisors and colleagues did not formally report it. 

Pritchett also said she fears that “by lifting the prohibition, all city employees could be tested. It could be an intrusion.” 

Many other police departments do drug testing under various circumstances, including Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles and New York.  

New York and Los Angeles dismiss officers after a first positive drug test, according to a July 30, 2006 Boston Globe story. Boston officers who test positive for drugs get a 45-day suspension during which they must get treatment. When they return to work, they are subject to random testing, as well as the annual test officers must take within 30 days of their birthdays. 

The Oakland Police Department spokesperson was unable to give the Daily Planet details of the city’s testing policy. 

Budget vote expected 

Responding to community pressure and the requests of council colleagues, Mayor Tom Bates, in a budget proposal released on Friday, has added several items to the list of social service spending that he had released last week. They include: 

• $25,000 in start-up funding for Young Aspirations Young Artists (YA YA) California. 

• $15,000 in funding to Berkeley Youth Living with Disabilities to fund a budget gap. 

• $10,000 to the Malcolm X Neighborhood Arts Collaborative for a five-year strategic plan. 

• $3,000 for Berkeley Boosters to develop a corporate sponsorship plan. 

• $13,000 to restore the reduction in the Berkeley Drop-in Center contract. 

• $12,000 to restore the reduction in the Lifelong Acupuncture Detox program. 

• $15,000 for case management services at University Avenue Homes, the site of low income housing where there was a recent homicide. 

• $10,000 to enhance the Lifelong Medical Care Social Worker program service for chronically homeless individuals. 

Funds will come from taking $100,000 in additional funds from those available through transfer taxes (slated to be spent on infrastructure), which will total $1.5 million in Bates’ budget additions. He is also freeing up funds by recommending that the Civic Arts Coordinator position that was to be cut to half-time in 2009 be restored with funds from the mid-year budget in February 2008.  

Bates’ budget continues to recommend $377,000 for engineering/planning needs, $225,00 for a transportation planner, $85,000 to increase the West Berkeley Planner to full time, $50,000 for a person to write laws for his Public Commons for Everyone Initiative and other social service needs as previously recommended.  

Rules for public comment 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington introduced an item last week to regulate public comment, something that the mayor has been experimenting with for much of the year, in response to a lawsuit threatened by Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense (SuperBOLD). The item was introduced, but not discussed, when the meeting abruptly ended at 11 p.m. The item is also scheduled toward the end of the council meeting Tuesday and, if the meeting ends at 11 p.m., may once again remain unaddressed.  

Bates is planning to introduce his own finalized rules for public comment July 17, the last meeting of the council year, according to DeVries. 

Wright’s Garage 

An appeal of the proposed development at Ashby and College avenues, turned down by the council two weeks ago, remains on the agenda for a month, allowing councilmembers to change their votes. This item is the last scheduled item on the agenda. 

The Berkeley Chamber of Commerce’s political action arm, Business for Better Government, files its campaign statements with the County of Alameda rather than the city. 

Deputy City Attorney Kristy van Herick wants to know why. 

“Based on an examination of the available Form 460 statements on file with Alameda County, it appears that the Berkeley Chamber PAC should be filing with the city of Berkeley instead of the county and therefore complying with the Berkeley Election Reform Act, including its more rigorous filing and disclosure requirements,” wrote van Herick in a May 30 request for advice to Scott Hallabrin, general council for the state Fair Political Practices Commission. 

Within a five-year period, the PAC contributed uniquely to Berkeley candidates and measures, with the exception of a $500 contribution to the Sandre Swanson for 16th District Assembly campaign.  

In 2006, the PAC spent around $100,000 to oppose council candidates Kriss Worthington and Dona Spring, to oppose the landmarks’ Measure J and to support Mayor Tom Bates. 

In 2004, it spent money opposing Berkeley’s Measure O (fair trade coffee) and in 2003-2004 spent funds on behalf of the Berkeley Committee for Fair Representation. In 2002, it contributed to the Berkeley Democratic Club and the local No on P campaign. 

“From my reading of the Political Reform Act, Government Code sections 81009.5 … and 84215 … the Berkeley Chamber PAC is legally required to file in Berkeley and comply with our local ordinance, the Berkeley Election Reform Act, if it is a general purpose committee ‘active’ only in Berkeley,” van Herick wrote, adding that she understands a committee to be active in Berkeley if it contributes only minimally to candidates in other jurisdictions. 

In her request for advice, van Herick asks the FPPC attorney whether the PAC should file in Berkeley and if so, asks: “If the Berkeley Chamber PAC should be a city general purpose committee [filing with the city], who has the authority to direct the committee to file an amended 410 and begin filing with the Berkeley City Clerk?” 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, whose opponent in the 2006 race was supported with thousands of Chamber PAC dollars, said he would like to know if the county reporting “was done to evade the stringent reporting requirements in Berkeley.” 

Berkeley’s local election ordinance limits contributions to candidates to $250. If developer Patrick Kennedy, for example, gave $250 directly to Bates’ mayoral campaign, then gives $5,000 to the PAC, if even $1 of his PAC money goes to Bates, he might be said to be subverting the law that limits contributions to $250 per candidate.  

By filing with the county and following its election laws, the Chamber PAC did not have to follow the $250 limit rule.  

Furthermore, individual contributions to committees that file with the county are not published in a local newspaper, as is required by the local election law. And they are published on the Internet only when the committee chooses to file in an electronic format, which the Chamber PAC does not do. In Berkeley, all contributions are posted on the Internet, generally the same day or the day after a candidate files the required campaign statement. 

The full Chamber PAC contribution information is available at the country registrar’s office. 

Furthermore, Berkeley does not allow corporate contributions, but by filing with the county, such donors as Wareham Development of San Rafael are permitted to give contributions. (Wareham, owner of the Fantasy Building at 10th and Parker streets and numerous other sites in West Berkeley, gave $10,000 to the PAC.) 

Miriam Ng, chair of the Chamber of Commerce PAC did not return calls seeking comment. Van Herick did not return calls to discuss the letter.

More than a year after local voters approved the Peralta Community College District’s Facilities Bond Measure A, authorizing the four-college district to issue some $390 million in bonds, a citizens’ oversight committee required by that measure has yet to organize itself, has yet to meet, and has not yet been fully formed. 

The Peralta Board of Trustees recently approved Chancellor Elihu Harris’ appointment of former Assemblymember and current State Senate candidate Wilma Chan to serve on the committee, leaving the committee one member short of its full seven membership complement. 

Peralta Vice Chancellor Tom Smith says the oversight committee has not yet met because “there is nothing for them to do.” 

Smith said the district has been offering “informational” tours of its facilities and construction sites, but noted that “those are not mandatory,” and the committee “is not making any decisions.” 

It is unclear whether such “informational” tours by the committee fall under the California Brown Act, which requires notification to the public and the ability of the public to be present “for any gathering of a quorum of a ... body [covered by the act] to discuss or transact business under the body’s jurisdiction.” 

Peralta General Counsel Thuy Twi Nguyen did not return a voicemail requesting her opinion on the matter. Jeffrey Heyman, Peralta Executive Director for Marketing, Public Relations and Communications, called in her place, saying that any questions to Nguyen for this story should be submitted to his office in writing by e-mail and he would have them answered. 

Measure A required the organization of the oversight committee within 60 days of the district’s authorization of voter approval of the bond measure, an authorization that took place in July of last year. 

Meanwhile, the district continues to authorize and spend millions of dollars in Measure A facilities bond money without the oversight committee. 

At its last meeting alone, on June 12, the Peralta Board of Trustees approved four separate projects involving the expenditure of approximately $2.5 million. An exact amount is not available because funding for one of the projects, the renovation of the district headquarters, is listed on the minutes as coming from both Measure A and the district’s previous construction bond, Measure E.  

Independent performance and financial audits called for in the bond measure have yet to be completed, according to Vice Chancellor Smith, because the district’s fiscal ’06-’07 books have yet to be closed. Smith said the two areas will be part of the report of Peralta’s outside auditors, Vavrinek, Trine, and Day, and should be available in October or November. 

Besides Chan, one of two community-at-large representatives on the committee, oversight committee members, with their interest areas in parentheses, now include Bay Area World Trade Center President and CEO Jose Dueñas (business), League of Women Voters Berkeley Albany Emeryville Community College Chair Helene LeCar (community-at-large), Laney College student Scott Folosade (students), Peralta Foundation President and EBMUD Board Member Bill Patterson (representing a group supporting the community college), and Polly Amrein (senior citizens). 

A seventh committee member, San Francisco accountant Hyacinth Ahuruonye, who once served as campaign treasurer for former Oakland City Councilmember Moses Mayne, was appointed last November to represent taxpayers associations, but Vice Chancellor Smith said that Ahuruonye has since been dropped from the committee. 

“He’s not a local property taxpayer,” Smith said, “and I believe that’s an important criteria for committee membership. We are currently looking for someone to represent a taxpayers group.” 

Another unstated reason for Ahuruonye’s removal, however, may have been a lack of affiliation with a recognized taxpayers’ association. Ahuruonye’s name was not familiar to local or state taxpayers’ associations which are represented on other bond measure committees, and last year, Ahuruonye failed to respond to telephone calls requesting information on what taxpayers’ association he represented. 

The purpose, duties, and makeup of the Measure A oversight committee are set out in California Education Code Sections 15278 through 15282, which is referenced in the Measure A text. 

The oversight committee purpose, according to the Education Code, is to “inform the public concerning the expenditure of bond revenues.” 

To do so, the code lists several activities that the oversight committee “may” engage in, including reviewing both the performance and financial audits, inspecting school facilities and grounds “to ensure that bond expenditures are [properly] expended,” and “reviewing efforts by the school district or community college to maximize bond revenues by implementing cost-saving measures.”

A new class of 15 students began the semester at the Bread Project at the Berkeley Adult School (BAS) Monday. In the first hour, this group of future bakers learned to differentiate between ounces and pounds, a few new vocabulary words for use in the kitchen, and, most importantly, they learned about Lucie Buchbinder. 

Buchbinder, co-founder of the Bread Project, a cooking training program for low-income adults, was killed in a train accident at Oakland's Jack London Square Tuesday. 

The Amtrak train that had hit Buchbinder had been traveling south from Sacramento. Buchbinder, 83, had been distracted by her cellphone and apparently did not see the train approaching. 

“I saw it on the news,” said Bread Project student Latoya Davis, a 30-year-old single parent of two. “I am sad that we won’t see her around here ever again.” 

“Anybody who has the motivation to create a program like this has to have a big heart,” said Coral Gardener, 24, who enrolled in the Bread Project after hearing about it at the Women’s Daytime Drop-in Center in Berkeley. 

Both Davis and Gardener have dreams of becoming pastry chefs. Instructor Nel Dias-DeSilva said the program has placed many students in professional kitchens. 

“Lucie’s vision was to provide hands-on training in cooking and training to low-income groups,” he said while introducing the class to scales and measurements Monday. “Our aim is to get every student an entry-level job in the food business. We can’t promise them a job as a pastry chef, but it’s possible.” 

As the BAS community mourned within the school Monday, Lily Divito, executive director of the Bread Project, spoke to the Planet about Buchbinder. 

“She was just so genuine,” Divito said, glancing at pictures of a silver-haired Bucbinder talking to her students. “She was so healthy and had an immense amount of energy. When she started the Bread Project, she was 75, but never stopped working. Since it was a start-up, there was no staff, nothing. I was hired in June 2002 as the assistant director.” 

The Bread Project was born in 2000 when Buchbinder met Susan Phillips, a social worker in San Francisco. 

“We were both working in affordable housing in the Tenderloin,” Phillips said. 

“When our low-income tenants approached us to help them find a job, I had an idea about the bread project. Research showed that baking as a trade paid significantly above the minimum wage and that it was a job that had a career ladder. Neither of us had any training in baking, but Lucie, with her experience in starting three nonprofit organizations, had the know-how.” 

Phillips and Buchbinder approached Michael Suas of the San Francisco Baking Institute who agreed to train students and provide space and equipment for classes at cost. 

Since its inception in 2001, the program has worked with organizations such as the Oakland Private Industry Council, the San Mateo County Human Services and the Berkeley Adult School. 

“It was Lucie who brought the Bread Project to us,” said BAS principal Margaret Kirkpatrick, who has been with the institution for over a decade. “She showed us how the program kept with the main goal of our school, that is serving adults. It fit exactly with our mission. We had a kitchen that wasn’t being used and they had a need. It was a collaboration waiting to happen.” 

When the adult school moved from the old campus to 1701 San Pablo Ave., Buchbinder insisted on planning the new kitchen herself. 

“She planned everything from where the new sinks would go in to where the oven would fit,” said Kirkpatrick. “Her energy was simply amazing.” 

A lifelong advocate of the economically disadvantaged, Buchbinder was born in Vienna, Austria, and fled to Amsterdam through Kindertransport after the Nazi’s occupied her country. 

After living in England for a while, Buchbinder moved to New York with her family. She finally ended up in Sacramento and attended UCLA and UC Berkeley. 

After a short stint teaching English at UC Berkeley, Buchbinder worked with HUD in San Francisco for a long time in low-cost housing. 

“She was politically very active and was a member of the Electoral College,” said Phillips. “She showed me that in order to accomplish something you had to work very hard. She had the energy of a 18-year-old. Even at 76, she was working 50 to 60 hours every week. The last time I met her she told me that she was tying up loose ends in her life to prepare for possible death, but I don’t think she had expected to die so violently.” 

Both Phillips and Buchbinder retired in 2005. Today the Bread Project has five sessions at BAS and two at the Oakland Adult School. 

It has served more than 500 people from diverse ethnic, social and economic backgrounds since its inception. About 75 percent of the program’s graduates go on to find work and 84 percent of those who find work stay employed after a year. 

As Monday’s class came to an end, Henry Boatwright, a new student, said he was sorry to miss the chance to meet Buchbinder. 

“I have heard so much about her,” he said. “I am glad she started something like this for folks like us. I want to thank her for that. I have done lots of things in my life. Roofing, painting, landscaping. But what I really want to do is learn how to bake. Soups and sandwiches and stuff, that’s what I really want to do. And now I can finally do that.” 

The Oakland Unified School District state administrator’s office is reporting this week that political intervention by State Senator Don Perata and State Superintendent Jack O’Connell with the state architect’s office has speeded up approval of construction plans for the partially burned Peralta Elementary School in North Oakland. 

Last week, OUSD State Administrator Kim Stathan announced that construction has begun on the Peralta campus, with completion scheduled within 60 days. 

But with construction always subject to possible delays, that may not be fast enough to stave off a possible joint habitation of North Oakland’s Carter Middle School by Peralta and the newly formed Oakland International High School in the fall, an arrangement that some Peralta parents have said will cause them to pull their children out of the Oakland school district completely. 

If there is such a joint school arrangement at Carter “the result will be that a handful of the parents will be there . . . to make it work,” said Peralta parent activist Christopher Waters by telephone, “but the district will also lose several families. That’s not a threat. That’s just a reality.”  

Waters said that Peralta administrators have already been notified by Oakland International High School officials that Oakland International will begin moving into portions of the Carter Middle School space within two weeks. 

Several Peralta parents told Stathan at an OUSD administrator board meeting earlier this month that housing high school and elementary school students together was “inappropriate,” and they would pull their children out of Peralta if that occurred. 

In an emotional address, one parent said, “Can you imagine what these high school boys would be saying to some of these 6th grade girls? Can you imagine the effect on them?” 

A portion of Peralta’s 63rd Street and Telegraph Avenue campus was destroyed in an arson fire last March, and since that time the school has been occupying space at the site formerly housing the defunct Carter Middle School at 45th Street and Webster. Oakland International is a newly formed school in the district affiliated with the Internationals Network for Public Schools. 

According to the network’s website, the Internationals Network for Public Schools is “a non-profit organization dedicated to the development and support of the network of International High Schools that serve late-entry immigrant English Language Learners.” 

“If it’s just not possible to move back into the Peralta site by the beginning of the fall school term, we’ll just have to figure out how to share the Carter campus with the high school,” OUSD spokesperson Alex Katz said by telephone last week. 

However that admission—that the joint Peralta/Oakland International occupation of Carter in the fall is still on the table—is contrary to what Waters says district officials said immediately after the fire and have been saying in recent days.  

Waters said that at a meeting between Peralta parents and Stathan a week after the March fire, “she told us under no circumstances would we have to share the Carter site with International High School.” 

But after district officials indicated that they were, in fact, contemplating a cohabitation arrangement after approval of the Peralta construction stalled over the spring and threatened a possible fall reopening, Waters said that parents met with several local political leaders about the situation at the school, including Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila Jordan, Assemblymember Sandré Swanson, Oakland City Councilmember Jane Brunner (who represents the district in which Peralta is located), and representatives of the office of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. He said that following those meetings, Jordan contacted him last week and said that OUSD state administrator Kim Stathan had “promised me that there would be no co-location at Carter.”  

Peralta parents pressed their case personally to State Superintendent O’Connell when O’Connell visited Carter Middle School earlier this month (“He slipped out the side door without telling us anything,” according to Waters), and have been coordinating efforts to speed up construction with the office of State Senator Perata. 

Meanwhile, a letter sent out this week to “Peralta Elementary Families & Staff” by Stathan updating the construction project did not mention the possible relocation controversy. Stathan only wrote that she was “very pleased that our plans were approved in record time and that we were able to start a 60-day reconstruction project a few days ahead of schedule. With work now underway, I am optimistic that we will be able to bring Peralta home before the first day of school on August 27. Throughout this project, I have promised that OUSD would do everything in its power to make the 63rd Street campus ready for students by the end of August—even if that means moving before offices and other repairs outside of classrooms are completely finalized. We will continue to direct all available resources to rebuilding Peralta. However, school construction is a complex business, and we must make sure that work meets the highest standards for teaching, learning and safety.” 

Katz said that construction at Peralta would begin with the damaged classrooms and then move to non-classroom space, with the idea that if possible, students might be able to occupy the classrooms at the beginning of the fall term while construction on other parts of the building were still ongoing. One scenario might have some administrative and non-classroom activity housed in temporary buildings on the site. 

Besides the classrooms, the damaged portions of the school include the front office, the library, and the teacher’s lunchroom. 

Waters said by telephone that he believes that the district is doing its best to complete the construction before the beginning of the fall term. Waters also said that the parents have no complaints about International High School itself, but only with the idea of housing elementary students with high school students. 

“We love International High School,” Waters said. “We’re excited about it. But it’s inappropriate for us to share the site with them. This is not the time for us to embrace a new challenge or foist a big change on us. We’re tired and we’re overwhelmed.” 

A man’s decomposing body was retrieved from the bay near the pier at the Berkeley Marina at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, the Alameda County coroner’s office reported. 

A boat passing by the Berkeley Pier, three and a half miles into the San Francisco Bay near the end of University Avenue, reported the body to the U.S. Coast Guard. 

The Coast Guard retrieved the body and brought it to the Alameda County coroner’s office. 

“The body looked like it was in there (the water) for a while, at least a few days,” said Petty Officer Cole. 

The county coroner’s office estimated the death, which occurred from drowning, took place sometime around June 18.

Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communication staff will be back at the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting Thursday to request a use permit for 11 cell phone antennas atop the UC Storage building at 2721 Shattuck Ave. following a second remand from the Berkeley City Council. 

A public hearing is also scheduled to be held at the meeting at Old City Hall, 1234 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, at 7 p.m. 

At the Jan. 30 ZAB meeting, board members voted 6-3 to deny the request of Verizon and Nextel for a permit to construct a new wireless telecommunications facility to host eighteen cell phone antennas and related equipment atop the building. 

The six ZAB members who voted against the permit cited insufficient third-party engineering review as grounds for denial. 

The item, which had been first remanded to ZAB by the City Council on Sept. 26, 2006, had brought forth health concerns from neighbors. 

But the City Council had asked ZAB to look primarily at the third-party engineering review, parking concerns and whether any illegal construction was taking place at the site, and had asked ZAB not to reject the cell phone antennas on grounds of health concerns. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits local governments from rejecting wireless facilities based on health concerns as long as the stations conform to Federal Communication standards. 

Neighbors said the denial was a breakthrough in terms of communities having a voice in planning their urban environments. 

Both Verizon and Nextel appealed ZAB’s decision to the City Council. 

At the May 11 council meeting, Paul Albritton, an attorney for Verizon, told councilmembers that more antennas were required for better cellphone coverage. 

“Data use has tripled in Berkeley,” he said and added that Berkeley’s use of cell phones had increased 94 percent between 2005 and 2006. 

Area residents who had turned up at the meeting to vociferously protest the antennas argued that the council had significant evidence that there was no need for additional coverage. 

Planning staff is recommending that ZAB approves the permit. 

2100 San Pablo U-Haul project 

The City of Berkeley Code Enforcement Division will request ZAB to hold a public hearing to consider recommending to the City Council that the U-Haul business at 2100 San Pablo Ave. is in violation of its use permit. 

If the business is in violation, the Code Enforcement Division has asked the council to determine with the appropriate remedy. 

According to the staff report, U-Haul was granted a use permit in 1975 to operate a truck and trailer rental business which allowed it to store 20 trucks and 30 trailers on the lot.  

The report says that U-Haul has consistently violated its use permit by storing more than 20 trucks on its lot and has also used on street parking spaces to store its trucks. 

U-Haul argues that the use permit does not limit it to storing 20 trucks on the site or prohibit it from using the public right of way to store the excess trucks.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), the hottest ticket on the Berkeley transportation horizon, is up for discussion again tonight (Tuesday). 

This time it’s the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee’s transportation subcommittee that is taking up the $400 million project that could change the streetscapes of downtown and Telegraph Avenue. 

The committee will be working on a collection of statements of concern to be submitted to AC Transit in time for consideration in the agency’s environmental impact report on the project. 

To be considered in the final report, all issues have to be raised before the week is out. 

The subcommittee, composed of members of DAPAC and the city’s Transportation Commission, is currently working on a draft chapter on access and transportation for inclusion in the new downtown plan. 

DAPAC has until the end of November to prepare statements for inclusion in a new downtown plan being created as one of the conditions of a settlement of a city lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley’s adoption of development plans through 2020. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The Berkeley Board of Education will be meeting at the Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to renew contracts and agreements before they break for summer this year. 

School site safety plans 

The board will vote on whether to approve the School Site Safety Plans, which utilize various community, agency and school resources to ensure proper response to any emergency. 

Every public school in the state is required to have a school site plan which includes a school site safety plan, said Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

The safety plans deal with day-to-day scenarios as well as drastic incidents. 

“It could range from dealing with a potential bomb threat and violent intruders on campus to simple things like child injury in the playground,” Coplan said. 

The district’s resources for its safety plans includes the city, UC Berkeley and Alta Bates Hospital. 

Berkeley school volunteers, special education transportation 

The board will also vote on whether to approve a revised agreement with the Berkeley Public Education Foundation to support Berkeley School Volunteers. 

The Berkeley Public Education Foundation is a nonprofit organization that brings up to $500,000 a year in grants and donations as well as volunteer programs to the district 

The board will also review information with respect to special education transportation services for the 2007-2008 fiscal year. 

The Saturday Farmers’ Market in Berkeley was awash with politicians, pressing the flesh and hawking their latest products. “Will you take the pledge?” one shouted at me, and I fled. I’ve got many historic associations with taking pledges, none of them good. 

In my childhood I discovered that when it was whispered about that So-and-So had “taken the pledge” it meant that he (it was always men) drank too much, and with the aid of some earnest priest he had promised in church to “go on the wagon” for a while—with dubious chances for long-term abstinence, however. (For the uninitiated, that’s the “water wagon,” as opposed perhaps to the club car on the train where the boozers hung out.) The hope was that prayer would save sinners from the demon rum, but it seldom lasted long. 

Another popular pledge has been promoted by the Christian right as the solution to the problem of sexually transmitted diseases. Pre-teens promise to refrain from sex at least until (we hope not after) marriage. Statistics, scanty at best, indicate that these abstinence pledges don’t make much difference either. 

A Google search turns up all kinds of pledges, from the unenforceable to the frankly commercial. There’s a “no-windows-boot” pledge bawked, not surprisingly, by the Apple Computer corporation. A Republican senator tried to goad Al Gore into signing some sort of environmental pledge. Gore, no fool he and an honest man to boot, politely declined.  

The pledge being pushed at the market on Saturday also seemed to have something to do with the environment. Making an educated guess, I checked the Berkeley mayor’s city-funded public relations page, and sure enough, there it was: 

I, _______________________, will address the climate crisis by taking responsibility for my greenhouse gas emissions. I pledge to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent within one year and 2 percent every year after that. 

Who could object to that, one might ask? Write a piece, if you dare, denoucing motherhood (population explosion, you know) or apple pie (the obesity epidemic!), but the prime candidate for Sacred Cow of the New Millenium is greenhouse gas emissions. How can anyone deny the need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? 

Well, no sensible person denies the problem, but there’s a lot to object to in the quasi-religious way that true believers are promoting ineffective personal solutions to knotty global problems. Pledges such as this one are based on a lot of faith, even more hope, and very little science. Percentages, as any high-school math student will tell you, mean nothing unless you define “percent of what.”  

Accompanying the pledge was a table, coyly titled “My Very Own Climate Action Plan,” printed in that Word computer font which is supposed to look like hand-printing but fools no one. It profers dynamic suggestions like using a water-saving shower head and buying an Energy Star ™ refrigerator. Excuse me, but haven’t we been doing those things here in Berkeley since the drought of the mid-’70s at least? The problem with band-aid solutions like these is that they allow us to feel that we’re doing the right thing while large-scale serious environmental threats of all kinds continue to be tolerated. 

Even worse, when environmental protection is treated like a religion, like all religions it engenders the emergence of false prophets. Here in Berkeley we have false environmental prophecies in abundance prominently preached. Some examples: 

A major part of the University of California is being sold off to British Petroleum. Why? Scientifically suspect claims are made that biofuels will solve the energy crisis without causing deforestation in the Amazon for planting fuel crops. And even if the claims are right, a multinational BP will still have a near-monopoly on supply, a risky proposition. Some professors will get even richer, to boot. 

And AC Transit is promoting half-a-billion dollars worth of construction contracts for a hard-wired bus rapid transit scheme which threatens to sink locally-serving businesses along its route. Their EIR offers absolutely no concrete proof that BRT will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it will certainly line a number of pockets with green. Berkeley people will be driving to malls to buy their books if Moe’s closes. 

The revised Berkeley landmarks ordinance, if not overturned by citizens in the upcoming referendum, is another anti-environmental boondoggle. It’s carefully calculated to make it even easier to demolish re-usable existing buildings. These will be replaced with the kind of new construction which consumes more energy and other resources than intelligent rehab—even if a few of the new buildings are built to often-lax LEED standards.  

But if we all believe, if we all take the pledge (and perhaps take some shorter showers and turn off some lights) we’ll be saved. Hallelujah. 

Berkeley should be embarrassed to allow itself to be fooled by faith-based greenwashed promotional schemes, particularly if they’re promulgated at government expense to promote political careers. Climate change, sometimes equated with global warming, is a serious threat which requires reality-based scientific world-wide solutions. Messianic zeal at the local level for ineffectual nostrums, with a dash of hippy capitalism thrown in to make us all entrepreneurs, cannot promise salvation, no matter how many pledges we take.

In the last few days we’ve heard about a lot of crime in the area near our South Berkeley office. Our neighborhood association has reported at least three nearby hold-ups in broad daylight, and a frequent correspondent in the adjacent Temescal area has sent us a letter (in this issue) about a frightening unprovoked assault on a pedestrian by a gang of young teens who didn’t even appear to be looking to rob the victim.  

At the same time people have been shocked and saddened by the murder of an Albany doctor and her little girls by their husband and father. An El Cerrito reader wrote in to urge some sort of public action to close the Old West Gun Shop in his area, where the murder weapon was purchased, completely legally. Another reader’s response to his letter, printed in this issue, is that everyone should carry guns, and that would deter murders. This is patent nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that if the murdered mother had been carrying her own weapon she could have stopped the killings? And what about the kids?  

One gun nut (yes, there’s a reason they’re called that) on a website promotes “man’s primal instinct to protect himself and his family through whatever means necessary.” Does this also describe the guys who kill their families with these all-too-available guns? Another man in St. Charles, Missouri, which used to be a peaceful bucolic river town, killed his whole family last week, though he spared himself.  

And in San Francisco, young gang members in the Western Addition with easy access to guns on both sides have recently been killing each other and innocent bystanders in terrible numbers. Just this weekend in Union City a recent high school graduate attending a supervised private party at the home of a school principal was shot dead as a result of an argument that it seems he wasn’t even part of. Then there are the all-too-frequent episodes like the recent mass killings in Virginia, where deranged suicidal people manage to take a lot of other innocent people out with them because they have the use of a powerful repeating weapon.  

Murder is as old as the human race, in biblical terms as old as Cain and Abel. But the amplification of the murderous instinct with modern weapons is a recent and frightening change. Even the gunslingers of the old west armed with six-shooters, nostalgically evoked by the El Cerrito gun dealer, lacked the deadly efficiency of present-day killers armed with easily purchased modern weapons.  

The idea of deterring street crime by arming all potential victims is fraught with peril. I’ll admit that I was a bit scared last week as I walked from my dentist’s office on Telegraph to my own office on Shattuck by way of the network of barriered back streets in the Halcyon Neighborhood, after hearing about the recent holdups there. But neither I nor anyone else in the area, especially innocent bystanders, would have been safer if I’d been packing. A workman at a house I passed greeted me in a polite, friendly way, but what if I’d been someone with her hand on a trigger ready with a rapid response to a perceived assault by someone carrying what looked like a weapon?  

There are less dangerous ways of dealing with this kind of situation. Community police patrols are an obvious deterrent, and in fact the police did arrest perpetrators in two of the recent robberies. Cell phones with an auto-dial setting for the local police number are effective, though 911 from cell phones is not as good because it just reaches the state highway patrol. 

It might be Berkeley heresy to say this, but it’s possible that the combination of a nearby BART station and car-free back streets could be part of the problem: easy entrance and egress by roving bad guys who can quickly disappear into the station, and not so many eyes on the streets when drivers are diverted elsewhere. People walking alone might be safer taking the big streets, though I must say the beautiful neighborhood gardens on my chosen route were much more attractive than the bumper-to-bumper Ashby traffic.  

It’s most unlikely that street criminals would be stopped in their tracks by believing that potential victims might be carrying guns—if they relied on logical thought processes they’d be in a different business altogether. In gang wars everyone’s reckless and they’ve all got guns, but that doesn’t stop them from killing each other.  

Survey after survey shows that the voting public all over the country would like to limit access to firearms, but the wealthy gun lobby manages to buy enough legislators to thwart meaningful legislation at the state and national levels. Some cities have enacted bans on gun sales, but then the traffic just moves to the suburbs. Over the weekend Jesse Jackson and a local parish priest were arrested in a protest at a gun shop in suburban Riverdale, Illinois, which they charged had been supplying Chicago gun wars since guns were banned in that city. 

East Bay activists should take a leaf from Jackson’s book and go after suburban dealers like El Cerrito’s Old West with on-site protests. Even though killings up and down the urban East Bay are often committed with illegal guns, the tragic slaughter of the Morrissey-Kawai family should be motivation enough for the El Cerrito city council and Contra Costa County supervisors to view continuing legal gun sales as a blight on their communities, and to pursue all available avenues to restrict or end the practice.  

EMPTY LOT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Dorothy Snodgrass would, I hope, be interested to know the history of the “blight” at the corner of Haste and Telegraph; a building which once served hundreds of low-income tenants was deliberately burned, so deliberately that the tenants in the affected wing were warned ahead of time. If the “moderate” majority on the City Council hadn’t prevailed, we would now have a low-income apartment building honoring Bob Sparks. The current council can’t seem to find a way to replicate the 77 units of affordable housing that once stood at that corner, and offered shelter to hundreds by the week or by the day, whatever they could afford. Even the word “affordable,” once a useful way to describe such housing, has been re-defined out of useful existence. Doing nothing about the crucial replacement of such housing is a clear statement of values, for which I hope people hold the council accountable. But we citizens, including Snodgrass, whose letters I thoroughly enjoy, need to learn and remember our local history, or we run the risk of replacing buildings which served a crucial need with market-rate housing that further exacerbates the housing crisis for the poor. 

Carol Denney 

• 

HILDEGARDE FLANNER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Phil McArdle’s article on Hildegarde Flanner sent me to my bookshelf to make sure I still had At the Gentle Mercy of Plants re-issued in 1986 shortly before Flanner’s death, by John Daniels, (Santa Barbara) publisher of many fine books. 

Immediately after I had enjoyed this book of poems and essays, including “Wildfire: Berkeley 1923,” I read that essay and a couple of poems on one of the regular readings I did at that time on KPFA. I loved the writing, but wasn’t really sure who Hildegarde Flanner was—I tended to confuse her with her sister Janet, who wrote more regularly for the New Yorker. 

A few years later, when the Oakland hills went up in flames, I called Susan Stone at KPFA, suggesting this might be a good time for a repeat reading of this exquisite piece, and brought her my copy, which she read on the air. (The Lake Tahoe fire reminds us again of our recurring catastrophes which Flanner took rather philosophically.) 

Still, I went on not knowing much about Hildegarde Flanner. I learned so much from the way Phil laid out so clearly the main facts about this wonderful writer, who wrote few pages, but made every word count. I was also delighted by the mention of Janet Lewis, another fine writer who made no big splash, but in terms of literature really counted. Maybe a piece on Lewis soon? to reassure older readers that good work is not forgotten, and to introduce young readers to good writers who get drowned out by noisy promotion of their more prolific and flashy inferiors. 

The articles by Phil McArdle are invaluable. Thank you. 

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

DOWNTOWN PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Tuesday’s article on the draft historic preservation element of the emerging Downtown Plan (“Preservationists Win Round in Downtown Plan Debate”) may have set a new Daily Planet standard for relating the sizzle but ignoring the steak. The real and unreported story—obscured by the detailed recounting of trivial editing disagreements among DAPAC members—is about how much progress has been made in one of Berkeley’s longest-running arguments: the relationship between preservation and development in Berkeley. 

The actual historic preservation draft submitted to the DAPAC makes a solid case for preserving the historic character of our downtown, focusing especially on the “core” frontages on Shattuck from University to Durant as a potential formal historic district. But it is just as vigorous in supporting “sensitive” in-fill development in the downtown—even to the extent of proposing that we actively seek out opportunities to “intensify” some landmark buildings themselves with taller and denser adaptive re-uses. As the report stated, “Downtown should not be frozen in time. . . . We should not only (a) protect Downtown’s historic character but also (b) accommodate a substantial amount of sustainable new development. We can, we should, do both.” 

This basic both-and approach was gratefully embraced in principle by all DAPAC members who spoke—really making for a milestone in the history of the committee, who saw the report’s “generous and inclusive spirit” to be a model worthy of emulation for the entire final DAPAC report. Compared to that headline accomplishment—which the Planet reporter apparently failed to notice—the “disagreements” at the meeting were insignificant. They focused mainly on editorial concerns—for example, not whether “urban design” issues need to be included in the report, but simply if they’re best addressed in a separate chapter rather than in parts of multiple chapters. A few open policy issues do remain, but the principle has been established for maintaining downtown Berkeley as both an historic and a still-evolving district. 

Yes, the “preservationists” won a round—for which the city should be thankful. And they did so by recognizing that responsible preservation not only grudgingly accommodates change, but also embraces it. Thanks to this well-crafted document, more of us should proudly say that we are all preservationists now. 

Alan Tobey 

• 

FACTS AND OPINION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What fun it is to mix facts and opinions! 

Writers can make any sort of claim in a letter to the editor without providing a shred of evidence and it will be printed right along side empirically verifiable fact. Example: In his letter to your publication of June 26, Michael P. Hardesty asserts, “The fact is that guns are used in self-defense millions of times every year in the United States.” That was million with an “s” at the end. By pluralizing million we’re talking about at least two of them. That comes out to an average of 5,479 incidents every day in which an American uses a gun in self defense. That’s 228 times an hour. Remember two million would be the minimum so these are conservative figures. 

Two can play at that game Mr. Hardesty. Here’s mine: There are literally billions of unverified claims made within printed letters to editors in America every day. 

I betchya mine’s closer to the truth. 

Richard Hourula 

• 

NET NEUTRALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a U.S. citizen, as a student, as a teacher, as a voter, as a person concerned about small, independent, local, community websites: We need to stop the corporate take over of the Internet! This is not an issue in France, Germany, Japan, England, nor in Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria or South Africa. It is exclusive to Corporate America: AT&T, Comcast, etc., who want to charge high rates for website speeds! Right now, under net neutrality, all sites in America get the same speed. The Internet could soon look like expensive cable TV and be denied to millions of students who cannot afford skyrocketing rates. Everyone, stop the corporate takeover of our Internet. The Internet is the new space of enlightenment and global commerce that we need to maintain free, neutral, and independent of corporate greed. Net neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet’s gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that do not pay their added tolls. 

This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination. 

Adam Shellhorse 

• 

ELMWOOD DISTRICT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I became engrossed in the June 26 Berkeley City Council meeting, especially when residents and the Elmwood Merchants’ Association spoke against the Wright’s Garage project. Although I have commented in your pages about my position on the issue, I feel it is imperative to address one issue that arose during the testimonies, and to suggest an immediate solution to the probable confusion by the city attorney.  

The insistence by the city’s attorney that Kitchen Democracy’s survey was a valid barometer as evidence residents of District 8 support the project needs to be addressed. I appeal to the attorney, and especially to members of the council, to read the survey. It was a broad survey about the Elmwood in general, with no specific information about the Wright’s Garage project. The conclusion arrived at was the position of Councilmember Wozniak, an interpretation of the replies to the survey that is highly suspect. In fact, it appears that the elaborate setup was a scheme to win approval of the project from the start. The attorney’s continued insistence on its validity, even after Councilmember Worthington’s astute rebuff, is both egregious and curious; it begs the question as to whether a conflict of interest issue exists. Even after the merchants’ association and residents of the Elmwood spoke, unequivocally, against the project, the attorney continued to minimize their significant relevance. Perhaps the attorney was not aware that her comments actually misled council members. 

Therefore, it is clear that the council needs to be informed directly by residents of the Elmwood District, not through councilmembers who support the project, and not through an attorney who has difficulty with reality. At least one councilmember relied on the attorney’s answers for insight into the issue. The merchants’ association needs to submit its petition to the council directly, showing that the vast majority of merchants oppose the project. And citizens of the Elmwood need to get up their own petition, perhaps have the signing as an on-going activity through the week and on weekends at the four corners of Ashby and College. Volunteers could create the need for enlightenment.  

In an ideal world, councilmembers would give residents and merchants one more week to secure signatures for their petitions.  

Such overwhelming evidence should convince the council, and inform the city’s attorney, once and for all.  

R.J. Schwendinger 

• 

GUNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In voicing my whole-hearted support of Andrew Ritchie’s demand that the Old West Gun Room in El Cerrito be permanently removed from our community, I run the risk of being labeled as someone with a mind “taken to its reductio ad absurdum.” (In the eloquent words of your reader, Michael P. Hardesty.) So be it, Mike. 

And I must not overlook Deborah Cloudwalker’s letter espousing her novel theory that carrying guns in self-defense is the only thing that can “equalize a small, weak woman against a large strong man.” She forgot to add the words “carrying a gun.” I would remind Deborah that not all small, weak women consider guns an appropriate means of defense—only women with small, weak minds! 

Please continue your campaign to shut down the Old West Gun Room, Mr. Ritchie. You have the support of all those angry and frustrated by the easy accessibility of guns. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

BE WELL INFORMED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Whatever your position on gun issues, it is best to be well informed. Those who advocate gun control may not be aware that state and federal law already give everyone the right to use deadly force in defense against “grievous bodily injury.” However in states like ours, as Deborah pointed out, citizens are overwhelmingly prevented from carrying guns in public places, so that they usually cannot use these effective weapons outside their own home. In her editorial, Becky O’Malley argues that it could be dangerous if one reacts too quickly to perceived assault. Very true, and that is why, in every state where individuals are allowed to carry concealed weapons, they must go through a rigorous training program and obtain a permit to do so. Those who own and carry guns usually have studied the gun laws quite thoroughly, and they realize, as they are taught in concealed weapons classes as well as classes on combat use of handguns, that to make a mistake and squeeze the trigger too easily is to end up charged with murder. It is an extremely serious thing to use a gun in self-defense, something that should only be done “in the gravest extreme,” to quote the title of one book on the subject. As we have found in the many places where carrying a concealed gun is more readily permitted than here (and by the way, it is permitted here, but not very readily), citizens trained to carry guns can actually be trusted to do so.  

Finally, Becky misses the point that I believe Deborah was making it isn’t the carrying and use of guns for self-defense that deters criminals. Rather it is the fear of armed citizens that deters criminals. If laws provided everyone the right to carry guns in the streets, and in Oakland and Berkeley not a single citizen chose to enact that right, violent crime would still drop steeply, simply because of the fear that had now been introduced in criminal’s minds, “the person I hit on might have the means to kill me." That criminals tend to pick on those who look more vulnerable, demonstrates that they look to avoid danger to themselves in their commission of crime. Doubt it? Talk to criminals.  

To those who use the phrase “gun nut,” I’d suggest you meet some of those you caricature but don’t know. Go to a shooting range or gun shop and talk to people. Go to rural areas and meet those who’ve grown up with hunting and guns. Find out that some of those who own guns are doctors, social workers, schoolteachers, psychologists, nannies, dog walkers, and women who’ve been assaulted or raped. You’re free to form your own position on guns, but be well informed.  

David Knauer 

Oakland 

• 

SUMMER IN SOUTH BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Around 11 a.m. this morning I received a call from a neighbor, alerting me that there had been a shooting event shortly before, on the 1600 block of Russell Street. It sounded like they came from around the parking lot of an apartment complex. I walked over to the Rosewood Apartments, the parking lot for which is directly west of the structure, and partially wraps around. There is a flight of stairs leading up to the first floor, with a wood fence behind it. There I counted three fresh bullet holes, lightly circled in crayon. There were two other, larger bullet holes in the fence, which appeared to be older. The cut-through left by those rounds had been painted over. Beyond the Rosewood parking lot is another apartment building and its backyard. There is a chain-link fence at the back, overlooking Lenora Moore’s residence of 1610 Oregon St. 

I took photos of the damaged wood fence, and a woman came up the entrance and greeted me. I asked her if she was the press, since she carried a substantial camera and what looked like a bag for gear. She answered “No, I’m a nurse. Are you Mary Lou?” That made it seem that she was entering an apartment to see to a tenant. I asked her if anyone was injured. She said no, she was really just there in more of a social worker capacity. So an apartment was shot into, it seemed. 

The backyard of the next-door apartment building was clear. No one hanging out; no bullet casings, had any been left from that location. I heard that shots were fired into a separate apartment residence around the 1614 Oregon address. It is at the back of the property. Bullets came through the walls of the bathroom and lodged in the walls of the closet. The family who lives there was home at the time, but no one was in the bathroom. Otherwise, I am told they could easily have been killed. Someone connected with the property told me that rounds retrieved were heavy-duty, jacketed bullets that are armor-piercing. Great. 

A sole officer was sitting in a Crime Scene BPD van out in front of 1612 Oregon. Officer (Detective?) Vargas told me that no one had been injured, no one apprehended. No one was willing to admit that they had seen anything. 

I guess that makes it now, officially, summer. 

Sam Herbert 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Roy Nakadegawa (letters, June 26) missed the whole point of my June 22 commentary about AC Transit’s misnamed Bus “Rapid” Transit (BRT) lane grab: 

AC Transit has already captured most of the speed enhancements realistically available to buses in the Telegraph Ave./BART corridor. Its new 1/1R “Rapid Bus” route, inaugurated on June 24, alternates fast express buses with local buses. 

It also allows buses to prolong green lights until they clear intersections. As with San Pablo Avenue’s successful 72/72R route, these benefits come with no negative impacts. 

But building the whole BRT package—which means seizing two lanes of Telegraph for bus-only use—would add only tiny further speed benefits. And those would be offset by larger detriments: snarling Telegraph’s remaining traffic, and diverting through-traffic into neighborhoods. 

If you want a bus faster than Rapid Bus, just add simple “proof-of-payment” boarding: Let riders buy tickets from retailers, board quickly, and cancel their own tickets onboard. No bus-only lanes, “stations,” or trouble-prone ticket vending machines (like BART’s) required. 

BRT apologists keep defending this $400 million boondoggle with theoretical, or system-wide, claims that are irrelevant to Berkeley. And indeed, while BRT is great technology where properly sited, there’s no defense for AC Transit’s proposed route. 

It would hug the BART tracks for its entire length. That’s idiotically redundant route planning, which would be allowed in no other city. 

Roy claims time savings that AC Transit has never predicted. They estimate more like five minutes on a long trip. 

And he cites theoretical figures about “mass transit” (presumably including electrified rail) producing less pollution and CO2 “per passenger mile” (an important detail) than cars. Yet as even he concedes, AC Transit’s own environmental study shows negligible energy or pollution savings from this project. 

Why? Because buses only save energy and pollution when they’re full. On Telegraph, AC Transit is evidently proposing to run mostly-empty buses most of the day, to collect federal and regional subsidies. 

That’s an absurd Rube Goldberg scheme that’s neutral for the environment, only marginally better for transit riders, bad for South Berkeley, and awful for taxpayers. Consider the real benefits that $400 million could buy on a better-patronized route, and it’s bad for everyone. 

Let this wasteful proposed Emperor’s New Bus stop here. 

Michael Katz 

• 

TOO EXPENSIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A cost-benefit analysis suggests that the AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal is far too expensive for the modest gains in travel time and passenger increase. 

AC Transit estimates that the total cost for Bus Rapid Transit will be between $310 million and $400 million. For this amount of money, we would see: 

• A reduction in peak-period travel time from downtown Oakland to downtown Berkeley of 5 to 7 minutes (from 26 minutes without BRT to 19 to 21 minutes with BRT). 

• A reduction in peak-period travel time from downtown Oakland to downtown San Leandro of 6 to 10 minutes (from 36 minutes without BRT to 26 to 30 minutes with BRT). 

In his recent letter to the Daily Planet arguing in favor of BRT, Roy Nakadegawa unfortunately compared the current travel times between the points listed above with the estimated travel times under BRT. It is more useful—and more accurate—to use the comparison times that AC Transit has provided with and without BRT on its website (as I’ve done above) because those times include the enhancements, such as traffic signal manipulation and fewer stops, that will be in place even if the full BRT project is not implemented.  

AC Transit also estimates that over an 18-year period to the year 2025, BRT would increase the average weekday riders by 12,000 to 21,180 passengers (from 28,050 riders without BRT to between 40,050 and 49,230 passengers with BRT).  

These seem like very modest gains for so much money—coupled with the extraordinary inconveniences and traffic delays caused by just a single lane in each direction for autos on Telegraph, the heavy increase of traffic likely on neighborhood streets, the loss of parking spaces on Telegraph, and what seems to be almost no net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  

In addition, the University of California will open this fall a new 1,000 car parking facility on College Avenue between Channing Way and Haste that will feed huge numbers on cars onto College, which is already a severe bottleneck during rush hours, and onto Telegraph with its proposed single-lane-in-each-direction for cars. 

The costs of BRT clearly seem to outweigh its limited advantages. 

Bob Laird 

• 

LONELIER THAN EVER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My childhood was spent on a dairy farm in Los Angeles County. Telephones were still luxuries. It was a big deal when we got a four-party line (yes! four households shared the same line). Phone bandwidth was expensive. Only the wealthy had private lines. On Sundays friends and neighbors would drop in on each other unannounced. In those days, existence had a more tangible personal feel to it. 

Phones became cheap; and the Internet made communication faster and even cheaper. Today we send messages everywhere on Earth at a moment’s notice. But, are we closer now than the neighbors who knocked at each other’s doors on Sunday for a visit? Are we getting more “free time” by flooding each other with more e-mail and cell phone messages? I don’t think so. In fact, I suspect that we are now lonelier and more confused. We think we’re more connected—but spend more time skimming massive quantities of messages and images coming to our computers screens, cell phones, iPod headsets, televisions, and radios everywhere. Less and less time do we spend face-to-face with each other. 

Americ Azevedo 

• 

PREJUDICE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

An anti-immigration rally took place in Jackson, Miss. to castigate Trent Lott for his moderate stance on the immigration debate. It seems the only people not assimilating in the current debate are the “whites only” crowd. How many Mexicans, blacks, Latinos and tolerant whites do you think were at this Mississippi social? The current debate is not about illegal immigrants, amnesty and speaking English, it is about prejudice and discrimination. 

Why are Americans so blind to this fact and why do they so easily feed into the hatred of a vocal and ignorant fringe element of society?  

Is today’s immigration frenzy any different than the racial unrest of the ’50s and early ’60s, except in that brown skin has been substituted for black skin. The ugly scourge of racism is still very much alive and well in America.  

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

In a Nov. 18, 2003 commentary, Mayor Bates and Councilmember Linda Maio made what appeared to be a heartfelt plea for immediate incorporation of the University Avenue Strategic Plan into the zoning ordinance. In light of developments such as the behemoth building proposed for 1950 MLK, affectionately known to some as the Trader Joe’s building, this public promise to champion the UASP principles of protecting Berkeley from inappropriately large development and to maintain the residential character of the neighborhoods definitely bears re-examination. 

The letter began with the sentence, “The future for University Avenue cannot be wall-to-wall five story buildings.” It goes on to assert, “New buildings in Berkeley need to respect adjacent homes and protect their sunlight and privacy—not loom above and overwhelm their neighbors” and “We pay attention…to blending with the neighborhood context, to the interface between commercial and residential, to how a building impacts the streetscape.” It concludes with the statement, “We should all realize that our major corridors are where new affordable housing can and should be built. But we must respect the context of the street and neighborhood and ensure that new buildings do not make a significant imposition on their neighbors.”  

As Mayor Bates lamented in 2003, the requirements of the State Density Bonus law often result in “…large, blocky buildings which are too big for the lot and overwhelming to neighbors and the street.” The state density bonus law has been used as a convenient scapegoat for ignoring the neighborhood protection principles of the UASP. The 1950 MLK project’s current promise of a ground-floor grocery and increased tax revenues is no excuse for abandoning the stated protection principles of the pre-existing UASP, which Mayor Bates clearly claimed to champion in 2003. I defy anyone to explain in public forum how this project fulfills the protection principles delineated in the UASP. Let’s take a look at those principles: 

• UASP, Strategic Plan Goal No. 3: “Protect and improve neighborhood quality of life,” including the following goals: “Protect Existing Local Business and Established Neighborhoods”; “Enhance the quality of life for current residents at all income levels; “Protect and improve neighborhood quality of life.”  

• UASP Strategic Plan Goal No. 5 includes the goal to “Respect the Character of the Local Neighborhoods.” 

• UASP Housing Policy UA-17 specifies that “The design of new and renovated housing along the University Avenue Corridor should contribute to its character, without negatively impacting residents of adjacent residential areas.”  

• UASP Transportation Policy UA-21 mandates “Implement improvements to tame traffic along University Avenue, but protect the adjacent neighborhoods from excessive traffic.”  

Nowhere in these clearly stated UASP requirements to protect the existing residential character of the neighborhoods, and nowhere in Mr. Bates’ and Ms. Maio’s letter to the editor of 2003, does it specify the caveat “unless there is a profitable reason not to uphold these principles.”  

The 1950 MLK project will reduce on-street parking along MLK for existing businesses. It confronts the neighborhood with a 4-5 story façade, looming 43-55 feet high on our one- to two-story residential block. It places a residential entrance for a 64-unit apartment building opposite a single-family Queen Anne cottage, effectively doubling the number of residents the street already houses. It proposes a retail parking entrance for a Trader Joe’s on our residential block. Without a full traffic barrier in place as requested by the neighborhood, that equates to a projected 2,200-plus extra cars driving down our street per day. Certainly none of these proposals enhance our quality of life. They increase traffic, air pollution, noise, density and reduce our safety significantly; this on a block where we are already a frequently-used and abused shortcut for cars evading the traffic light at MLK and University and a block where parking is already scarce. 

We, the Neighbors for A Livable Berkeley Way, are not and have never been NIMBYs. We are a diverse, predominantly low-to-middle-income community. We initiated a dialogue with the developers specifically to forge a productive template for development for all of Berkeley, not just our block, so other neighbors would not have to face this same fate, a template that would specifically include respecting the character of the existing neighborhood, clearly delineated in the UASP. The 1950 MLK project is a substitute design, and regardless of the state density bonus, it is entirely at the council’s discretion to make any modifications necessary to comply with UASP guidelines to maintain our “lovely” town, as Bates referred to Berkeley in his letter. 

According to Mr. Bates and Ms. Maio’s letter of 2003, they believed in and pledged publicly to uphold all the goals of the UASP, including the protection of existing neighborhoods, not to pick and choose whichever UASP principles might be convenient at the time. We call on you now to honor that pledge. 

Regan Richardson is a Berkeley resident. 

AC Transit proposes to eliminate two auto lanes on Telegraph Avenue and have curbed, restricted, and exclusive fast bus lanes in the middle two lanes for the new BRT service. Their thinking and the environmental impact report do not address the problems this will cause. Telegraph today is attractive, clean, and traffic flows. 

Local bus and all auto and truck traffic would be confined to one lane in each direction. Emergency vehicles would run with the fast buses in the center lane, and be restricted by the buses and congestion. No one could pass other vehicles. Police and fire vehicles would be considerably hampered. Much, but not all parking would be eliminated. Local buses stopping and cars parallel parking would stop all traffic. Getting across Telegraph would be restricted. Left turns limited. People will leave rather than use businesses. 

Telegraph is the main route for entering and exiting South Berkeley especially. 

Entering: Berkeley events, theater, sports, UCB events, downtown, for giant trucks with food for Andronico’s and Whole Foods, and many trucks with supplies for stores and restaurants.  

Exiting: after events and games, after work, and in an emergency such as fire or earthquake. It is an important feeder for freeways and the Temescal Shopping Center at 51st Street. Some neighborhoods could be isolated. Stores would lose customers by the droves.  

Alternative routes are not readily available; they are jammed already. Both South Berkeley and North Oakland neighborhoods have many blocked streets; as it has been longtime policy to divert traffic to main streets. These mazes will become a traffic mess. 

At peak hours exits from the UC campus to Claremont and/or Route 13 are slowed to a stop. Claremont can handle more traffic, but it is very hard to get to it. Much traffic has been diverted over the years from neighborhoods and other routes to Telegraph Avenue. 

At most hours College Avenue is very slow, restricted by the light at Ashby. College cannot handle more autos and trucks. Ashby, our exit to east and west, has jammed traffic at many hours and can handle no more. Broadway can handle Oakland traffic but it does not solve the problem of getting to South Berkeley, including UC Berkeley or Alta Bates Hospital. Routes such as Martin Luther King are too far away and made hard to access by traffic restrictions. 

Telegraph Avenue functions extraordinarily well in 2007. It is clean. Neighborhoods are improving. Many new businesses are established from 20th Street in Oakland through Stuart Street in Berkeley. Temescal is reborn. Condos have been built. The buses work; trucks deliver vital food and merchandise. Auto traffic flows easily. All this will be brought to an end by the unnecessary construction of restricted lanes. Traffic not being able to sort itself out by passing will clog the avenue. There will be great pain and bankruptcies as a result of blocking Telegraph. The businesses will be killed by the congestion and lack of parking. Growing tax revenues for the cities will shrink. In any emergency there is the risk of lost lives when emergency vehicles cannot get through. Emergency vehicles will be blocked by traffic. 

The opinion survey on this development was only mailed to people within 300 feet of Telegraph. Very few people know what is happening. The meetings chaired by AC Transit were stacked with transit people with local people objecting. Berkeley’s own traffic commission is filing the most modest objection to the EIR, and not representing the motorists, most of the residents of the town. Does the City Council know what is happening here? Does Oakland know? Do fire, police, and ambulance operators know? 

Today, the big fast double buses are running on Telegraph, mixed with other traffic, and this, and restriping and cleaning up the avenue has resulted in less congestion and faster both bus and auto service. AC Transit should stand pat with what has already been accomplished and not go too far and destroy commerce and neighborhoods.  

This is an open letter to Berkeley residents, Berkeley government, Oakland government and above all the Board of AC Transit who are requested to not proceed on this project.  

We suggest that residents and business people call your Oakland or Berkeley Council person and AC Transit and write to newspapers and AC Transit Board, 1600 Franklin St, Oakland Ca., 94612 with your point of view. People pressure can avert this disaster. EIR comments are due by July 3. Google AC Transit EIR for much more information. Berkeley government may tend to favor this proposal as a way to invigorate downtown. Oakland hardly knows it is happening. 

Mary and George Oram are Hillegass Avenue residents; Arlene Giordano and Thomas Cooper own Le Bateau Ivre; Carol Lipnick and Ed Dougherty own Berkeley Hat Company on Telegraph Avenue.  

At last count, there were 43 separate militias in Gaza, including clan based militias, Fatah splinter groups, criminal gangs, and non-Hamas Islamic groups. It is unclear as of this writing how long it will take Hamas to consolidate its control, and eliminate all possible resistance. But they will. To subdue one clan, they took three female civilian clan members, one a young girl, and executed them summarily as an example. Summary execution has always greeted those accused (no trials necessary in Palestine) of collaboration with Israel. Now collaboration with Fatah has become a capital offense as well. Military control is but one aspect of the story. Gaza is about to descend into a very dark night of the soul. Hamas will gradually monopolize and Islamicize all aspects of life. There have already been innumerable attacks on normal expressions of modernity. Nightclubs and internet cafes have been torched, gays murdered, churches burned (Palestine, which, until recently, was 7 percent Christian Arab, is now only about 2 percent Christian). Women who commit adultery face death by stoning, if their own brothers and fathers do not kill them first. Hundreds of women have already been strangled by their own family members in so-called “honor killings.” Women also face forced genital mutilations, and, of course, they will be required to take up the veil. The education system will become Islamic. Already, Mickey Mouse broadcasts a message of hate on Hamas TV. “Kill the Jew and the crusader” (i.e., Christians), preaches Hamas’ Mickey Mouse, “for they are all pigs and apes.” But this has been going on for years. Hamas’ “summer camps” routinely taught children how to become martyred suicide bombers. Those children have grown up to become the shock troops which made short order of Fatah in Gaza, and may someday soon do the same in the West Bank. 

Hamas has at least 6,000 very well equipped fighters in Gaza, most of whom have been indoctrinated in jihad and hate since early childhood. Hamas has risen above the moniker of militia. It is now an army approximately equal in strength to Hizbollah in Lebanon, save only that their rockets are still cruder. Almost all of their weapons came through the honeycomb of tunnels dug under the town of Rafah, which straddles the Egypt-Palestine border. Egypt turned a blind eye to this smuggling. This was not so much a matter of Egyptian policy, but rather, Egypt’s poorly paid border patrol was simply bribed to look the other way. Israel, before it evacuated Gaza, tried to staunch the inflow of weapons by seeking and destroying those tunnels.  

Enter one Rachel Corrie. ISM, a group dedicated to the Palestinian cause, and which in its literature fully supports Palestinian terrorism, sent Rachel Corrie to Rafah. The idea was that she and her friends, in the name of “peace,” would throw their bodies in front of Israeli bulldozers as they tried to uproot the tunnels. One such bulldozer accidentally ran her down (no one has alleged murder, though driver negligence may have been a factor). This happened at the height of the second intifada, and at time when over a thousand Israelis were blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has since built security fences which have greatly diminished the number of suicide bombings, though there has been barely a let-up of Palestinian attempts to infiltrate Israel with suicide bombers. Only now, very few actually get through to their targets.  

Berkeley is complicit in the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. City Council members Kriss Worthington and Linda Maio brought to the City Council a resolution effectively supporting Rachel Corrie, and pointedly ignoring all Israeli casualties. In effect, their resolution gave a vote of support for Hamas’ weapons smuggling. What were they thinking?  

By all accounts, Worthington realizes that he made an error, and has tried to make amends. If I am correct in this, then I say to Worthington, to err is human, so let’s move on. Maio, on the other hand, continues to defend her outlandish behavior. I hope that one day a viable candidate will choose to run against Maio in her district. Such a candidate would receive a great deal of support by a community that is sick of Berkeley politicians who insert themselves into complex foreign issues of which they are almost wholly ignorant. As for becoming mayor one day, I say to Maio, run for mayor in Gaza, but not in Berkeley. 

PRO-MASS TRANSIT,  

ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What is it that Daily Planet letter and op-ed writers don’t get about the Inconvenient Truth of polar ice cap melting and planetary destruction, and how this might somehow be eased by the inconvenience of using mass transit, bicycling and walking, plus the concept of transit-friendly development? Perhaps Berkeley needs to enforce existing laws, such as citing bad drivers for speeding, neglecting turn signals and not yielding to pedestrians, in order to make driving less convenient. And, perhaps Berkeley can deputize more traffic enforcement staff, incent them with “commissions” on the citations, and use the revenues to pay for more city services. 

Mitch Cohen 

• 

QUOTATION MARKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Can someone help me understand the rhetorical use of quotation marks in some of your correspondents’ letters ? 

Just recently, for instance, Ms. June Brott referred to British academics exercised by the “moral implications” (her punctuation) of Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Why this term deserves or requires problematization by enclosure in quotation marks is a mystery to me. A reasonable person might feel that imprisoning over 1 million people in Gaza without adequate food or water, no means of earning a living and no way to escape, has moral implications. Incessant sonic booms, lack of access to their own tax money, tanks and bulldozers on the prowl at any time of the day. The majority of their elected representatives thrown in prison along with many thousands of others, where they are not treated kindly. Readers of HaAretz will recall how one detainee was paralyzed for life by a vicious kick to the chest. 

Ms. Brott’s inability to detect a genuine moral issue here says a great deal about her own moral tone-deafness. Unless we’re talking about a victim of the Palestinians, such as the journalist who was kidnapped, she simply cannot see any moral implications, and this with the benefit of a religious tradition spanning thousands of years. Perhaps Ms. Brott could spell out when something rises to the level of having genuine moral implications (without ironic quotation marks). If there were 1 million Jews being starved and shot in Gaza, would that qualify ? Please, Ms. Brott, share with us your vision of “morality” and explain why it has no room for anyone in Gaza. 

Edward Strauss 

Oakland 

• 

REAL NEWS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I know that the general American public no longer appreciates “real” news, we are in love with Paris, Britney, and Lindsay, and so the media in turn continues to feed us that. If not Paris, it’s the soap opera-style drama of the political front, or the “war” that no one is truly comfortable with. There are a few items that I think should be highlighted in your papers: Though news reports of Sudan’s latest agreement to allow a United Nations-African Union hybrid peacekeeping force into Darfur seem like a positive development, there is considerable reason to be skeptical. 

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has failed to live up to his past commitments to the international community, including stonewalling after agreeing to this same hybrid peacekeeping force in 2006. 

Any regime that would bomb its own villages and kill as many as 400,000 of its own people does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. 

The violence is far from over. Sudan’s air force continues to bomb villages and the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia have not relented in their horrific attacks. 

Just as this “positive” news came out of Sudan last week, one of the largest humanitarian aid groups in the world announced it was permanently leaving Darfur—due to continued attacks and concern for aid workers’ safety. 

World leaders, and especially the United States, China and France—each which have unique influence over Sudan—must increase their pressure on Sudan to make sure that this latest “promise” is fulfilled. 

Kasey Ellison 

Oakland 

• 

MY ENEMY’S ENEMY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Bush network’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq crossed the border into desperation territory late last year when Rumsfeld’s successor undertook supervision of a newly minted surge tactic. Last week we found out exactly how deep our military is stuck in the terrain of desperation; it has turned to Sunni clansmen, former enemies, and given them weapons in return for a promise to use them against al Qaeda, their enemy and ours.  

Lt. General Odierno proudly declared, “Engaging with the tribal entities and others has made a huge difference.” Leave aside questions regarding the nature of “entities,” the identity of “others,” and the specifics of “a huge difference,” I see no reason for optimism.  

I taught math for over three decades and never told my students that two negatives make a positive—they do if you multiply, they don’t if you add. 

I claim no experience with foreign policy, but I think that to be our friend, the enemy of our enemy, i.e. Sunni clansmen, should bring something more positive to the enterprise. Don’t you? 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

• 

ABSURD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Andrew Ritchie’s letter is an example of the liberal mind taken to its reductio ad absurdum. 

If a drunk driver kills a loved one then we should sue General Motors or maybe even the state for maintaining highways. Extend this to every product or service under the sun. 

Lardasses can sue Kraft Foods and McDonald’s for their failure to control themselves. 

The fact is that guns are used in self-defense millions of times every year in the United States. 

The “progressive” assumption that only state officials are qualified to own weapons is a deeply totalitarian premise.  

But, Andy, keep those manic letters coming, it’s always great sport to see a statist shoot himself in the nuts (pun intended.) 

Michael P. Hardesty 

Oakland 

• 

TILDEN PARK MAYHEM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In my discussions with many friends in the last few days, there is almost universal agreement that this gun shop (Old West Gun Room) should be removed from the community. It sits right next to the El Cerrito Plaza between the new Peets and Tulip Hardwood Floors. What the hell is a gun shop doing in this respectable middle-class community? 

But where is the expression of resistance, where are the picketers demonstrating outside the shop, where is the will to resist this obscene commerce in weapons of death? Who will organize resistance to them, and drive them out of business? I know they have a Second Amendment legal right to be there, but we, the citizens, also have the right to organize against them, to petition the City of El Cerrito to deny them their license. We have the right to take a moral stand against gun violence. 

I see that in Chicago Jesse Jackson was just arrested on a trespass charge after demonstrating in front of a suburban gunshop. But gun shops are banned in the actual City of Chicago. Unless the citizens step forward and make their wishes and their views felt, there will be no change, and it will be the business of death and murder as usual. 

Of course, the nature of these killings as a masculinist act perpetrated on females should also not be ignored - an indication of deeper, more widespread issues in American society. But whereas we cannot change these deeply ingrained attitudes except in ourselves, we can change the manifestation of unacceptable aggressive commerce right on our doorsteps. 

Andrew Ritchie 

• 

OAKLAND VIOLENCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Last night (Saturday, June 23) at about 10 p.m., our neighbor was attacked by a gang of five youths, knocked from his bike, and hit in the face with a metal object. He was returning from work, and close to his house. He had noticed a rowdy group of black youths (12-14 years of age) as he headed up 59th from Dover. He thought nothing of it as they followed him up the street. Unexpectedly, without warning or words, and before he could call out or defend himself, they’d hit him in the face (he believes with a metal object like a pipe) and knocked him down. At that point, an unknown “middle-aged, heavy-set” black man interrupted the beating and chased the youths off. He also left, without the neighbor being able to thank him. The neighbors called the police, and Officer Alaura arrived on the scene a short time later. He was a calming presence and quickly checked out other close-by neighbors and the street for witnesses or culprits. He didn’t come up with anything. 

The officer suggested that the attack was probably not an interrupted mugging, but a random act of violence. Our neighbor was in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

This is a very worrying development. We’ve lived on this block for some 36 years. It’s been a relatively quiet place, despite the presence of three empty houses. But the drug dealers own the corner of 59th and Shattuck and are a near-constant presence. The house on the corner of 59th and Shattuck has been vacant for years and its driveway serves as a toilet—at best—or drug-dealing haven and whatnot at worst. I do not want to exploit my neighbor’s trauma. His face is quite swollen today. He credits the Good Samaritan with saving him from a perhaps severe beating, and grapples with the bleak “what-if?” alternative scenario to the episode. 

But as the city approves one massive North Oakland condo project after another with inadequate off-street parking, we are lectured by the Planning Commissioners (most of whom drive in from their single-family homes high in the hills) that cars are so retro and we live in the flats on “transit corridors” close to not one but two BART stations from where residents can easily walk or bike. 

Our neighbor was returning from his job in the City from the BART station on his bike when he was attacked. It was even a warm night, not that late, with windows open and people still up and about, when he was so brazenly set-upon. 

While we are encouraged by the prompt police response and the officer’s professionalism, essential urban “amenities” like safe neighborhoods do not necessarily follow in the wake of market-rate condo projects that don’t pay their fair share toward police services or improvements to the schools to point these kids, now a menace to themselves and others, in a better direction for their lives. This could be a long, hot summer. 

Bob Brokl 

Oakland 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Michael Katz’s critical letter about AC Transit’s proposed Bus Rapid Transit project states that only a few minutes will be saved riding the bus from Berkeley to San Leandro, implying that the project will duplicate BART. He misses the reason for the project. 

Very few would use the BRT over its total length. BRT is for local trips such as from Berkeley to Oakland where existing buses carry 6,000 riders a day. The BRT draft environmental impact report (DEIR) estimates the ridership will increase to around 10,000 riders. Why? 

With BRT this trip will be faster, more frequent, reliable and will conveniently serve the corridor with more stations than BART. The current buses take 40 minutes, whereas the BRT will take only 19 minutes, saving 21 minutes. Moreover, BRT will have up to 37 stations, almost five times the number of stations as BART from Berkeley to San Leandro The DEIR indicates very little change of total energy consumed by both autos and BRT. However, American Public Transit Association says Transit produces nearly 50 percent less carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide per passenger mile as private vehicles today. By 2020 AC Transit should have a new fleet that are much more fuel-efficient and with additional passenger loads per bus and better fuel efficiency, the emissions of BRT will clearly be less than half that of autos. 

Katz says that the LA Orange Line BRT has experienced frequent collisions with cars. This was true only in the beginning months of operation. After over a year of operation, the accident rate has fallen to levels similar to light rail. 

BRT passes through one of the most developed areas in the East Bay containing a great percentage of the region’s jobs, schools, churches, cultural and community faculties. BRT will be much more accessible to far more people than BART throughout this high-density corridor. Over the years traffic congestion has increased even with relatively little development. The I-80 has been the most congested freeway and it is known many drivers use local arterials like San Pablo Avenue to bypass it. The fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel will increase local traffic as well. So, we will have congestion whether we build BRT or not. BRT may not eliminate congestion, but is a necessary and desirable alternative to congestion. BRT is the best and most cost-effective alternative we have to counter gridlock, increased pollution and Global Warming by reducing CO2 emissions.. 

Roy Nakadegawa 

• 

SELF-DEFENSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I read a letter by Andrew Ritchie arguing that selling guns is anti-social and should be stopped immediately. I want to argue the opposite. The recent incident of the man killing his wife, daughters and then himself is a terrible tragedy. However, an incident of a woman being grabbed by a man who jumps out of the bushes and rapes her, as has happened countless times in Oakland and Berkeley, is also tragic, especially when she, like most Californians, is forbidden to carry a gun with her when she walks the streets at night. It infuriates me that our lawmakers forbid us to carry with us the most effective means for self-defense as we walk our streets. In tony Rockridge a couple of years ago, on Ocean View Drive, a young woman was raped by a man wielding a wooden baton of some sort as a weapon. She has to live with the psychological trauma of that incident every day for the rest of her life. If she’d been able to carry a gun, she might have been able to shoot that scumbag dead and save herself from this trauma. I think it is reprehensible that we have denied her that possibility. I think it is outrageous that our state deprives us of the right to effectively defend ourselves from grievous bodily injury.  

I demand that all Californians who are legally able to own guns be allowed to carry guns for self-defense: this is the only thing that can equalize a small, weak woman against a large, strong man. Every municipality that has prohibited guns has seen a rise, not a drop, in violent crime, for instance, Washington, D.C. “It is estimated that 20 percent of American homicides are concentrated in the four cities that have some of the most restrictive gun-control laws, New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Detroit.” (from Armed and Female, by Paxton Quigley). In municipalities where criminals have good reason to believe they might face an armed citizen, violent crime rates are lower. The state of Nevada allows its citizens to carry guns nearly everywhere: their rate of violent crime is much lower than ours. In my south Berkeley neighborhood there have been many armed robberies lately. I can guarantee that if these criminals had any expectation that those they accosted were likely to be armed, the rates of armed robbery would drastically plummet. Criminals fear armed citizens much more than they fear the police. Police will arrest them: busy courts will toss them about and very likely free them all too soon. Armed citizens will kill them. Most criminals have anti-social personality disorder and are not deterred when treated with compassion, which they view as weakness. Fear of being shot dead is a very effective deterrent to crime.  

Deborah Cloudwalker 

Oakland 

• 

KYOTOUSA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

KyotoUSA and its supporters express their thanks to the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) Board for its unanimous decision to proceed with the installation of a photovoltaic (PV) system on Washington Elementary. After suggested energy efficiency measures are implemented, the PV system will provide 100 percent of the electricity requirements for the school’s main building. 

The HELiOS Project (Helios Energy Lights Our Schools)—now some fourteen months in the making—brought together individuals and organizations from throughout the City and beyond. It has been a community inspired project involving the School District, the Washington School PTA, City of Berkeley staff, the Berkeley City Council, the Sierra Club, the university, board members of organizations such as the Ecology Center and the Chamber of Commerce, and hundreds of community members who expressed their agreement with letters of support, expertise, and financial contributions. One of the most inspiring contributions came from an eleven-year old girl who asked her parents, relatives and friends to donate to the project instead of buying her birthday presents. 

In April 2006, KyotoUSA assembled a team of local experts to evaluate the feasibility of installing a photovoltaic system on a Berkeley public school in a way that would not add any additional costs to the district. The team included financial and technical experts from two of Berkeley’s solar companies and energy experts from the city. Over time we were able to demonstrate to the district that such an approach was feasible with the financial support of Berkeley residents. Once the district expressed its backing and we had identified Washington Elementary as the likely first school, we presented the project to the Washington Elementary school community to seek their support and input. 

Washington parents pointed out that energy efficiency was an important first step in any renewable energy project. In fact, energy efficiency has been a keystone of the project since its inception. In August 2006, KyotoUSA, together with the City of Berkeley and BUSD applied for a grant from UC Berkeley to conduct energy audits at Willard Middle School and at Washington Elementary. The grant was approved and the audit at Washington Elementary was completed in mid-May 2007. The full report is now available and shows that modest energy efficiency improvements can reduce the school’s electricity needs by about 20%. KyotoUSA donors will gift $12,000 to the district to help implement those energy saving measures. 

This project also provides a number of co-benefits, not the least of which is that it is a tangible way of showing our children that we care about their future and that we are taking steps to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and combat the dire threat of climate change. 

Thank you, Berkeley, for all your support!  

Tom and Jane Kelly 

Co-Founders KyotoUSA  

• 

ENVIRONMENTAL SABBATH DAY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In our efforts to reduce greenhouse gases we often overlook the cultural dimensions. These days, we love the idea of “24/7” —that production and services run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Certainly this makes for higher production of goods and services, as well as greenhouse gases! What ever happened to the “the Lord’s Day” or the Sabbath? It was Saturday for the Jews and Sunday for the Christians. One day in every seven set aside as a Holy Day; on that day, no work. Yes, things shut down; instead, we talk with family and neighbors, and walk around the neighborhood. That once included not using machines, such as automobiles and aircraft. With a weekly “Environmental Sabbath Day” we would save upwards of 14 percent of energy use! Plus, get back the time to slow down, relax and have more humane lives. Good for the environment, good for us. 

Americ Azevedo 

• 

NET NEUTRALITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been very interested in the internet. All kinds of people have presented their issues, and I have been able to support some organizations that I care about. 

Now I hear that some large cable and telephone corporations are working together to get the FCC to agree that only people with money will be able to put information on the Internet. What we have now is called “Net Neutrality.” I can look at anything I want to on the Internet. I can e-mail organizations that interest me. I can learn from them. 

This will no longer be possible if a bill passes which will let corporations which can pay put their messages on the Internet, and everyone else will be left behind. I hope that people reading this letter will want to keep the Internet the way it is. If you want to keep the Internet, look at SavetheInternet.com. 

Julia Craig 

• 

TELEGRAPH AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In my view, the large vacant lot at Telegraph and Haste Street more or less symbolizes the decay—or should I say “decline”—of Telegraph Avenue. Once the site of The Berkeley Inn, this corner lot has stood vacant for at least a dozen of years. There’s something almost sinister and forbidding about the tall black fence with its pointed “spears” encasing the lot, which is littered with trash and beer cans. 

I find it ludicrous that this valuable piece of property, almost within stone’s throw of one of the country’s most illustrious universities, remains a disgrace and an eyesore for residents and visitors passing by. Can not the City of Berkeley or the University itself take steps to rectify this long standing blight on our community? 

Dorothy Snodgrass

Parking in the Elmwood hangs by a tenuous thread. The proposed retail complex to be housed at the old Wright’s Garage near Ashby and College will have no on-site parking, and the only requirement owner John Gordon must meet is to try to provide parking. He doesn’t even have to try very hard!  

In order to be given a building permit for his restaurant, bar, and lounge, (not a use permit as Mayor Bates has stated), Mr. Gordon only has to satisfy the following vacuous condition imposed by ZAB: “The property owner shall cooperate to the extent practical with the Elmwood Merchants Association and City of Berkeley Transportation Planning Department, on opportunities and strategies to improve parking supply in the district.” These strategies include employing valet parking in the Elmwood public lot throughout the day and at the merchant lot at night, arranging for paid parking at the Huntmont Garage near Alta Bates on evenings and weekends, acquiring the property to the building’s north, extending Residential Permit Parking hours in zones B and D to 9 p.m. and extending the hours of operation of parking meters on College Avenue. Before receiving his building permit, Mr. Gordon only has to demonstrate to ZAB that he has gained access to additional parking using these or other options, or failing that, he may present a study showing that parking needs generated by the restaurant could be “accommodated within the neighborhood.”  

It should be noted that Mr. Gordon is not required to provide adequate parking for his 200-seat restaurant, only “additional parking,” and he may choose to provide a parking study, in lieu of providing any parking at all. This study need not be of any minimal professional quality, nor is it required to satisfy any specific standards. A poorly conducted study with the right conclusions would suffice. Furthermore, ZAB would not address any of the other heartfelt concerns raised by neighbors and merchants in the appeal process, because those concerns would be permanently dismissed when the City Council finishes with Wright’s Garage. 

Only the City Council can address these issues and in doing so, deny the use permit already granted to Mr. Gordon by ZAB; that opportunity will vanish if the Council fails to act in either its June 26 or July 10 meeting. In the past few weeks, the council has received well over 100 letters in opposition to this project, in addition to hearing multiple testimonies about potential impacts at least as important as parking. How could Mayor Bates, Councilmember Moore, and Councilmember Olds have failed to acknowledge the most important issues raised by neighbors and merchants? These issues include: 

• Increased traffic and traffic congestion, danger to pedestrians and neighbors, drunk driving, and additional exhaust pollution, as a result of the patrons of the restaurant, lounge, exercise studio, and other unspecified businesses. 

• Public drunkenness and its associated behavior, including noise, vandalism, crimes against women, and drunk driving from allowing a late-night bar and lounge to be established in a family neighborhood. 

• The harm to small businesses, including the Elmwood Theater, as a restaurant and bar the size of Spenger’s usurps customer parking and drives up its costs. 

• The irregularities of granting a developer a use permit for unspecified businesses, whose impact on the neighborhood and local businesses cannot be evaluated in any realistic way. 

It is difficult to understand how Mayor Bates with his ambitions for re-election and Councilmember Moore with his ambitions to run for the Assembly could be so casually dismissive of the well-being of the many people who would be impacted by inebriated lounge patrons and the traffic generated by the customers and employees (probably well over 300 in all), who could occupy this complex at a single time. Indeed, Mayor Bates expressed far more interest in trying to remove this item from future Council agendas than addressing the issues neighbors and merchants raised. It is incomprehensible that a project that violates multiple provisions of the Elmwood Zoning Ordinance could be so strongly embraced by public officials who have sworn to uphold the law. 

On Tuesday, June 26, the seven members of the City Council, who have not recused themselves from voting on this agenda item, will again attempt to find five members who can agree on how to proceed. Because so little is known about the businesses that might operate in this complex and so many negative impacts have been left unmitigated by ZAB, the only logical and legal choice is to remand this project back to ZAB. It should never have been approved in the first place. 

Judith Epstein writes on behalf of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association.

Our community, in particular, South Berkeley, is experiencing a gnawing anxiety about the apparently unstoppable will of Verizon/Nextel to install throughout South Berkeley a cell phone antenna net. This is an expression used in the cell phone industry and now also part of the accepted and incorporated lingo of our city planning department staff.  

Most recently these companies’ corporate reps, attorneys and sub-contractors have focused their energies on forcing upon the city yet another multiple antenna site in our neighborhood As many readers now know full well, South Berkeley has 14 cell phone antenna locations, North Berkeley only has two, and the Berkeley hills currently have none. Thus, for obvious reasons, South Berkeley gets Verizon/Nextel’s top ratings for excellent cell phone service and coverage. The result is a very inequitable distribution of antenna sites in the city.  

Verizon/Nextel’s latest potential future big money-maker (from anticipated, ever-increasing cell phone usage, video/photo transmittal and internet accessing “needs”) is the UC Storage Building at Shattuck Avenue and Ward Streets. Here Verizon/Nextel intend to install multiple antennas high up on the north and east-facing walls. These antennas, once installed, open the door for future multiple antennas from multiple cell phone companies at the same site. Before you know it, we might be the fortunate recipients of a virtual cell phone antenna heaven at 2721 Shattuck Ave., right in our own backyard.  

To protect public safety on the north side, Verizon/Nextel foresees the construction of a tall wall to separate their proposed antenna installation from a proposed five-story condominium development due north of UC Storage. Verizon/Nextel engineers predict that such a wall would reduce, ten-fold, the amount of RF radiation exposure to neighbors near the north side of the building. However these companies have no plans to reduce the amount of RF radiation exposure to the residents living near the east wall, nor any ideas for protecting residents to the northeast of UC Storage.  

RF radiation exposure for the many residences who share the block with UC Storage can now quite accurately be scientifically calculated, in advance of the proposed installation. This task can be accomplished by using know calculation formulas or by measuring the current amount of radiation coming from already installed antennas throughout south Berkeley. Engineers conduct these measurements all the time.  

Many of us believe that we, close neighbors, as potential “guinea pigs,” deserve to review this data before the city agrees to allow the antennas to be installed. We who live close to the intended antennas would, in fact, feel greatly relieved to know that our radiation exposure would be minimal, and nothing to worry about.  

So far, Verizon/Nextel installation application has been stymied through the determined effort of the Berkeley Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (BNAFU). In fact, our City Council was clear at its meetings on both May 8 and May 22, that it wished to schedule a September public hearing on the matter of the Verizon/Nextel application.  

While the city appears to want to make a well-considered decision on the matter by hearing from all sides and experts on this issue, Verizon/Nextel has threatened the Berkeley City Council that it is prepared to slap a very expensive lawsuit on the city if the city causes any further delay in processing the Verizon/Nextel application. These companies, as a standard intimidation tactic, routinely and effectively threaten to sue both large and small cities all across the country.  

Verizon, alone, claims to have 60 million customers. The income generated by this customer base pays for an army of attorneys on call to do battle for Verizon and its legal “rights” all over the world. The last thing Verizon/Nextel will allow is for the City of Berkeley to prevail in this matter. After all, as many of us know, the telecommunications industry paid Congress for the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act, which, among many other odious restrictions, made it illegal for any municipalities to use concerns about RF radiation as a reason for denying use permit applications.  

On both May 8 and 22, the City withstood the challenge from Verizon/Nextel and ended up sending the matter back to the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB). But now there is pressure being applied to ZAB members to reverse their 6-3 vote to deny the Verizon/Nextel application.  

Please consider attending the ZAB meeting this Thursday evening at Old City Hall, 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Find out if the ZAB will have the courage to uphold BNAFU’s position that this installation intrudes upon the neighborhood, is not needed, and restrains the rights of free speech of our council members. For more information, e-mail BNAFU at: JLLIB2@aol.com. 

Michael Barglow is a South Berkeley resident. 

The supporters of closed borders and deportations are not a fringe minority. Millions—including a majority of “liberal” elected officials like our California senators—favor the policy of walling off the United States at the Southern border. I visited the border last month. I talked with a few of the people deported from the Sonora desert of Arizona. I saw the bottoms of their feet torn to shreds after walking day and night in the desert sun and sand, and heard of beatings and humiliation at the hands of the private militarized Wackenhut company under contract with Homeland Security. Eight people were known to have died in the desert during four days I was there. One of the men we talked with was a San Francisco chef who had had to return home to the Yucatan for family affairs. Another was a peasant woman from Morelos the soles of whose feet I had to cut off because they were just dead separated skin. She cannot survive in Mexico because U.S. imports have financially ruined Mexico’s peasant agricultural base. Is this the kind of investment that letter writer Robert Gable believes will help get the Mexican economy back on its feet—the dumping of subsidized surplus US corn and other commodities on the Mexican market under NAFTA?  

Too many in our country either support—or are indifferent to—the immigration raids, deportations and the proposed legislation that, even with amnesty for some group of workers, would create a new control apparatus (an even larger bureaucracy) for potentially segregating and monitoring a huge segment of the U.S. population. Labeling people “illegal” or “legal” and subjecting them to daily controls because they cross a border into land that the United States seized from Mexico legitimizes discrimination—allows them to be spat out as some “alien” scourge. Support for such policy is a human stain. Despite our technological prowess and scientific progress, we seem incapable of overcoming a provincial narrow-mindedness that is not rational.  

There is little historical doubt that modern nations were formed by the needs of the capitalist market. Borders were drawn by force and to protect various spheres of economic influence for the masters of capital, not for human rights. This is why we see the failure of nation states and world wars in periods of great capitalist crisis. The value of nation states to capital was magnified by the advent of capitalist democracy wherein the general population “learned” that “what is good for General Motors, is good for America.” Thus, as citizens of a powerful “representative democracy” we today accept that we have no public right to health care, housing, jobs or higher education. We accept government that overthrows governments and initiates wars at will, sends jobs overseas and ignores our human needs; we act as if it were “our” government, even though it overtly ignores the plight of its citizens as it did after the Katrina catastrophe or the 9/11 clean-up, when the EPA fraudulently said that that environment posed no danger, knowing otherwise. Sometimes we say “but Democrats are different,” to excuse our passivity.  

The public that supports militarized borders—or opposes amnesty or accepts raids that break up families and leave children homeless and parentless—believes it has a greater stake in “capitalism’s America” than in the fate of humanity or our nation. These are people who feel protected by a government that tortures simply because they may not yet know anyone who has been tortured or violated by that government. We are content to look the other ways on immigration raids so that the mirage of our own security can remain intact. The saddest fact is that those who benefit from dividing us against our brothers and sisters also work to convince those they have consistently oppressed, such as the African American community, that it is the Latinos and other “aliens” come to take their jobs who are responsible for their continuing plight. Elites today even suggest that slavery and racial discrimination (or the Vietnam war for that matter) were oddities and errors of the past, not plans effecting great benefit to their progenitors. They market the absurd idea of one nation, indivisible—currently excepting the undocumented, “illegals who violate the law, take your jobs, overpopulate your cities, and eat up your tax dollars.” These are simply ignorant opinions but they are sold on the free market as fact at a very cheap price, with a promise of homeland security, as if unemployment and lowering wages are not a documented recurring capitalist scourge worldwide.  

Promoting the “Homeland” was a Nazi idea. Nazis elevated the idea of national chauvinism (the ideological basis for war which already existed), to new propaganda heights. Sinclair Lewis wrote that fascism would come to the United States not in the form of storm troopers, but wrapped in the flag and carrying the bible. Lewis was somewhat prescient, yet today fascism arrives heralded first by law—Patriot Act, the appointment of anti-democratic ideologues to the Supreme Court, the massive spying and removal of habeas corpus, the legalized merging of the functions of foreign intelligence with assassination, torture, detention and the disruption of domestic dissent, the disregard of Constitutional law and precedents, corporate money and power behind almost every major government move, and overt self-censorship by media. Nevertheless, pressure builds to reverse these losses and none of these attacks have been sufficient to move the public to support domestic terror in the way the Ku Klux Klan (a paramilitary group) did after reconstruction. The attack on the “other,” particularly those who cross the border, advances that end. This hysteria forms the ideological basis for a new fascist movement, even as that movement is rejected by good liberals, like Robert Gable, who just oppose “illegals.” But the singling out assures that many Americans will not resist the targeting of those who are powerless and poor. And our passivity will be our downfall. We live under a government whose two parties—controlled by big money—consistently operate in behalf of finance capital, not public interest. Neither calling ourselves free and democratic nor blaming the undocumented can change that. At this point immigration reform is a threat to our liberty because its main function is as an ideological tool to divide people and gain support for domestic militarization of the United States. We ought resist with all our energies.  

Marc Sapir is executive director of Retro Poll. 

An attentive and knowledgeable reader has pointed out that in my June 15 column on Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums (“Mayor Dellums Isn’t What’s Wrong With Oakland”), I incorrectly reported that at the new mayor’s direction, the city’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) has “put a moratorium on conversion of Oakland's dwindling industrial-zoned parcels to mixed-use.” Though close, that’s not what actually happened. 

In the column I used “moratorium” in the popular way, meaning to put a temporary halt to a certain activity. That’s what CEDA did, pulling its “Update To The Industrial Land Use Policy” report from consideration by the Planning Commission’s Zoning Update Committee on May 16, with plans to rethink it, possibly rewrite it, and resubmit it to the commission sometime in September. In effect, that temporarily halts the rezoning of currently-zoned industrial land to permit mixed use developments, a rezoning that some observers—including my attentive reader—feels would lead to the loss of Oakland’s valuable industrial land, land which we will need in the future on which to attract businesses that can provide needed jobs for Oakland residents. 

But “moratorium” has a specific legal meaning in the context of city planning that is different from the popular meaning, with specific actions and consequences such as temporarily halting consideration of developments altogether, and so I was in error in using the term, and I apologize. Sometimes, in our haste to get out information, we get out the wrong information, a hazard of the journalistic profession. 

That seems to be the case with a recent Wall Street Journal article on the Oakland Unified School District, getting out the wrong information, and I hope the Journal is as quick to recognize its errors, and correct them. 

The June 22 “Taste” article “Another School Dropout” by WSJ deputy “Taste” editor Naomi Schaeffer Riley (first called to our attention by Alex Gronké’s blog on the NovoMetro online Oakland newspaper—thanks, Alex), reports on the decision by OUSD Budget Director Barak Ben-Gal to leave the district to take a job as Yahoo.com’s Director of Corporate Finance. The article is what you would expect from the Journal, an advocacy for corporate control of public institutions. That’s the Journal’s position, bless their hearts, and they have the right to hold it. But as the saying goes, they ought not to alter the facts in order to make their point. 

“When Mr. Ben-Gal started his (Eli Broad Foundation) residency (at OUSD in 2004),” Ms. Riley writes, “the Oakland Unified School District was bankrupt. It had been placed under state control, and [Mr. Ben-Gal’s] first role was as the special assistant to the state administrator. In the subsequent two years he was the executive officer of financial services and then finally the budget director for the whole district. Today, thanks in some part to his efforts, the district is out of bankruptcy…” 

OUSD is out of bankruptcy? That seems odd, because we never knew it was in. 

Bankruptcy, in lay terms, is a situation in which an entity—person, company, and so forth—has gone so far into debt that it has become impossible to pay off their debtors with their available income and assets, and must file a petition with a “bankruptcy court” to declare himself, herself, or itself “bankrupt.” The result of this situation is that sometimes the bankruptcy court allows the entity to legally reorganize, paying off only a percentage of each of its debts with its available funds, and start over fresh. In some instances, the situation is so bad that the entity (if it is a company or other type of “thing”) has to be completely dissolved and its assets divided up between those it owes. 

That was never even remotely the case with the Oakland Unified School District. To paraphrase the Cowardly Lion in the movie The Wizard Of Oz, not never, not nohow. 

In the spring of 2003, the district discovered that it was not able to meet its final school year payroll and formally requested a loan from the State of California to pay its bills (some of the details of the why’s and how’s of the series of circumstances that led to the state loan have been recounted here and elsewhere; some have yet to be publicly revealed). In any event, a $1 million state line of credit for OUSD was established, and the state takeover resulted. The final spring, 2003 payroll was met in full, as were all of the other debts and obligations of the district since, including payments on the state loan itself. 

So if the actual definition of words have any weight here and in the Wall Street Journal, the Oakland Unified School District was never “bankrupt.” OUSD did not have enough money to pay its bills, so it got a loan from the state to do so. Getting a loan to meet your bills, in the corporate world, is commonly called “refinancing.” It is not called “bankruptcy.” 

But perhaps Ms. Riley was simply loose with the use of a popular word, as I was in the above-stated CEDA “moratorium” case, and what she really meant was that OUSD found itself not “bankrupt” but “without enough money to make a debt payment” in the spring of 2003, or, to describe it in the way most of us would, “seriously in debt.” If that is true, however, it leads to a problem in Ms. Riley’s initial assertion about the success of Mr. Ben-Gal’s tenure. If you substitute “seriously in debt” for “bankrupt” in the above-quoted passage, you come up with the following formation: “When Mr. Ben-Gal started his residency, the Oakland Unified School District was [seriously in debt]. … Today, thanks in some part to his efforts, the district is [no longer seriously in debt?] [less in debt?] [out of debt?]…” The fact is, none one of these suggested three final clauses are correct. At the time of the state takeover, the OUSD state administrator drew down $65 million of the $1 million state line of credit in order to meet the spring, 2003 payroll and subsequent operating expenses. Three years later, as his last official act leaving the district last year, OUSD State Administrator Randy Ward drew down the remaining $35 million of that credit line. As a consequence, OUSD is deeper in debt (my emphasis) now than the district was at the time of the state takeover and during the time of Mr. Ben-Gal’s tenure as OUSD budget director. 

Not that I’m blaming Mr. Ben-Gal for those problems. I simply don’t think he ought get credit for fixing something which is broker (if that’s a proper word) than when he started. 

But there are more problems with the factuality (if that’s a proper word, as well) of the Wall Street Journal article. 

Mr. Ben-Gal talks of the difficulties of getting competent help in the public sector (which he contrasts with the competence we are so used to seeing in the corporate sector—ha!), and then Ms. Riley continues “Even if you can assemble a team of competent people (and somehow hold on to them without offering merit raises), Mr. Ben-Gal notes that you are still constrained [in a public school district] in ways that would be unimaginable in the private sector. For instance, he [Mr. Ben-Gal] compares the operations of his local school board with the board of a corporation. ‘Corporate boards look at big-picture governance. They ask, “What are the major milestones our CEO should be achieving?” Board conversations are held behind closed doors because the board members are supposed to act as trusted advisers.’ By contrast, the Oakland board, like most school committees, has all of its meetings televised. Every contract, no matter how minuscule, must be put to a vote. And every financial decision has to be put on hold while waiting for a monthly board meeting. As for its members acting as trusted advisers, Mr. Ben-Gal assures me that thanks to the public nature of its meetings, ‘the school board typically knows less than what the staff knows.’” 

One wonders what school district, let alone what corporate board, Mr. Ben-Gal is talking about. 

During the two years that Mr. Ben-Gal worked at OUSD, the school board functioned as an advisory body only, powerless, with no ability to decide anything. No contracts were put to a vote, if, by vote, we mean the process by which the decision was made. If financial decisions were put off, for a month or for any other period of time, it was at the discretion of the state administrator who was free, under the terms of the state takeover, to make those decisions at any time, without waiting for a school board meeting or a school board opinion. 

But, of course, Mr. Ben-Gal’s description of school districts would not appear to apply, even where the school board retains power. Though there are glitches, and the system is far from perfect, the role of the school board in an independent school district is to set policy, and the role of the superintendent—or chancellor, in the case of a college district such as Peralta—is to implement that policy on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes school and trustee boards infringe on the territory of their administrators, and sometimes those administrators take on policy-setting roles that should properly be in the hands of the board. But that’s one of the dynamics and give-and-take of democracy, as these public bodies go about the public business, and because these operations are supposed to take place in full view of the public, the public often intervenes, and these things get themselves corrected. 

And that, in the end, seems to be Mr. Ben-Gal’s and Ms. Riley’s real problem here, not with anything specific Oakland Unified. It is not OUSD, but the public operation of the public schools, about which they appear to be complaining. If only the public schools were run in the corporate way—in fact, if only the corporations would be allowed to take them over—things would be done logically, efficiently, smoothly, etc., etc., and etc. That is the implication of the “Another School Dropout” story. 

I don’t mind Mr. Ben-Gal and Ms. Riley and the Wall Street Journal saying that. It is, after all, their right, in a democracy, to hold and advocate their own opinions. I learned that particular civics lesson at Highland Elementary, and then at Havenscourt Junior High, and then at Castlemont High School, during the years I attended the Oakland public schools. It wasn’t such a bad education, all things considered, and since I’ve never been to corporate school, I’m not in a position to judge whether corporate education might have been better. In this regard, perhaps Mr. Ben-Gal and Ms. Riley know more than I. If they do, I wish they’d use some actual facts to show me. 

The history of Bay Area industry parallels that of immigration. In the East Bay, the economy was largely built by first- and second-generation immigrants who had settled in the West, bringing with them specialized skills from points east, often Europe. 

Such was the case in the founding of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, which operated on Third and Fourth Streets between Camelia and Gilman from 1905 until 1985. 

On May 3, 1905, the Oakland Tribune announced a new business in West Berkeley that “will employ at the start some twenty-five or thirty men.” Manasse-Block, which had operated a large tannery in East Oakland since 1900, purchased the West Berkeley tannery previously owned by Frank E. Deach, who resided at 1618 Fifth St. 

Deach (possibly a corruption of Deitsch), born in California to German immigrants and married to a Mexican woman, first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1900, when he was listed in the U.S. census as a tannery proprietor. His name wasn’t included in the property assessment rolls until 1903, at which time his ownership comprised Lots 36-39 in Block 28 of the Wentworth Tract. Immediately to his south, on Lots 27-34, the French immigrant Prudent Remond had been engaged in tanning and manufacturing of oak-tanned harness and skirting leather since at least 1894. 

Even earlier than Remond, the southwestern end of the block had been the site of another tannery, owned by the Nova Scotian immigrant Robert Stewart since 1892. The block being large, for a few years the three establishments overlapped, although by 1900 Stewart had switched from tanning to manufacturing coconut fibre. 

Remond, who came to the U.S. in 1871 with his French-Swiss wife and lived at 721 Camelia Street, constructed in 1898 a three-story building that the Berkeley Gazette promised would be “one of the largest currying establishments on the Coast. In this place leather will be received from the tanneries and prepared for the making of shoes, harness, etc.” 

Remond may have overextended himself, or perhaps he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either way, his tannery was taken over by the California Ink Company around the time that Deach’s plant became the Manasse-Block tannery. For several years afterwards, the two worked as tanners, possibly for Manasse-Block. By 1909, Remond had become a watchman for Cal Ink, while Deach, now living at 1732 San Pablo Avenue, was working as a dyer for William Reuter & Sons, located at 7th and Jones Streets. 

The businesses that followed Stewart, Remond, and Deach on Block 28 were far more successful. Both Manasse-Block and Cal Ink thrived for the better part of a century, and both were owned by German immigrants or their sons. The proprietor of Cal Ink was Ernest L. Hueter of San Francisco, German-born and owner of the Bass-Hueter Paint Company and the Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works. 

Both founders of the Manasse-Block Tanning Co. came from the Bay Area’s tight-knit German-Jewish community. The company’s first president, August Manasse (1875–1942) was born in Napa, where his father, Emanuel, originally from Frankfurt by way of San Francisco, was in charge of manufacturing at the B.F. Sawyer tannery, in operation from 1869 until 1990. Emanuel originated the Napa Patent Leather process and became a co-owner of the business, which his descendants continued to run. The Manasse Mansion in Napa, built in 1886 by architect-contractor William H. Corlett, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and operated as a tony bed & breakfast inn. 

August worked at the Sawyer tannery, but having three older brothers may have thwarted his ambitions. At the age of 25 he came to Oakland and entered into partnership with Roy Block (1879–1955), who was only 21 when he became secretary of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company. 

The Blocks had no tanning background, but they knew something about leather. Roy’s father, Harry Block, was born in Bohemia and emigrated in 1866 as a 17-year old. In the 1870s, he ran a jewelry store in Virginia City, Nevada, where Roy was born. After opening a jewelry store in San Francisco, Harry formed the H. & L. Block Co. with his younger brother Leopold. The company manufactured gloves. In 1900, before he entered the tanning business, Roy was a glove drummer, as traveling salesmen were called. 

Initially, Manasse and Block’s intention was to run the Berkeley facility as a branch of its main Oakland tannery. “The local branch will be enlarged and improved as the business increases, and promises within a few years to become one of Berkeley’s leading enterprises,” informed the Oakland Tribune in May 1905, concluding, “It is understood the tanning company will expend some $10,000 or $15,000 on improving its West Berkeley establishment.” 

The company did, in fact, leave Oakland, supposedly because the railroad was constrocted through its site at East 12th St. and 19th Avenue. In 1906, Manasse-Block was joined on Third St. by H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works, which had lost its San Francisco facilities in the earthquake and fire. That catastrophe fresh in the principals’ minds, precautions were taken. On July 28 of that year, the Tribune reported, “In the belief that it will be impossible for the city to furnish them better fire protection at the present time, three of the largest factories in the West End, the California Ink Company, the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, and the Pacific Glove Works, located between Camelia and Gilman and Third and Fourth streets, combined in installing a pumping plant and an efficient fire brigade of their own. The directors believe that the cost of the undertaking will eventually be paid by a reduction in the insurance rates. […] The brigade will be at the service of the West Berkeleyans.” 

In February 1906, Manasse-Block made news for an altogether different reason. That month, two young men who declined to give their names but who said they were medical students called on August Manasse and asked him to prepare some human skin for commercial purposes. “With them,” reported the Tribune, “they had two pieces of cuticle, one about a foot square and the other a trifle smaller, which they admitted they had stripped from a body in a dissecting room. They said they intended making slippers of the skin.” 

“It is alleged,” continued the article, “that articles made from the skin of men and women have been carried from California to all portions of the Union. The skin is expensive, a piece six inches square being valued at $20. When tanned the skin of a man is worth in the neighborhood of $500. The skin is soft and pliable, resembling in many respects chamois. Of it belts, purses, slippers and many other small articles are manufactured.” 

Manasse declined the offer, and Town Marshal August Vollmer announced that he would take steps to put an end to the gruesome business. 

Newspaper notices published during the 1910s give an idea of the extent of Manasse-Block’s business. At different times in 1917 and ’18, the company shipped leather to Houston, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Portland, OR. “The white tanned leather put out by this company enjoys the distinction of being in a class by itself,” touted one of the notices. 

By that time, August Manasse had exited the scene. Around 1914, Roy Block took over as president, and Manasse became a hide buyer. The company’s new secretary was Solomon Seeligsohn, another offspring of a San Francisco German-Jewish family. His older brother, Abraham (Abe) Seeligsohn, was editor of the Jewish Progress. Solomon, who may have died prematurely, was followed as Manasse-Block’s secretary by his younger brother Selig. 

Even after breaking up, Manasse and Block continued to live in proximity to each other. For many years, August Manasse and his wife Myra lived at 2837 Regent Street. Refugees from the San Francisco earthquake, Roy Block and his spouse Edna built a new house at 2920 Hillegass Ave. It is a handsome Arts & Crafts shingled structure with a rustically jagged clinker-brick chimney, sturdy porch posts, and zigzag window muntins. The house was designed by Alfred Dodge Coplin, whose distinctive residential creations from the same period may be seen at 2811 Benvenue Ave. and 2630 Piedmont Ave. 

In the mid-1920s, the Blocks moved to a larger house at 44 Montrose Road, in Thousand Oaks. Their old house changed hands many times and eventually became a rental property. By the early 1960s, a modern two-story, four-unit apartment building had been constructed in the back yard. Less than ten years ago, the house was empty and boarded up. Now, although still a rental, it is handsomely restored. 

The Block family continued to own the tannery for the rest of its productive life. The plant expanded steadily until 1956, its principal product being boot and shoe leather. As synthetics replaced leather and as shoe production moved overseas, the tanning business declined. After the tannery closed, the facilities were sold to the Athena Development Corporation, which created the Tannery project, preserving, rehabilitating, and reusing the abandoned 81,180 sq. ft. complex. Completed in 1990, the complex accommodates offices, retail, and live-work units. 

The old Cal Ink plant next door is now abandoned and awaiting its fate on the auction block. Can it be as creatively rehabilitated as the Manasse-Block tannery? 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Part of the Manasse-Block Tannery complex, 1307 Third St. originally housed H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works. 

I see the inimitable Annie’s Annuals is having a sale. Some of the stuff the two Anni(e)s are offering are rarities in the plant trade, in the area, maybe anywhere. Once again I’ll have to wrestle with my conscience.  

Partly it’s about budgeting. As you might have heard, income possibilities for freelance writers are shrinking rapidly around here while prices the prices of gas and pretty much everything else are rising. Annie’s plants are certainly not overpriced but they aren’t cheap, and there’s always one more—well, two more, and shouldn’t I get some of those over there too?—temptation there that I’d counted on.  

I could take cash and my driver’s license and nothing else, I guess. I could wear a hairshirt and cilice too, but somehow I’m just not that kind of a girl.  

Partly it’s about space. Our garden is crowded, mostly shady, badly drained in spite of various stratagems against flat alluvial clay. How badly drained? Every winter a mysterious hole opens in the mud of the driveway. This hole swallows whatever we throw into it: chips, mats, gravel, pecks of rocks ranging up to breadloaf size.  

The hole, from the moment it appears, fills with water. That water and the mud for a few square yards around it stink of stagnation. It has risen from some unwholesome quarter of the bowels of Earth and it’s not going anywhere till Spring.  

So I’m gambling with the life of every poor plant I bring home. I end up adopting a lot of orphans, because, well, I’m cheap and they have nowhere better to go, and rarities rarely get orphaned. This contributes to a certain vernacular, even outsider-art atmosphere here at The Belfry.  

I’ve been a member of Native Seeds/SEARCH for years; they made a believer out of me when they brought some of their marvelous chili powder varieties to the Bioneers conference. They were the best thing there that year. 

But I buy only groceries and artifacts from them because the species and cultivars they preserve are desert-based, and I’m sure I’d be committing murder by planting them here. Their seeds are rare pretty much by definition, and if I’m going to perform vegetable sacrifices I’d prefer at least to leave a lot of survivors somewhere.  

One matter that does not rasp on my conscience when I succumb to Annie’s charms is that of provenance. That’s something you have to think about with rare plants and even some common ones, particularly bulbs.  

So obscenely disparate are global wages that some bulb distributors still find it cheaper to pay some poor Third World gatherer for bulbs dug from the wild than to grow their own plants and keep seeds from them to grow out for bulbs, or even propagate by bulblets or cuttings.  

There’s an ethical side to pretty much anything—maybe not crossword puzzles, but anything else—and gardeners who prize interesting plants do well to pay attention to it. 

More about that next week. 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet. 

Annie’s Annuals and Perennials 

740 Market Avenue, Richmond 

(510) 215-1671 

Directions at www.anniesannuals.com or call (don’t trust Mapquest or Google on this one.) 

Sale June 23 through July 8 at retail  

nursery ONLY. 

Native Seeds/SEARCH 

Retail store: 526 N. 4th Ave. 

Tucson, AZ 85705 

(520) 622-5561 

www.nativeseeds.org

I was with a very charming couple today. He was French and she was American. They were very different and both very smart and we had a great time looking at an incredible place that needed … like … nothing. Well, not much. 

As usual I reeled out scenarios of earthquake and assorted disasters and related how this building might fare in each case. At one point, it occurred to me how absurd I am and I said “Just imagine what my dreams must be like.” Luckily … they laughed. It’s true, though. 

I do spend an inordinate amount of time running worse case scenarios of how various things might go wrong, in the pursuit of the best advice for my clients. But truly, I do not live in fear. It’s just interesting and a wonderful challenge. I’m a very lucky person to be doing what I do. 

Among the red flag danger signs I try to point out, I’m fairly certain that the most frequent and certainly the most hidden are those involving fire. The building code is busily at work with these as well. Fire is really our most serious threat when it comes to the places in which we live and it occupies a huge amount of what we’re addressing in the building codes and other building standards. It’s probably the central issue in the design of nearly every major component of our houses as well it should be. It’s the one thing we just don’t ever want to face. 

So I’d like to offer a little tour around the typical house and touch on just a few of the things it would be best to focus on to minimize this threat. 

While there are many things one can do to diminish the likelihood of a fire starting, I would suggest that we refocus of our attention (at least at first) and take a look at how we can be prepared to cope with fire once it occurs. The most important thing is to have many ways to escape from the house and of course, lots of smoke detectors to wake us or alert us to the need to escape. 

If in doubt, add more smoke detectors. Put them on ceilings and not on walls. If they’re old, replace them, and change the batteries every year when you change the clocks (you know- “Spring forward, Fall back”). While you’re buying the batteries, pick up a fire extinguisher and hang it by the kitchen entry. 

OK. Now you’re awake and the smoke alarm is going off. What next? You want to be able to get out of the house by any door or window in the house. So be sure that no exit is impeded in any way. Window bars are very dangerous in this regard and need to be owned with great awareness of their ability to cause death. Be sure you think they’re worth it. Operable window bars are better, but they prevent firefighters from entering the building (at least quickly and easily.) 

They can get through them if there’s time but in a fire, time is what we most lack). If you have operable window bars keep the mechanism clear of furnishings and test them regularly. Remember that when fires get going, people panic and forget how to do basic things. Also, smoke prevents vision and quickly disables occupants. 

Even a pane of glass in a paint-stuck window can be a tremendous impediment to escape. With panic and smoke, the simple act of breaking a window may be too much to ask. Make it easy. Get the windows unstuck. All of them. You don’t know where you’ll be when a fire breaks out. 

I can’t emphasize this last part about smoke and panic quite enough. Emergency situations can make the obvious action unimaginable and smoke makes everything very hard to manage. In a matter of seconds we can lose our ability to do all the things that we imagined we might in our heroic dream of action. It’s only human. It’s preparation that can make us more able to cope when the time comes. 

Modern codes say a lot about window size and height. I’ll give you some of the stats. A window should open to the following minimum size. 20” wide, 24” high and a total openable area of at least 5 square feet. That means that you’re really looking at something like 2’ wide and 30” high, but there’s room for variation. Many of the windows I see in older houses are smaller than this.  

You may not need code-approved size, but open the window and see if you can imagine climbing out. Can your family all do the same? Can the kids open the windows? By the way, make sure they know to get out of the house without looking for the adults. Agree on a meeting place like the front lawn so you know that everyone is safe. But the job is to get straight out without delay. 

Finishing the code thing with windows, the windowsill should be no more than 44” above the floor. This is to be sure that the firefighter can climb into the room without fear that they will fall through the collapsed floor. They want to touch the floor before committing. 

Another thing about windows is to be sure that no locking mechanism more complex than your basic twist lock is being used. If you have keyed locks on windows, please consider removing them. They could be deadly. 

If you have a second or third story without an extra outside set of stairs, consider rope or chain ladders for each bedroom (especially for the kiddies) so you don’t have to stand staring at those things at Orchard’s after something really, really bad has happened. They’re not that expensive. 

Make sure that no door requires a key in order to leave the dwelling. If you have a “double cylinder” lock, replace it with a single-cylinder lock that has a thumb turn on the inside. If burglars find this easier to steal your stuff, let ‘em have the TV and save your family from a premature terrestrial evacuation. 

It may sound severe but it’s really smart to plan for this stuff. Do a drill, even just once. You may discover something huge in the process. I recently had a client who was terribly concerned about her animals and wanted to be sure that there were escape exits for them to the exclusion of any interest in herself. Now, I’m as big an animal lover as any but, please, save yourself first.  

If you smoke, remember that you are very likely to cause the fire, so think about limiting your smoking to one place in the house and not in the bedroom. Falling asleep smoking has killed many a smoker as well as many non-smokers. 

If you manage to heat without using electric space heaters, you’ll further decrease your chances of a fire. Also, never use an extension cord with a space heater. These cause overheating in the wiring and spark blazes as we sleep. If you can heat the room prior to bed-time, you’ll be better off. 

We can’t cover all the things that might set your house ablaze but you can take the time to look at the escapes and make sure that you’ll be able to get outside in plenty of time to watch the house burn down. 

I heard a guy on the radio this morning as I was pulling on my argyles talking about how he just lost his house in a fire. He said, “Well, at least the family is safe and that’s the important thing.” Hail brother. Ain’t it the truth. Before I close today, I’d like to share one last thought. 

A few years ago I was speaking with John, a Berkeley firefighter during the inspection of his new home in Oakland and so, took advantage of the chance to ask a few questions about what firefighters do. I can’t remember exactly what I was asking, but it had something-or-other to do with getting inside to pull people out of fires. 

He stopped me, his face somewhat screwed-up and said “Oh … we don’t do that much anymore. Ever since people started using smoke detectors regularly, we’re just putting out fires. The people are already outside.” 

If the message isn’t clear, let me put it just a little more bluntly. Go buy the smoke detectors today. Put batteries in ‘em and put em up on the ceiling of every bedroom and out in the hall on each floor. Don’t wait. Don’t get gelato. Don’t order Netflix. Just get ‘em. That’s how I say “I love you.” 

Just outside the City Council chamber in the Maudelle Shirek Building (formerly Old City Hall) stands a large table. When the council is meeting, that’s where you can find copies of its agenda. Last Tuesday evening, you could find something else there as well: copies of a two-sided sheet entitled “City of Berkeley/Welcome to Your Council Meeting.” 

Dated June 6 and signed by the city attorney and the city clerk, “Welcome” details the council’s latest experiment in procedures for public comment other than at a public hearing. Some of its features are far more welcoming than others. But as the June 19 council meeting all too amply demonstrated, no procedure, however hospitable, can compensate for the offensiveness of a peremptory chair.  

A little background: The era of procedural experimentation began last year after the library watchdog group, Berkelyans Organizing for Library Defense (SuperBOLD), threatened to sue the city for violating California’s sunshine ordinance, the Brown Act. Specifically, SuperBOLD objected to the city’s long-time practice of limiting public comment to three minutes apiece for 10 people whose names had been drawn out of a hopper at the start of each council meeting. That, said the group, conflicted with the Brown Act’s guarantees for public testimony. 

In response, the council started trying out different formats for oral communications. Now members of the public can address items on the consent calendar (items that are scheduled to be approved without discussion, unless they are “pulled” to the action agenda by a councilmember), which is always high up on the agenda; items on the action agenda, which takes up the bulk of a meeting; and, at the end of the meeting, matters not listed on the agenda.  

These new arrangements are an improvement, as SuperBOLD member Gene Bernardi noted in a letter to the June 15 Daily Planet. But as Bernardi also noted, big problems remain, almost all stemming from the arbitrary authority of the mayor, who chairs the council’s meetings.  

Some of that arbitrary mayoral authority is written into the new rules. “Welcome to Your Council Meeting” stipulates that “[t]he mayor retains the authority to limit the total public comment time allocated to an item or to persons representing a particular side of an issue” on the action calendar. Bernardi observed that “allowing the mayor to select who will speak for or against an item is more egregious than selecting speakers at random by lottery, and therefore certainly as illegal.” In the interest of fairness, speakers need to be chosen according to a fixed formula that precludes discretion. 

But setting formal limits on paper won’t eliminate mayoral arbitrariness, because Tom Bates plays fast and loose with council procedures even when he has no authority to do so. So, for example, at the end of council meetings, Bernardi noted, the mayor “has failed to call, without reminder” for comment on items that have been pulled from the consent calendar. On June 19, he not only failed to call for such comments; he resisted doing so and instead tried to adjourn the meeting. He allowed the meeting to continue only after a handful of would-be speakers, including myself, protested that they had waited four hours—until nearly 11 p.m.—to address the council. After we each got to say our two minutes, the mayor failed to ask for public comment on non-agenda items and ended the meeting, ignoring two other individuals, who, in accordance with procedures outlined in “Welcome,” had waited until the very end of the meeting to speak on such items.  

But when it came to high-handedness, Tom Bates’ late-night efforts to squelch public comment paled next to his disposition of the controversial Wright’s Garage project earlier in the evening. The council was considering whether to grant requests from the Elmwood Neighborhood Association and the Elmwood Merchants Association to schedule a public hearing on the project. About 30 neighbors and merchants showed up; 14 of them were allowed to speak for up to two minutes apiece.  

It takes five votes to schedule a public hearing. With two councilmembers recused (Capitelli, who owns a business in the area, and Wozniak, who had publicly lobbied for the project), and one absent (Moore, who was tending to his sick mother), the council deadlocked 4-2 in favor of Councilmember Maio’s motion to schedule a public hearing. When the council deadlocks over an appeal of a Zoning Adjustments Board decision, the matter is customarily continued for 30 days from the date the item first appeared on a council agenda. If by then the council has not mustered the five votes required to take action, the ZAB decision holds.  

With this precedent in mind and still hoping to find five votes, the Elmwood appellants were counting on the matter to be continued to the council’s June 26 meeting. Thanks to Councilmember Worthington’s spirited defense of due process, the item was continued. But first the public was treated to a flagrant show of mayoral arrogance, as Tom Bates tried to get the item permanently removed from the council’s agenda. Astonishingly, he declared that since he had allowed 14 speakers to address the council, there was no difference between the evening’s proceedings and a public hearing.  

If the appellants end up suing the city, I hope they include the mayor’s assertion in the material they provide to the court. For that statement exemplifies Tom Bates’ attitude toward law and governance: I make the rules around here, and if I say this is as good as a public hearing, it’s so. Never mind that a real public hearing has legal standing that regular public comment lacks. Never mind that on June 19 neither the project applicant, John Gordon, nor his lawyer, Harry Pollack, was there to present their side of the case, as they surely would do in a hearing. None of this matters to Berkeley’s mayor. L’état, c’est lui. 

He brings to mind Animal Farm’s Napoleon, the barnyard despot who lords it over the other creatures and keeps unilaterally changing the rules. Like Orwell’s beastly autocrat, Mayor Bates doesn’t act alone. His imperious ways are expedited and legitimated by a compliant council majority, a fawning city attorney and other unctuous bureaucratic managers who do little to conceal their own disdain for public process. (On June 19 Planning Director Dan Marks didn’t bother to bring a copy of the staff report on the Wright’s Garage project into the council chamber and was consequently unable to answer councilmembers’ questions about conditions attached to the use permit). 

What ultimately doomed the denizens of Animal Farm, however, was their own gullibility, exacerbated by the fact that most of them couldn’t read. Their Berkeley counterparts can’t plead illiteracy. I assume that everyone in town believes in a government of laws, not persons, and deplores the Bush administration’s blatant disregard of that principle. How, then, to explain the greater Berkeley public’s seeming indifference to the blatant disregard of that principle in city hall? 

The text of “Welcome to your Council Meeting” can be found on the council’s website under the heading “General Information” and the subheading “Public Comment.”  

Zelda Bronstein is former member of the Planning Commission as well as a former candidate for mayor.

In the sixth month of the campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, the race has narrowed to New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The latest Gallup Poll shows Obama and Clinton in a statistical dead heat, with John Edwards a distant fourth, behind Al Gore—an undeclared candidate. Public perception of Clinton and Obama is strikingly different: Hillary has much higher unfavorable ratings than does Barack. Obama and Clinton are very different people; which one of them carries the day, at the Denver Democratic convention in August of 2008, will hinge on which campaign is best able to utilize the unique strengths of their candidate. 

Obama has a broader appeal than does Clinton. Recent polls indicate that the Illinois senator fares better against potential GOP candidates than does his New York counterpart. Larissa MacFarquhar dissected Barack’s attraction in her fascinating May 7 New Yorker article, describing him as “serene,” “centered,” and “congenial.” She observed that he appeals to many Republicans because he’s non-judgmental, willing to listen to their point of view. MacFarquhar concluded: “Obama has staked his candidacy on union—on bringing together two halves of America that are profoundly divided, and by associating himself with Lincoln.” 

There are two schools of thought about how Obama should position himself to win the Democratic nomination. One argues that Barack needs to adapt his style to what voters have come to expect: he needs to be more political. This opinion contends that while Obama has well-thought-out positions on most issues, he needs to present them more forcefully: be less of an academic and more of a gladiator. At least, that’s the opinion of New York Times contributor Maureen Dowd in her June 6 column. Referring to the candidate as “Obambi,” Dowd harrumphed that the junior senator often disappoints his constituents by being too professorial and observed: “He skitters away from the subtext of political contests, the need to use your force to slay your opponents.” She noted that in the most recent debate among the Democratic candidates, “When Hillary admitted that she had not read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting to authorize the president to go to war, Sen. Obama had a clear shot…[but] Mr. Obama let the opportunity for a sharp comment pass.”  

The other school of thought about Obama campaign strategy argues that Barack should stay the way he is; that America is ready for a president who doesn’t represent politics as usual. Writing in the June 3 New York Times Frank Rich observed, “Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying for the mood pendulum to swing … Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king … [that accounts for] The Democratic boomlet for Barack Obama … his views don’t differ radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.”  

Of course, what stands between Obama and the Democratic nomination is Hillary Clinton: the first serious female candidate for president. Ms. Clinton is smart, experienced, and tough. And she’s very political. Hillary has assembled a top-flight campaign team that includes her husband, the former president, who’s one of the most remarkable politicians in modern American history. During the next 14 months, Sen. Clinton will battle Barack Obama for each vote in every primary. This contest won’t be conducted in the world of ideas or on the tranquil fields of democratic process. Instead it will take place in TV studios and carefully scripted public appearances; consist of sound bites and bon mots. 

If Maureen Dowd is right then Obama may not be political enough to wrest the 2008 presidential nomination away from Hillary Clinton. Perhaps, Barack’s temperament isn’t cut out for the superficial nature of American presidential politics: the emphasis on form over substance. But, if Frank Rich is right and it’s true that voters are exhausted by the knock-down, bare-knuckles, take-no-prisoners political style of the Dubya years, then America may be ready for a different sort of president: even if that person happens to be a black guy from Chicago with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama. 

Either way, Democrats seem poised to nominate a presidential candidate who is not a white male. According to the Feb. 20 Gallup Poll Americans say they ready to vote for an African American or a woman candidate. While racism and sexism will play a role in the final vote, what’s likely to be the dominant factor is familiarity. Ninety-eight percent of Americans are familiar with Hillary Clinton and 80 percent have strong feelings about her. Obama is less well known: only 80 percent have heard of him and only 56 percent have strong feelings. So, the contest is likely to be decided by the impression Barack makes on voters when he shows up on their TV screens or at their local political event. Here the long-term trend is in Barack’s favor, as his favorability ratings have stayed high since he’s become a candidate. If that trend continues then he’s likely to win the Democratic nomination in 2008. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net 

It began with a phone call: Jean Moss, a Berkeley reader, had an odd nest that had fallen from a Cecile Bruner rosebush. She suspected it was some kind of hummingbird nest, because she had seen a female hummer hanging around it acting territorial. But what she described sounded more like a bushtit nest, bag-shaped with a small entrance hole near the top. Curious, I arranged to stop by and take a look at it. 

Bushtit is what it was, all right, very much like the one I discovered last year in the Lady Banks rose outside the kitchen window. It was a remarkable object, tightly felted from plant matter and spiderweb and decorated with moss and lichen. According to Hal Harrison’s Field Guide to Western Bird Nests, bushtits may also use leaves, grasses, and cocoons for the basic construction and plant down, wool, hair, and feathers for the lining. 

Mrs. Moss was adamant that she hadn’t seen any bushtits—chubby long-tailed grayish birds—in the neighborhood, and I am convinced she knows a bushtit from a hummingbird. So what about the hummer? I have a theory about that, and I’ll get to it later. 

Bushtits are interesting little birds, though. (I don’t know who saddled them with that name.) Once thought to be close relatives of the chickadees and titmice, the last taxonomic reshuffle put them in a separate family along with the Eurasian long-tailed tits, and recent studies suggest they may be close to the Old World warblers. They got here some 10 to 12 million years ago, via the Bering land bridge, and have spread as far south as Guatemala. 

They’re even more social than chickadees. You hardly even see a lone bushtit. Except for the nesting season, flocks stick together year-round, and pairs rejoin the flock as soon as their nestlings fledge. Flock members roost together, huddling close for warmth on chilly nights. They forage as a group, bridging the gaps between trees one bird at a time. 

In some parts of their range, bushtit sociality goes even farther: two or more females may lay their eggs in the same nest, and supernumerary helpers—maybe last year’s offspring—help the parents rear the brood. But this seems more common in southern Arizona than in coastal California. 

There seem to be two basic nest-building techniques. In heavy vegetation, the pair attaches spiderweb and plant material to a couple of support points and stretches the incipient nest into a loose sack. Alternatively, they start with a platform bridging a fork in a branch. One or both of the builders stretches the platform into a cup by sitting in it. Eventually the cup becomes a sack. I couldn’t track it down, but I recall reading somewhere about some northern people—the Saami, or some Siberian tribe—using the nests of long-tailed tits as children’s footwear. 

Like many Bay Area resident birds, bushtits start their nesting season early; eggs have been confirmed in California nests as early as February 26. Some coastal California populations raise two broods a year.  

So it’s reasonable that a bushtit nest should be active in May. But how to account for the hummingbird? Some birds do reuse the nests of other species; the piratic flycatcher of the New World tropics boots the original owners out and takes their nest over. But I could find no account of our local hummers using another bird’s nest. Their own open-faced cup-shaped nests are completely different in size and shape; all they have in common is the decorative lichen. 

Huh. Lichen. Instead of nesting in the bushtits’ construction, maybe Mrs. Moss’s hummer was recycling it—using its components to build her own nest. That wouldn’t be unheard-of. Bushtits are known to steal nest material from each other, and in the Chiracahua Mountains of Arizona warblers and vireos dismantle bushtit nests for material. As for the hummer’s behavior, she might have seen the nest as a resource to be defended, like a patch of nectar-bearing flowers. 

Who knows? Birds do go to extremes to get their nesting material. I’ve seen lichen-covered hummingbird nests a long way from the nearest lichen. The grand prize would have to go to the South American fork-tailed palm swift, which lines its nest with feathers. It was assumed for a long time that it just picked up feathers that were lying around. But no. Recent observations indicate it plucks the feathers from the backs of other birds, in flight. Victims range in size from thrush to turkey vulture, but the swifts seem to have a preference for pigeon and parrot feathers. Must be an unsettling experience for the donors. 

Photograph by Joe Eaton. The mystery nest, with a pair of binoculars for scale. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisey in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

Black Repertory Group “Love Don’t Cost A Thang” written and directed by Danesha Simon Fri. and Sat. at 7 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $25. 652-2120. 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

“Prisons” by Shanique Scott Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Tickets are $15-$18. 849-2568. 

Virago Theatre Comapny “The Death of Ayn Rand” and “A Bed of My Own” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda to July 7. Tickets are $10-$17. 865-6237.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Fairytales and Other Stories” Series of 21 photographs based on fairytales, classical paintings and film stills by Diania Elliott. Opens at 6 p.m. at ASUC Art Gallery, Lower Sproul Plaza, UC Campus. 642-3065. www.asucartstudio.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Julia Glass reads from “The Whole World Over” at 12:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jeremey Adam Smith & Loren Rhoads, Benjamin Perez & Matt Rohrer read at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Some Enchanted Evening” Opera arias and art songs with Andrew Chung and Kate Howell at 7:30 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. 868-0695. 

Indian Classical Music Concert with sitarist Srinivas Reddy and tabla player Michael Lewis at 7:30 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Suggested donation $15. www.uucb.org 

Natasha Miller & her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Vowel Movement, beat box, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Free Peoples, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Fred Odell and James Moore at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

That Man Fantastic, Suburban Slow Death at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Terezodu, Sad Boy Sinister at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Raya Nova at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

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

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

CHILDREN  

Animal Weekend with puppet shows and activities from 11 a.m. on at Children’s Fairyland, at 699 Bellvue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “A Dream Play” Sat. and Sun. at 3 p.m. on the lawn in front of Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. at Berryman, through July 1. 841-5580.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unicorns Puke Rainbows and the Packing Foam Swimming Pool” works by Michael Deane at 9 p.m. at the Living Room Gallery, 3230 Adeline St. www. 

myspace.com/livingroomcollective 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Margaret Ahnert discusses “The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Naomi Guttman and Robert Lipton read their poetry at 7:30 at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose “Poetic Splendor in Bharatanatyam” at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 408-983-0491. www.sulekha.com/bayarea  

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Rankin Scroo, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Zion-I, Pigeon John at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 548-1159. 

Emily Kurn and Marianne Barlow at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Married Couple at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Local Women Musicians at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Kurt Ribak Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

The Steve Deutsch Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Mirthkon, Three Piece Combo, Inner Ear Bridge at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

The Freeze at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. w 

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

CHILDREN 

Abby & The Pipsqueaks at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

THEATER 

The Herstories Project “Tapestries” at 6 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$25. 207-6623. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Viewpoints” plein-air landscapes by Barbara Ward, many of Tilden Park, on display at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, Tues.-Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to Aug. 26. 525-2233. 

“Point Pinole: A Place Apart” An exhibition on the explosive and peaceful past of the Point Pinole Shoreline, at Contra Costa County Historical Society, 610 Main St., Martinez. Exhibit runs to Aug. 23. 925-229-1042. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Barbara Siesel “Flute Music from Around the World” at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17.  

The Lovell Sisters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Falso Baiano Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Salvador Santana, Antioquia, new world grooves, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. 

Art Lande, Bruce Williamson, Alan Hall and Peter Barshay at 7 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. COst is $10-$15. 845-1350. 

Rebecca Mauleon, Jimmy Branly and Gary Brown “Piano y Ritmo” Clinic from 4 to 6 p.m., concert at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $15-$25. 849-2568.  

MONDAY, JULY 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tsunami Affected Lives: Moving Beyond Disaster” Photographs by Adrienne Miller at La Peña, through Aug. 31. 849-2568. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “It’s a Mystery,” stories by Lee Child, Agatha Christie and Donald Westlake at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214.  

Readings from the Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Marvin Ray at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Itals, Malika Madremana & The Greensphere Band, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054.  

Fito Reinoso at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sambadá, Brasilia, funk, at 5 p.m. at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito.  

Tom Rigney & Flambeau, Cajun/Zydeco, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Kutandara Marimba Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Dick Conte Quartet with Steve Heckman at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mariachi San José, Voco, On Taiko, ObeyJah and other world music performers from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at at Cerrito Vista Park, Moeser at Pomona St., El Cerrito. www.worldoneradio.org 

Whiskey Brothers at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473.  

Orquestra America, salsa, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz with Faye Carol at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $5. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

EXHIBITIONS 

“A Lasting Impression” Group show of ceramic sculptures, and “Injuries, Improvised Paintings by Luke Riles” Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Estaban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St. at Telegraph, Oakland. Exhibition runs to July 30. 444-7411.  

THEATER 

Crowded Fire Theater “Anna Bella Eema” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun at 2 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $10-$20. 415-439-2456. www.crowdedfire.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

United Capoeira Artists at noon at the downtown Berkeley BART station. info@downtownberkeley.org 

George Cotsirilos Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Damon and the Heathens, October Allied, Kemo Sabe at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082. 

“Un Regalo para Garabato” Music and spoken word to celebrate the life of Carlos Carabato Gonzales at 7 p.m at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$50. 849-2568.  

Kevin Eubanks at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$22. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES 

Photographer Diana Elliott’s 21 color and black and white portraits, from three distinct series, are on display in “Fairytales and Other Stories,” opening today (Friday) and running through Aug. 3 at the UC Berkeley ASUC Art Studio Gallery, MLK, Lower Sproul Plaza, MLK Jr. Student Union Building. An opening reception will be held tonight 6-9 p.m. 

The first set of photos in the exhibit are images inspired by fairytales, the second on classical paintings, and the third series appears to be inspired by movie stills. Elliott, who is originally from New York, lives in Berkeley where she is a freelance photographer. For more information, see wwww.dianaephoto.com/asuc/ or call 642.3065. Art Studio Hours: Mon.-Fri., noon-10 p.m., Sat.-Sun., noon-5 p.m. 

A dense and dazzling, vertically and horizontally rectilinear installation of color photographs by contemporary Chinese artist Wang Gangfeng awaits visitors at the entrance to Alta Galleria in Berkeley (2980 College, Suite #4, near Ashby Avenue). The show closes July 10. 

Additional color and random black-and-white photographs fill the other walls of the gallery. The self-taught artist escaped from a job at the Shanghai Net and Rope Factory, where he was expected to spend the remainder of his working life, in 1980, when his sister gave him a camera. He knew then that the camera would be his career and that the common people of China would be the focus of his interest. 

The images throughout the exhibition are as varied as the dishes of a Chinese banquet. Indeed, one of the most engaging is that of a group of young women gathered at a table to enjoy a meal together. Those of us who live here at the Portal to Asia may vicariously enjoy the flavors, fragrances, textures and colors that have the attention of the young women. 

Other subjects are farmers’ markets; village rooftops; a young woman carrying baskets on a yoke crossing her shoulders; a mass of bicycles moving to the viewers’ right except for one in the middle moving perversely to the left; a girl holding clumps of fiber; cityscapes; young Buddhist monks frolicking; and other subjects typical of China. Wang, who has exhibited internationally, has enjoyed great commercial success as well as critical acclaim. All of his photographs, which he prints himself, possess a grace and authenticity characteristic of a committed artist, as, for example, the sinuous, curvilinear forms of a rice paddy.  

The finest work of art in the exhibition (to my eye) is a black-and-white image of an urban scavenger bent double beneath an immense load of empty containers on his back, presumably destined for recycling. The subject and those passing him in the street seem indifferent to the noble poetry he conveys. A comparison to the great photographer of American distress Dorothea Lange comes easily to mind. 

At an opposite pole is Wang’s black-and-white image of two boys, about five years of age, sitting on the first of several ascending stone steps. Their grins from ear to ear are totally seductive. This is, incidentally, Wang’s most popular photograph in China. The artist did not come by the boys’ pose easily. One of the boys was recalcitrant until his father said, “If you smirk, you don’t have to go to school today.” 

The exhibition of photographs by Wang Gangfeng at Alta Galleria has had a long gestation period. When Alta Gerry visited Shanghai six years ago, it had not yet occurred to her that she might become the owner of an art gallery. Nevertheless, when she visited Wang’s studio, ironically named “The Gang of One” for China’s foremost freelance photographer, in contrast to the infamous “Gang of Four,” she was immediately seduced by his work, recently organizing this exhibition which continues through July 12. 

Photograph: Photographer Wang Gangfeng’s varied images of China, including “Weight,” above, and “Swamp,” below, are on display at the Alta Galleria.

Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, is something of a departure for the Danish director. He has returned to Denmark and the Danish language to produce, for the first time, a comedy, and a rather light-hearted comedy at that. No politics, no commentary, no overarching cinematic code of ideals to weigh down his creation—just a clever idea, a witty script and a talented cast. 

An unemployed hack actor (Jens Albinus) is hired to impersonate a non-existent corporate boss in order to facilitate the sale of an information technology firm. Trouble is, the actor’s benefactor (Ravn, played by Peter Gantzler) is the true owner and has been masquerading as an employee for 10 years, manipulating his colleagues to his own ends while blaming his unpopular decisions on the never-seen CEO, a faceless entity named Kristoffer who has been running the company by email from the United States. 

When the hapless actor is brought in to sign away the company in a private meeting with an Icelandic buyer, a firestorm of nationalistic tensions interrupts the negotiation and spills out into a corridor where the company’s employees catch their first glimpse of the man they believe is “the boss of it all.” And thus begins a convoluted series of interactions in which “Kristoffer” is constantly forced to improvise, trying to match his performance to the various preconceptions of the employees, all of whom think they have developed some sort or relationship with the man via e-mail, though in fact all of those interactions were with puppetmaster Ravn. At times Kristoffer benefits from these situations, and at times he suffers; he finds himself sexually involved with one employee, romantically linked to another, and the source of anxiety and anger for several more. 

Ravn starts off allowing Kristoffer a great deal of leeway in shaping his character, but increasingly tries to usurp more and more control. The actor of course rebels as he gains confidence in the role, pompously delving deeper and deeper into his character’s motivation until, with the help of his ex-wife, who coincidentally works as an attorney for the Icelandic buyer, he finally taps into a few crucial insights that will allow him to alter the course of the intra-office melodrama. That said, he doesn’t necessarily glean much insight into himself, and one of the closing scenes features a hilarious episode in which the actor essentially holds up the plot’s resolution for an extended meditation on his character’s motivation, the obvious point of which is merely to draw attention to himself and his self-proclaimed mastery of his craft.  

It all makes for an entertaining film, a clever comedy that uses the familiar construct of mistaken identity to stage a more complicated self-reflexive commentary on film and theater, on acting, directing and filmmaking.  

Von Trier breaks the fourth wall in the first shot by introducing himself and the principal characters, following with a vow to dispense with artsiness for the duration of this “harmless” comedy. Yet this is a particularly artsy method of poking fun at all things artsy, and the director continues to emphasize the artifice of the film at crucial junctures, at one point taking center stage to announce that he has decided to add a new character to the mix just to further complicate the plot. Thus von Trier never lets us forget who is really the boss of it all. 

Von Trier uses many of the principles of the stripped-down Dogme school of film that he co-founded, but with a lighter, less didactic approach. He eschews artificial lighting, makeup and scoring, for instance, but employs a unique and decidedly un-Dogme-like technique for photographing the film called Automavision. Von Trier selected each camera setup, but then employed a computer to randomly select various parameters for the shot, tilting the camera, changing the focal length or shifiting the composition. The computer controlled a similar set of parameters for the sound recording. The result is a film that is constantly shifting, as though through a series of jump cuts, giving the impression that the scenes and dialogue were patched together in the editing process.  

But what we’re really seeing is a framing device that has removed the human element and replaced it with computerized randomness. Most viewers won’t notice the technique on a conscious level, conditioned as we’ve become over the years to hand-held cameras, jump cuts and disjointed editing. But thematically it works, as the constantly shifting perspectives mirror the shifting alliances and realities of the characters, adding to the confusion and chaos of a situation over which the principal players—and to some extent the director—have lost control. 

THE BOSS OF IT ALL 

Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cinematography by Automavision. Starring Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Thor Fridriksson, Benedikt Erlingsson, Iben Hjejle, Henrik Prip, Mia Lyhne, Casper Christensen, Louise Mieritz, Jean-Marc Barr, Anders Hove. 

99 minutes. Not rated. In Danish with English subtitles. Playing at Shattuck Cinemas. 

Photograph: Peter Gantzler and Jens Albinus negotiate a contract in The Boss of It All.

With a clap of thunder, a lightning fla sh illuminates an enormous shadowy figure, behind gauze, before a window. A man hastily enters, pulling away that curtain, revealing a much smaller female form standing in the window casement, with greenbacks safety-pinned to the lace curtain that frames the window. 

The man, Scooper (Cassidy Brown), insouciantly inquires of his mother Henny (Joan Mankin) what’s the matter. She, after muttering deliriously about staunching up the bleeding with Super-Kotex and waving a St. Jude over it, parts her robe ... her son yelps—and, as we later learn, she’s carted to the hospital for an emergency mastectomy. 

So much for the title of Bosoms and Neglect, John Guare’s screwy play of black New York Irish humor, now onstage at the Aurora. The title’s easily explained. But “the matter”—that is, the dialogue and action, and the story material that zig-zags, relentlessly back and forth—constitutes another question, or bunch of questions, altogether. 

John Guare’s plays—and this one dates from the late ’70s—have been called “semi-absurd,” like a pair of oddly polished saddleshoes, which Scooper seems to be wearing. Guare has talked about his “war with the kitchen sink,” though in his burlesqued domestic dramas, the sink seems to be stopped up—or something’s crawling out of it. 

In this case the creature is ostensibly Henny, though it may really be her son, considering the narrative he pours out to Deirdre (Beth Wilmurt), a kind of comfort station and book-bombardier for famous authors (if her own story makes any sense), in her apartment, above and across the street from her and Scooper’s adored psychiatrist, where she can watch the comings and goings.  

Actually, though the psych’s waiting room should have provided the stage for their meeting (and Deirdre avers she spent much time and anguish trying to attract Scooter’s attention), it’s just that morning they’ve collided for real, outside a mutually favored bookstore, where Scooper’s picked her up—or thinks he has—for a bit of chat and solace on the day he’s been planning to run away with his friend and business partner’s wife to Haiti, a steamy tropical retreat from New York, itself steaming into August. 

What gradually erupts—the dialogue and action are jerky and self-contradictory—is a frenetic mating dance, played out across a couple of sofa-daybeds, syncopated with a kind of demented literary or psychiatric coitus interruptus, one-upmanship with the names of authors or syndromes to send off as teasers. 

It all ends in mayhem, with Scooper joining Henny in the hospital for a filial chat, though no repose, soon to be joined by Deirdre, who joins forces with the man she lacerates in yet another quest for a Freudian slip, while blind Henny, unaware she’s alone, tells the true tale of Scooper’s recurring primal scene and the secret of his real name. 

Black humor is a tough thing to flesh out onstage, continually pushing the envelope until even the postman bursts out in laughter at the overload. And Guare’s special, regional branch of it (something related can be seen in Philip Kaufman’s hilarious parody of juvenile delinquent movies and postwar nostalgia in general, The Wanderers, set in The Bronx) demands a kind of careless exactitude, an off-the-cuff delivery of true gravity, with the fingers crossed on both hands folded behind the back. 

Joy Carlin is a fine director of actors, and Cassidy Brown and—especially—Beth Wilmurth contribute what’s easily for both of them among their finer characterizations. 

But it doesn’t quite come off. Brown’s whimsical, palatized accent begins to drone, and the cavorting he and Wilmurth do is nutty and amusing, but the play demands a little more than demonstrable eccentricity or today’s common coin in humor, quotidian silliness. The zaniness throws off Guare’s strange rhythms, and the dialogue and story take on the consistency of pudding, with these crazy borough Irish characters relegated to merely surveying the linguistic bog they caper on. 

Only Joan Mankin, at start and finish, provides the bass line that makes it a fugue, indeed. Her characterization is clearly reflected in the funhouse mirror of Henny’s crabbed consciousness—and conscience. It’s right in the heart of that true form of Pirandellian humor that apprehends “what’s there instead of what’s supposed to be there” versus the conflating of deliberate, self-serving illusion with reality, only to come back around and drive the obtuse point home. 

BOSOMS AND NEGLECT 

8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through July 22 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addision St. $38. 843-4822. www.aurotatheatre.org.

The history of Bay Area industry parallels that of immigration. In the East Bay, the economy was largely built by first- and second-generation immigrants who had settled in the West, bringing with them specialized skills from points east, often Europe. 

Such was the case in the founding of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, which operated on Third and Fourth Streets between Camelia and Gilman from 1905 until 1985. 

On May 3, 1905, the Oakland Tribune announced a new business in West Berkeley that “will employ at the start some twenty-five or thirty men.” Manasse-Block, which had operated a large tannery in East Oakland since 1900, purchased the West Berkeley tannery previously owned by Frank E. Deach, who resided at 1618 Fifth St. 

Deach (possibly a corruption of Deitsch), born in California to German immigrants and married to a Mexican woman, first appeared in the Berkeley directory in 1900, when he was listed in the U.S. census as a tannery proprietor. His name wasn’t included in the property assessment rolls until 1903, at which time his ownership comprised Lots 36-39 in Block 28 of the Wentworth Tract. Immediately to his south, on Lots 27-34, the French immigrant Prudent Remond had been engaged in tanning and manufacturing of oak-tanned harness and skirting leather since at least 1894. 

Even earlier than Remond, the southwestern end of the block had been the site of another tannery, owned by the Nova Scotian immigrant Robert Stewart since 1892. The block being large, for a few years the three establishments overlapped, although by 1900 Stewart had switched from tanning to manufacturing coconut fibre. 

Remond, who came to the U.S. in 1871 with his French-Swiss wife and lived at 721 Camelia Street, constructed in 1898 a three-story building that the Berkeley Gazette promised would be “one of the largest currying establishments on the Coast. In this place leather will be received from the tanneries and prepared for the making of shoes, harness, etc.” 

Remond may have overextended himself, or perhaps he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either way, his tannery was taken over by the California Ink Company around the time that Deach’s plant became the Manasse-Block tannery. For several years afterwards, the two worked as tanners, possibly for Manasse-Block. By 1909, Remond had become a watchman for Cal Ink, while Deach, now living at 1732 San Pablo Avenue, was working as a dyer for William Reuter & Sons, located at 7th and Jones Streets. 

The businesses that followed Stewart, Remond, and Deach on Block 28 were far more successful. Both Manasse-Block and Cal Ink thrived for the better part of a century, and both were owned by German immigrants or their sons. The proprietor of Cal Ink was Ernest L. Hueter of San Francisco, German-born and owner of the Bass-Hueter Paint Company and the Pioneer Varnish and Glycerine Works. 

Both founders of the Manasse-Block Tanning Co. came from the Bay Area’s tight-knit German-Jewish community. The company’s first president, August Manasse (1875–1942) was born in Napa, where his father, Emanuel, originally from Frankfurt by way of San Francisco, was in charge of manufacturing at the B.F. Sawyer tannery, in operation from 1869 until 1990. Emanuel originated the Napa Patent Leather process and became a co-owner of the business, which his descendants continued to run. The Manasse Mansion in Napa, built in 1886 by architect-contractor William H. Corlett, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and operated as a tony bed & breakfast inn. 

August worked at the Sawyer tannery, but having three older brothers may have thwarted his ambitions. At the age of 25 he came to Oakland and entered into partnership with Roy Block (1879–1955), who was only 21 when he became secretary of the Manasse-Block Tanning Company. 

The Blocks had no tanning background, but they knew something about leather. Roy’s father, Harry Block, was born in Bohemia and emigrated in 1866 as a 17-year old. In the 1870s, he ran a jewelry store in Virginia City, Nevada, where Roy was born. After opening a jewelry store in San Francisco, Harry formed the H. & L. Block Co. with his younger brother Leopold. The company manufactured gloves. In 1900, before he entered the tanning business, Roy was a glove drummer, as traveling salesmen were called. 

Initially, Manasse and Block’s intention was to run the Berkeley facility as a branch of its main Oakland tannery. “The local branch will be enlarged and improved as the business increases, and promises within a few years to become one of Berkeley’s leading enterprises,” informed the Oakland Tribune in May 1905, concluding, “It is understood the tanning company will expend some $10,000 or $15,000 on improving its West Berkeley establishment.” 

The company did, in fact, leave Oakland, supposedly because the railroad was constrocted through its site at East 12th St. and 19th Avenue. In 1906, Manasse-Block was joined on Third St. by H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works, which had lost its San Francisco facilities in the earthquake and fire. That catastrophe fresh in the principals’ minds, precautions were taken. On July 28 of that year, the Tribune reported, “In the belief that it will be impossible for the city to furnish them better fire protection at the present time, three of the largest factories in the West End, the California Ink Company, the Manasse-Block Tanning Company, and the Pacific Glove Works, located between Camelia and Gilman and Third and Fourth streets, combined in installing a pumping plant and an efficient fire brigade of their own. The directors believe that the cost of the undertaking will eventually be paid by a reduction in the insurance rates. […] The brigade will be at the service of the West Berkeleyans.” 

In February 1906, Manasse-Block made news for an altogether different reason. That month, two young men who declined to give their names but who said they were medical students called on August Manasse and asked him to prepare some human skin for commercial purposes. “With them,” reported the Tribune, “they had two pieces of cuticle, one about a foot square and the other a trifle smaller, which they admitted they had stripped from a body in a dissecting room. They said they intended making slippers of the skin.” 

“It is alleged,” continued the article, “that articles made from the skin of men and women have been carried from California to all portions of the Union. The skin is expensive, a piece six inches square being valued at $20. When tanned the skin of a man is worth in the neighborhood of $500. The skin is soft and pliable, resembling in many respects chamois. Of it belts, purses, slippers and many other small articles are manufactured.” 

Manasse declined the offer, and Town Marshal August Vollmer announced that he would take steps to put an end to the gruesome business. 

Newspaper notices published during the 1910s give an idea of the extent of Manasse-Block’s business. At different times in 1917 and ’18, the company shipped leather to Houston, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, Denver, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Portland, OR. “The white tanned leather put out by this company enjoys the distinction of being in a class by itself,” touted one of the notices. 

By that time, August Manasse had exited the scene. Around 1914, Roy Block took over as president, and Manasse became a hide buyer. The company’s new secretary was Solomon Seeligsohn, another offspring of a San Francisco German-Jewish family. His older brother, Abraham (Abe) Seeligsohn, was editor of the Jewish Progress. Solomon, who may have died prematurely, was followed as Manasse-Block’s secretary by his younger brother Selig. 

Even after breaking up, Manasse and Block continued to live in proximity to each other. For many years, August Manasse and his wife Myra lived at 2837 Regent Street. Refugees from the San Francisco earthquake, Roy Block and his spouse Edna built a new house at 2920 Hillegass Ave. It is a handsome Arts & Crafts shingled structure with a rustically jagged clinker-brick chimney, sturdy porch posts, and zigzag window muntins. The house was designed by Alfred Dodge Coplin, whose distinctive residential creations from the same period may be seen at 2811 Benvenue Ave. and 2630 Piedmont Ave. 

In the mid-1920s, the Blocks moved to a larger house at 44 Montrose Road, in Thousand Oaks. Their old house changed hands many times and eventually became a rental property. By the early 1960s, a modern two-story, four-unit apartment building had been constructed in the back yard. Less than ten years ago, the house was empty and boarded up. Now, although still a rental, it is handsomely restored. 

The Block family continued to own the tannery for the rest of its productive life. The plant expanded steadily until 1956, its principal product being boot and shoe leather. As synthetics replaced leather and as shoe production moved overseas, the tanning business declined. After the tannery closed, the facilities were sold to the Athena Development Corporation, which created the Tannery project, preserving, rehabilitating, and reusing the abandoned 81,180 sq. ft. complex. Completed in 1990, the complex accommodates offices, retail, and live-work units. 

The old Cal Ink plant next door is now abandoned and awaiting its fate on the auction block. Can it be as creatively rehabilitated as the Manasse-Block tannery? 

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

Part of the Manasse-Block Tannery complex, 1307 Third St. originally housed H. & L. Block’s Pacific Glove Works. 

I see the inimitable Annie’s Annuals is having a sale. Some of the stuff the two Anni(e)s are offering are rarities in the plant trade, in the area, maybe anywhere. Once again I’ll have to wrestle with my conscience.  

Partly it’s about budgeting. As you might have heard, income possibilities for freelance writers are shrinking rapidly around here while prices the prices of gas and pretty much everything else are rising. Annie’s plants are certainly not overpriced but they aren’t cheap, and there’s always one more—well, two more, and shouldn’t I get some of those over there too?—temptation there that I’d counted on.  

I could take cash and my driver’s license and nothing else, I guess. I could wear a hairshirt and cilice too, but somehow I’m just not that kind of a girl.  

Partly it’s about space. Our garden is crowded, mostly shady, badly drained in spite of various stratagems against flat alluvial clay. How badly drained? Every winter a mysterious hole opens in the mud of the driveway. This hole swallows whatever we throw into it: chips, mats, gravel, pecks of rocks ranging up to breadloaf size.  

The hole, from the moment it appears, fills with water. That water and the mud for a few square yards around it stink of stagnation. It has risen from some unwholesome quarter of the bowels of Earth and it’s not going anywhere till Spring.  

So I’m gambling with the life of every poor plant I bring home. I end up adopting a lot of orphans, because, well, I’m cheap and they have nowhere better to go, and rarities rarely get orphaned. This contributes to a certain vernacular, even outsider-art atmosphere here at The Belfry.  

I’ve been a member of Native Seeds/SEARCH for years; they made a believer out of me when they brought some of their marvelous chili powder varieties to the Bioneers conference. They were the best thing there that year. 

But I buy only groceries and artifacts from them because the species and cultivars they preserve are desert-based, and I’m sure I’d be committing murder by planting them here. Their seeds are rare pretty much by definition, and if I’m going to perform vegetable sacrifices I’d prefer at least to leave a lot of survivors somewhere.  

One matter that does not rasp on my conscience when I succumb to Annie’s charms is that of provenance. That’s something you have to think about with rare plants and even some common ones, particularly bulbs.  

So obscenely disparate are global wages that some bulb distributors still find it cheaper to pay some poor Third World gatherer for bulbs dug from the wild than to grow their own plants and keep seeds from them to grow out for bulbs, or even propagate by bulblets or cuttings.  

There’s an ethical side to pretty much anything—maybe not crossword puzzles, but anything else—and gardeners who prize interesting plants do well to pay attention to it. 

More about that next week. 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet. 

Annie’s Annuals and Perennials 

740 Market Avenue, Richmond 

(510) 215-1671 

Directions at www.anniesannuals.com or call (don’t trust Mapquest or Google on this one.) 

Sale June 23 through July 8 at retail  

nursery ONLY. 

Native Seeds/SEARCH 

Retail store: 526 N. 4th Ave. 

Tucson, AZ 85705 

(520) 622-5561 

www.nativeseeds.org

I was with a very charming couple today. He was French and she was American. They were very different and both very smart and we had a great time looking at an incredible place that needed … like … nothing. Well, not much. 

As usual I reeled out scenarios of earthquake and assorted disasters and related how this building might fare in each case. At one point, it occurred to me how absurd I am and I said “Just imagine what my dreams must be like.” Luckily … they laughed. It’s true, though. 

I do spend an inordinate amount of time running worse case scenarios of how various things might go wrong, in the pursuit of the best advice for my clients. But truly, I do not live in fear. It’s just interesting and a wonderful challenge. I’m a very lucky person to be doing what I do. 

Among the red flag danger signs I try to point out, I’m fairly certain that the most frequent and certainly the most hidden are those involving fire. The building code is busily at work with these as well. Fire is really our most serious threat when it comes to the places in which we live and it occupies a huge amount of what we’re addressing in the building codes and other building standards. It’s probably the central issue in the design of nearly every major component of our houses as well it should be. It’s the one thing we just don’t ever want to face. 

So I’d like to offer a little tour around the typical house and touch on just a few of the things it would be best to focus on to minimize this threat. 

While there are many things one can do to diminish the likelihood of a fire starting, I would suggest that we refocus of our attention (at least at first) and take a look at how we can be prepared to cope with fire once it occurs. The most important thing is to have many ways to escape from the house and of course, lots of smoke detectors to wake us or alert us to the need to escape. 

If in doubt, add more smoke detectors. Put them on ceilings and not on walls. If they’re old, replace them, and change the batteries every year when you change the clocks (you know- “Spring forward, Fall back”). While you’re buying the batteries, pick up a fire extinguisher and hang it by the kitchen entry. 

OK. Now you’re awake and the smoke alarm is going off. What next? You want to be able to get out of the house by any door or window in the house. So be sure that no exit is impeded in any way. Window bars are very dangerous in this regard and need to be owned with great awareness of their ability to cause death. Be sure you think they’re worth it. Operable window bars are better, but they prevent firefighters from entering the building (at least quickly and easily.) 

They can get through them if there’s time but in a fire, time is what we most lack). If you have operable window bars keep the mechanism clear of furnishings and test them regularly. Remember that when fires get going, people panic and forget how to do basic things. Also, smoke prevents vision and quickly disables occupants. 

Even a pane of glass in a paint-stuck window can be a tremendous impediment to escape. With panic and smoke, the simple act of breaking a window may be too much to ask. Make it easy. Get the windows unstuck. All of them. You don’t know where you’ll be when a fire breaks out. 

I can’t emphasize this last part about smoke and panic quite enough. Emergency situations can make the obvious action unimaginable and smoke makes everything very hard to manage. In a matter of seconds we can lose our ability to do all the things that we imagined we might in our heroic dream of action. It’s only human. It’s preparation that can make us more able to cope when the time comes. 

Modern codes say a lot about window size and height. I’ll give you some of the stats. A window should open to the following minimum size. 20” wide, 24” high and a total openable area of at least 5 square feet. That means that you’re really looking at something like 2’ wide and 30” high, but there’s room for variation. Many of the windows I see in older houses are smaller than this.  

You may not need code-approved size, but open the window and see if you can imagine climbing out. Can your family all do the same? Can the kids open the windows? By the way, make sure they know to get out of the house without looking for the adults. Agree on a meeting place like the front lawn so you know that everyone is safe. But the job is to get straight out without delay. 

Finishing the code thing with windows, the windowsill should be no more than 44” above the floor. This is to be sure that the firefighter can climb into the room without fear that they will fall through the collapsed floor. They want to touch the floor before committing. 

Another thing about windows is to be sure that no locking mechanism more complex than your basic twist lock is being used. If you have keyed locks on windows, please consider removing them. They could be deadly. 

If you have a second or third story without an extra outside set of stairs, consider rope or chain ladders for each bedroom (especially for the kiddies) so you don’t have to stand staring at those things at Orchard’s after something really, really bad has happened. They’re not that expensive. 

Make sure that no door requires a key in order to leave the dwelling. If you have a “double cylinder” lock, replace it with a single-cylinder lock that has a thumb turn on the inside. If burglars find this easier to steal your stuff, let ‘em have the TV and save your family from a premature terrestrial evacuation. 

It may sound severe but it’s really smart to plan for this stuff. Do a drill, even just once. You may discover something huge in the process. I recently had a client who was terribly concerned about her animals and wanted to be sure that there were escape exits for them to the exclusion of any interest in herself. Now, I’m as big an animal lover as any but, please, save yourself first.  

If you smoke, remember that you are very likely to cause the fire, so think about limiting your smoking to one place in the house and not in the bedroom. Falling asleep smoking has killed many a smoker as well as many non-smokers. 

If you manage to heat without using electric space heaters, you’ll further decrease your chances of a fire. Also, never use an extension cord with a space heater. These cause overheating in the wiring and spark blazes as we sleep. If you can heat the room prior to bed-time, you’ll be better off. 

We can’t cover all the things that might set your house ablaze but you can take the time to look at the escapes and make sure that you’ll be able to get outside in plenty of time to watch the house burn down. 

I heard a guy on the radio this morning as I was pulling on my argyles talking about how he just lost his house in a fire. He said, “Well, at least the family is safe and that’s the important thing.” Hail brother. Ain’t it the truth. Before I close today, I’d like to share one last thought. 

A few years ago I was speaking with John, a Berkeley firefighter during the inspection of his new home in Oakland and so, took advantage of the chance to ask a few questions about what firefighters do. I can’t remember exactly what I was asking, but it had something-or-other to do with getting inside to pull people out of fires. 

He stopped me, his face somewhat screwed-up and said “Oh … we don’t do that much anymore. Ever since people started using smoke detectors regularly, we’re just putting out fires. The people are already outside.” 

If the message isn’t clear, let me put it just a little more bluntly. Go buy the smoke detectors today. Put batteries in ‘em and put em up on the ceiling of every bedroom and out in the hall on each floor. Don’t wait. Don’t get gelato. Don’t order Netflix. Just get ‘em. That’s how I say “I love you.” 

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Mayor Tom Bates on “State of the City” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Indigenous Permaculture Progam in El Salvador” A slide show on rural community development and sustainable communities, and a Mayan cultural presentation, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Donation $10-$35. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents Self-serve for the general public from 11:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground, Berkeley. 644-6566. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 9 to 11 a.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. at Ashby. 981-5332. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction. Potluck supper at 7 p.m., dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

0 to 100 Watts in 4 Days A workshop to build an FM broadcast transmitter, sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley. With an emphasis on hands-on learning, you will learn how to solder, identify electronic components, assemble a 40 watt transmitter from a kit of parts, build and tune an antenna, properly setup and test broadcast equipment, and more. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day, at 2311 Adeline, Unit P, Oakland. Cost is $200-$250 sliding scale. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

Drip Irrigation A workshop on landscape watering that utilizes low-flow and conservation principles from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sponsored by the Alameda County Cleanwater Program and EBMUD. Call to register and for location. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“Restore Wetlands in Oakland” A volunteer opportunity with Save the Bay on a wetland restoration project near the Oakland Airport. From 9 a.m. to noon. RSVP to 452-9261 ext. 109. 

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Join a Park Ranger for a walk under a full moon to see noctunal animal life. Reservations required. Call for details. 925-228-8860. 

Canned Food Collection for the Alameda County Food Bank at the film showing of “Ratatouille” at the Berkeley 7 Theater, 2274 Shattuck Ave. Bring 2-8 cans from 1 to 5 p.m. 635-3663, ext. 358. 

Origami for All Ages Learn to fold five different origami shapes from 2 to 4 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best cat friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500.  

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

Habitat Hunters A hike for the whole family to discover what makes a habitat, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

Solo Sierrans Waterfront Bike Trip from the Emeryville Marina to Berkeley. Meet at 3 p.m. in front of the Watergate Clipper Club, 5 Captain Dr. for a leisurly five mile round trip ride. 923-1094. 

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

EcoHouse Tour Visit the the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., entrance on Peralta. Cost $10, sliding scale. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Insect Hunt A capture and release program for the whole family at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Social Action Forum with Eric Mills on animal rights at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Peach Tasting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

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 Jack Petranker on “Learning to Be” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JULY 2 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

TUESDAY, JULY 3 

Alternative Fourth of July Celebration commemorating Frederick Douglass’ Independence Day Speech, at the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, 1852, with a concert and BBQ dinner at 6 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., downtown Oakland. Tickets are $20-$30. www.opcmusic.org 

Fourth of July Celebration with music by the Milt Bowerman Band at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

The Red Oak Victory Ship BBQ and Fireworks Viewing at 6 p.m. at 1337 Canal Blvd., off Hwy 580, in Richmond. Cost is $20. For information and reservations call 222-9200. 

Insect Discovery Lab See and touch live bugs as you learn more about them at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 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. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina from noon to 9:30 p.m. with live entertainment, arts & crafts, food, and activities for children. Alcohol-free event. Free admission. Sponsored by the City of Berkeley. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us.  

Celebrate Inter-Dependence Day with a vegetarian potluck from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Laurel Picnic Area in Tilden Park. Bring a vegetarian dish to share. Dogs and musical instruments also welcome. Sponsored by The Network of Spiritual Progressives 644-1200. www.spiritualprogressives.org  

People’s World Barbeque “Que Viva Cuba!” with report-backs from recent visits, music, and Cuban and BBQ food, from 1 to 5 p.m. at 2232 Derby St. Cost is $10. 548-8764. 

Fireworks on the Bay Canoe Trip An easy paddle to see the welands before the fireworks show. All boating equipment and instruction is provided. Mimimum age is 10. Cost is $35-$45. For reservations call 452-9261, ext. 119. bayevents@saveSFbay.org  

Fourth of July on the USS Hornet with live music, games for all ages, and tours of the aircraft carrier, and firework viewing, from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at 707 W. Hornet Ave., Pier 3, Alameda. Tickets are $10-$25. 521-8448, ext. 282. www.hornetevents.com 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

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. 

THURSDAY, JULY 5 

“From Gaza, With Love” with Palestinian physician and human rights activist, Dr. Mona El-Farra at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1606 Bonita at Cedar. 548-0542.  

California Telephone Access will display phone equiipment for those with vision, hearing and mobility issues from 12:30 to 2 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Cope with Creativity shows the video “The Gifts of Grief” at 6:30 p.m. at 4401 Howe St., Oakland. To register call 888-755-7855, ext. 4241. 

El Sabor de Fruitvale Farmers’ market, salsa making, and live music with La Familia Son afrom 3 to 7 p.m. at Fruitvale Transit Village, 3411 East 12th St., Oakland. 535-6900. 

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.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. Free, all are welcome. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

CITY MEETINGS 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs. July 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.

TUESDAY, JUNE 26 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Moshi Moshi! Bridging Cultures through Art” Japanese and American art inspired by cross cultural influences at the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond, though Aug. 10. 620-6772. www.therac.org 

THEATER 

Tell It On Tuesday Solo Performances at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $8-$12 sliding scale.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Erica Rische-Baird reads from “This Is For A World Gone Mad” at 7:30 p.m. at Spectator Books, 4163 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. 653-7300. www.spectatorbooks.com  

Ales Debeljak and Rusty Morrison, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Katherine Taylor reads from “Rules for Saying Goodbye” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Adam Miller, folksinger and storyteller, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 

Tee Fee Swamp Boogie at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Ellen Hoffman at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

David Bromberg & the Angel Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $34.50-$35.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Randy Craig Trio at 7:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Bob City Pacific, hip hop, fink, at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $12-$15. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

John Calloway at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Suddenly Summer” A group show by East Bay women artists opens at Royal Ground Gallery, 2058 Mountain Blvd., Montclair, Oakland.  

FILM 

International Latino Film Festival “Un Franco, 14 Pestas” at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $5-$6. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!” A film on the art-car artist at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Donation $5.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Writing Teachers Write” monthly student and teacher reading series, at 5 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

David Bromberg & the Angel Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $34.50-$35.50. 548-1761.  

Terrence Brewer Quintet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Fishtank Ensemble at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Eastern European dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Mazacote at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Dave Stein Bubhub at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Poncho Sanchez at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square., through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 28 

CHILDREN 

Jon Agee author of “Milo’s Hat Trick” and “Jon Agee’s Palindromania” will show and tell how he makes his fun books, at 7 p.m. at North Branch Library, 1180 The Alameda. 981-6250.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Subcutaneous Portraiture” Works by Amber Stucke and Brian Sweet. Reception at 6:30 p.m. at Transmissions Gallery, 1177 San Pablo Ave. Exhibit runs to July 28. 558-4084. www.trasmissions-gallery.com 

FILM 

“The Mind is a Liar and a Whore” by Antero Alli at 8 p.m. at 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakland. Tickets are $6-$10. 444-7263. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Camille T. Dungy and Sandra Lim at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. www.poetryflash.org 

Julia Flynn Siler describes “The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Josie Iselin shows her portraits of “Seashells” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Rhoda Curtis will read from “Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years” at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Delta Love, Band of Brotherz at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Dave Alvin at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $25.50-$26.50. 548-1761.  

Latitude Zero at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ.  

Zej at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

San Pablo Project, Ross Hammond’s Teakayo, at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

THEATER 

Aurora Theatre “Bosoms and Neglect” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., SUn. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through July 22. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisey in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

Black Repertory Group “Love Don’t Cost A Thang” written and directed by Danesha Simon Fri. and Sat. at 7 p.m. at 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $25. 652-2120. 

Central Works “Bird in the Hand” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through July 29. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater “Meet Me in St. Louis” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. in July at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Aug. 4. 524-9132. 

Impact Theatre “Impact Briefs 8: Sinfully Delicious” Thurs.-Sat. through July 21 at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

“Prisons” by Shanique Scott Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Tickets are $15-$18. 849-2568. 

Virago Theatre Comapny “The Death of Ayn Rand” and “A Bed of My Own” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda to July 7. Tickets are $10-$17. 865-6237.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Fairytales and Other Stories” Series of 21 photographs based on fairytales, classical paintings and film stills by Diania Elliott. Opens at 6 p.m. at ASUC Art Gallery, Lower Sproul Plaza, UC Campus. 642-3065. www.asucartstudio.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Julia Glass reads from “The Whole World Over” at 12:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Jeremey Adam Smith & Loren Rhoads, Benjamin Perez & Matt Rohrer read at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies “Some Enchanted Evening” Opera arias and art songs with Andrew Chung and Kate Howell at 7:30 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. 868-0695. 

Natasha Miller & her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Vowel Movement, beat box, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Free Peoples, jazz, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Fred Odell and James Moore at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

That Man Fantastic, Suburban Slow Death at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Terezodu, Sad Boy Sinister at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Raya Nova at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

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

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

CHILDREN  

Animal Weekend with puppet shows and activities from 11 a.m. on at Children’s Fairyland, at 699 Bellvue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “A Dream Play” Sat. and Sun. at 3 p.m. on the lawn in front of Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. at Berryman, through July 1. 841-5580.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unicorns Puke Rainbows and the Packing Foam Swimming Pool” works by Michael Deane at 9 p.m. at the Living Room Gallery, 3230 Adeline St. www. 

myspace.com/livingroomcollective 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Margaret Ahnert discusses “The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Naomi Guttman and Robert Lipton read their poetry at 7:30 at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Abhinaya Dance Company of San Jose “Poetic Splendor in Bharatanatyam” at 5 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 408-983-0491. www.sulekha.com/bayarea  

Yancie Taylor Jazztet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Rankin Scroo, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $TBA. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Zion-I, Pigeon John at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 548-1159. 

Emily Kurn and Marianne Barlow at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Married Couple at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

House Jacks at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Kurt Ribak Jazz Group at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

The Steve Deutsch Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Mirthkon, Three Piece Combo, Inner Ear Bridge at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Freeze at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Giant Squid, The River Runs Black, heavy metal, at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $7. 451-8100.  

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

CHILDREN 

Abby & The Pipsqueaks at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054.  

THEATER 

The Herstories Project “Tapestries” at 6 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $10-$25. 207-6623. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Viewpoints” plein-air landscapes by Barbara Ward, many of Tilden Park, on display at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park, Tues.-Sun. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to Aug. 26. 525-2233. 

“Point Pinole: A Place Apart” An exhibition on the explosive and peaceful past of the Point Pinole Shoreline, at Contra Costa County Historical Society, 610 Main St., Martinez. Exhibit runs to Aug. 23. 925-229-1042. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Barbara Siesel “Flute Music from Around the World” at 2 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17.  

The Lovell Sisters at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Falso Baiano Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Rebecca Mauleon, Jimmy Branly and Gary Brown “Piano y Ritmo” Clinic from 4 to 6 p.m., concert at 8 p.m. at La Peña. Cost is $15-$25. 849-2568.  

Salvador Santana, Antioquia, new world grooves, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. 

MONDAY, JULY 2 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tsunami Affected Lives: Moving Beyond Disaster” Photographs by Adrienne Miller at La Peña, through Aug. 31. 849-2568. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “It’s a Mystery,” stories by Lee Child, Agatha Christie and Donald Westlake at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. ricaisabella@yahoo.com 

Readings from the Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Marvin Ray at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Itals, Malika Madremana & The Greensphere Band, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054.  

Fito Reinoso at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

O’KEEFE’S TAKE ON WALT WHITMAN’S ‘SONG OF MYSELF’ 

There have been plays about poets, and poetry readings that are just as much performances, but John O’Keefe’s one-man show of Whitman’s 1855 edition of “Song of Myself” is something else again, a recitation of that epic of American life, both lyric and epic, panoramic and internal, taken to the audience in the way the poet seemed to wish his screed taken to heart by his fellow countrymen. 

O’Keefe, cofounder of Berkeley’s Blake St. Hawkeyes, playwright, opera librettist, works the room as himself combined with the professedly genial Walt, after speaking with élan about the effect the poem has had on him. A bravura chamber performance, a bright way of making the audience—and each spectator—aware of being the silent partner in the unfolding of a living exhortation to be human beings. At the Marsh at 1062 Valencia St, in San Francisco through this weekend. For more information, call (415) 641-0235 or visit www.themarsh.org.

“If a working man can’t kill himself on a Sunday morning, we may as well have the Revolution at once!” Witty, barbed lines like these are almost thrown away in Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon, as brilliantly translated by Christopher Fry, and charmingly produced at the Masquers Playhouse in Point Richmond. 

But beneath the sparkling veneer is a streak of melancholy, almost Shakespearean, at the passing strange guises of rich and poor, beautiful and plain, in this modern romance of High Society tricked by its own credulity, and love mistaken for duplicity—and vice versa. 

It’s particularly like those Shakespeare comedies that rely on doubling, taken from the allegories and fantastic romances of Antiquity. Here it’s rich, handsome twin brothers, amiable Frederic and clever, cynical Hugo (both deftly played by Cin Seperi), and the very different pair of girls who love them—each loving the wrong one. Mistaken identity and indiscriminate taste—the stock-in-trade of old romance, whatever end it’s put to.  

Frederic is in love with the daughter of cunning financier Messerschmann (David L. Lee), Diana (a pouting Rachel Garcia), and spends his nights beneath her window. “The maid finds his bed uncrumpled and the rhododendron bush crumpled,” remarks Hugo to the agitated, hand-wringing butler Joshua (piquant Norman MacLeod). Yet Diana’s stuck on Hugo, and believes he’s kissed her in the park. The two brothers are identical, except in character. “Why haven’t you a heart?” Hugo is asked. “Because my brother has too much,” he answers, “I love nobody; that is why I can organize this evening’s little comedy.”  

For a ball, Hugo hires Isabelle, an itinerant dancer (Jillian O’Malior, a splendid ingenue), traveling with her semi-bohemian stage mother (madcap Dory Ehrlich), to pose as a pretty girl of quality, and woo Frederic away from Diana. Hugo is to be her Svengali, her Pygmalion—except in this case, the creation falls for the creator. Hugo, absorbed in his ruse, doesn’t notice.  

“So according to you, the truth means nothing,” Hugo’s asked. “Nothing, if no one believes it!” There’s an echo of magic in the wings, as the brothers switch off, and the snare for Frederic is played out. But there are complications. 

Madame Desmermortes (a very charming Loralee Windsor), the wheelchair-bound matriarch, might catch wind of the intended ruse, and tweak it with her considerable wit, which she reels off like a Lady Bracknell. (Berating her companion, Capulet (Sandra Bond), for leaving her alone: “I’ve gone over all my shortcomings—twice! And if you’d been longer, I’d begun to regret them!”) 

There’s also that affected, archly flamboyant Dorothy, Lady India (Anne Collins, striking pose after pose), Meserschmann’s mistress, entangled too with the clockwork doll-of-a-beau, Patrice Bombelles (Ted V. Bigornia). Their deadpan tango-with-scheming dialogue is a showstopper (choreographed by Kris Bell). And there’s Messerschmann himself, threatening Romainville (fluttery lepidopterist C. Conrad Cady) with failure of his pig-iron interests if the ruse, in which he plays Isabelle’s uncle, isn’t stopped.  

“You’re young and handsome and rich—what could make you sad?” Isabelle asks Frederic. “To be young and handsome and rich, as you call it—with nothing to be gained by it,” replies the young man—but it’s a rehearsal for the ruse, with Hugo taking his twin’s part. 

Somehow, as in true romances, true love, in this game of true-and-false, wins out, but not before a catfight of ingenues, a ripping-up of banknotes, and angry rejoinders about the rich and their social games versus the poor: “Your nurses were right to tell you not to play with the common children in the park. They don’t know how to play.” 

With John Hull’s direction and Tammy Berlin’s costuming, Ring Round the Moon comes off with appropriately gay festivity, a touch of the bizarre, and a healthy dose of world-weary wisdom: “It’s all there’s time for, before we laugh on the other side of our graves,” says Hugo. 

The Masquers, a proud community troupe, bring it off handsomely. It’s a good time to catch it, in the last two weeks of their run. 

RING ROUND THE MOON 

8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through July 14 at the Masquers Playhouse,  

105 Park Place, Point Richmond.  

$15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org.

There’s a row of owls glaring down at the audience in the theater at the Berkeley City Club. And the program for Bird in the Hand, Anne Galjour’s new play, directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang for Central Works, lists the various parts played by the four players (including Ms. Galjour), as well as the bird calls they perform during the course of the action. 

Bird in the Hand is a wry milieu play, cutting back and forth, in and out of the lives of a bunch of San Franciscans touched by the fervor for birding. The various couples and stray, uncoupled characters, as well-performed by the author, Terry Lamb (with an impressive sense of characterization), Joel Mullenix and Central Works’ co-director, Jan Zvaifler, are an eccentric, even extravagant lot, as they come together and break apart in rhythms reminiscent of bird-song, hopping or skittering. 

But Galjour has another purpose as well, one that came to the fore since the original “little experiment” of the piece as “a convergence of monologues and playwriting in the form of duets” in 2001. 

After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Galjour notes, “It affected my writing process. Where I grew up in southeastern Louisiana the culture and landscape is literally disappearing. It has heightened my concern for what is disappearing from the urban landscape in the Bay Area.” 

The play was developed as a collaborative process  

“I’ll never forget my first quail. I got hit in the head with a golfball! When I came to, I heard it,”one character says—and the appropriate calls often follow such lines, though the dramatis personae tend to express themselves more in dialogue, with an occasional monologue to another, listening character.  

“The mockingbird goes through its repertoire, sounds like a car alarm sometimes,” says another. All the alarums and diversions of existences enriched—or distorted—by the love of—the obsession for—birds, make up the comedy, which can turn simply poignant. A man alone in a house full of empty birdcages and photographs of wildlife talks about the death of his partner, an avid birder, to the neighbor whose husband deserted her and went on the road for the migratory tour. And the bereaved survivor isn’t a bird lover himself. 

After his partner’s death, he says he “opened the cages of finches and opened the windows ... [and] heard them try to get back in, crashing against the windows.” 

Another couple is fighting to stay in their place, the neighborhood association objecting to his pigeon-keeping. Yet another acts out a tale of near-captivity, with an exercise-minded boyfriend controlling his live-in displaced Louisianan woman-friend with rewards for her not eating ... all those dresses do more than feather the nest. 

Birders and their codependencies, the unglimpsed avian lives around us in the urban scheme of things, the mating and survival rituals of humans in their own endangered habitats ... unusual stuff to make a play of, but Galjour’s humorous and perceptive lines knit together the two worlds into a contemporary Bay Area version of The Bluebird of Happiness, Maeterlinck’s fin-de-siecle fantasy play about the search for the fowl that will make all fair. 

As in her narratives and solo performances, Galjour brings something different, a touch of sensibility, to the very bones of her dramaturgy, fleshed out in the Central Works style. It’s reflected in charming ways—like the most romantic (and therefore hopeful) line spoken, “Would you like to go owling in Glen Canyon?” 

BIRD IN THE HAND 

Presented by Central Works at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and at 5 p.m. Sundays through July 29 at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. $9-$25. 

558-1381. www.centralworks.org.

Hildegarde Flanner’s Wildfire: Berkeley, 1923 is a clear-eyed description of a natural disaster seen at close quarters; and, for Berkeleyans, an unforgettable picture of nature’s fury turned against us in our own homes. After reading it, even the greenest greenhorns will understand the dreadful power of wildfire and how rapidly it can consume a neighborhood.  

On Sept. 17, 1923, Flanner and her mother were living on Euclid Avenue in North Berkeley, just above Buena Vista Way. She wrote that it “was a hot, dry day. At mid-morning the wind blew heavily from inland ... while the big tea-colored hills of Berkeley appeared to rise and float ... It was between noon and one o’clock that we became aware of the scent of smoke coming from the eucalyptus trees on the hills above us.” To the reader it seems as though she and her mother took an agonizingly long time to shake themselves free from the rhythm of their ordinary, daily routine.  

When they finally fled downhill to the relative safety of Shattuck Avenue they looked back in a state of shock at the unbelievable: “... the increasing smoke. Only smoke. No flames could as yet be seen. Up there, hidden in turmoil and destruction, our home was burning. Up there, deep in smoke and terrible heat, our home was being consumed, and only just now we had walked out the front door and in no time at all the house was burning and all our possessions were burning and the smoke rose thickly in huge malign puffs.” 

As she tells of the fire she also gives us a memorable portrait of her mother. Mary Flanner, her daughter says, was an actress, “a religious woman whose true vocation was the theater.” On stage she gave “touching and poetic performances of Deirdre and Kathleen ni Houlihan” and other heroines in the repertory of the day. But in her daughter’s eyes, none of these equalled her display of conscience-stricken grief when she was seized by the obsessive thought that she might somehow have started the fire: “It was drama, but the drama of truth uncontrived, and in it life and art met and no one could have told the difference.” 

Hildegarde Flanner’s account of the fire is self-effacing but she is firmly present in it. She says next to nothing about herself. She seems to be a young woman, twenty something, who arrived in Berkeley some time before the fire and vanished afterward. Not a word suggests she was already a well-known poet, with two books to her credit, publishing regularly in The Nation, The New Republic and Poetry. In 1923 her expatriate sister wrote that she was known in Paris “as Hildegarde Flanner’s sister.”  

Early life 

June Hildegarde Flanner Monhoff, to give her full name, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1899, the youngest child in a prosperous upper middle-class family. At the time of her birth, her sister Janet was 7 and her sister Marie was 12. Frank Flanner, her father, was a successful businessman, and her mother gave recitals of poetry and dramatic readings at women’s clubs throughout the Midwest and the South. 

“We were not rich, and we were not poor,” Hilldegarde told Brenda Wineapple, her sister’s biographer, “and we did not lead dull lives.” The Flanners appeared to be happy and deeply rooted in their community. 

All this changed in 1912, when Frank Flanner committed suicide. The circumstances remain unexplained to this day, but he seems to have been suffering from a deep, pathological depression, a condition not understood or even recognized then. He left his mystified, desolated widow and children a fortune of more than $100,000. 

Within a few years Marie went to live in New York, where she became a piano teacher. Janet made her way to Paris and became famous writing for The New Yorker under the pseudonym “Genet.” Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939 is a captivating selection from her journalism. Janet’s literary fame eventually surpassed Hildegarde’s. 

As the youngest child, Hildegarde was expected to look after her mother. In 1915 they explored California together, visiting Pasadena, San Francisco and Berkeley. They liked what they saw, and Hildegarde enrolled at the University in Berkeley, studying poetry with Witter Bynner. And she met Frederick Monhoff.  

Southern California  

After the fire, she and her mother moved to Altadena, a suburb of Pasadena, in the Sierra Madre mountains. Frederick Monhoff also came south, and Hildegarde married him in 1926. An artist and an architect, he taught for more than twenty years at the Otis Art Institute, became the Principal Architect for Design for Los Angeles County, and illustrated her books. Like Berkeley, Altadena was subject to wildfires, and she has recalled how, “More than once, when wind brought the fire into the outskirts of our community and we were less than a mile from flying embers, my husband spent the night packing two cars with what he decided was most valuable among his collection of architectural designs, books, Chinese scrolls, Japanese prints and Navajo rugs. Onto this pile I always added his own etchings and paintings, which he characteristically delayed in gathering...” 

After a life-time of witnessisng wildfires Hildegarde Flanner concluded that, “People who come to California to live with the exhilarating joys of scenery and climate must learn to pay for the privilege, faithfully and painfullly.” 

During these years, according to Dana Goioa, she “became the central poet in Pasadena’s thriving artistic community, writing as a dismayed witness to urban sprawl and environmental threats.” In 1962, when her husband retired, they moved north to the Napa Valley. Part of their motivation was shared anger at the pillaging of Southern Callifornia by developers.  

Northern California 

In Napa Valley, where she lived for the next 25 years, she and her husband continued their environmental activism and she continued to write. In all, she published twelve volumes of poetry and four collections of essays. Poems: Collected and Selected is a selection of her work she made near the end of her life. The essays in Brief Cherishing tell the story of her life with Frederick Monhoff. He died in 1975, and she passed away in 1987, at 87 years of age.  

Poetry  

Hildegarde Flanner is one of the outstanding poets of the California landscape. (No doubt more than one developer called her “a tree hugger.”) Her evident love of the land has, however, promoted a narrow view of her work. She was a deeply humanistic writer who thought and felt seriously about issues of concern to all of us. Her language—always the measure of a poet—is as euphonious as Ina Coolbrith’s, but she writes with wit and humor foreign to the older poet. Flanner’s talent is fully on display in “One Dark Night” (see below). 

Prose  

Her essays provide use with wonderful pieces about the people and places she loved, as well as the ones she didn’t. “The Place of a Sequin” gives us a glimpse of her childhood in Indianapolis. “Wildfire” and “Roots and Hedges” share the early years of her life in California. 

Of “A Brief Cherishing,” Janet Lewis wrote, “It is a vivid evocation of some of the best years of a long and deeply happy marriage, the story of a great love, and a great experience of living on the loved earth ... a clear and tender and witty vision of life perceived, fortunately remembered and recalled for us.” 

Her years of widowhood are evoked unsentimentally in “The Chronicle of Zoe,” the story of a young friend of hers and their efforts to protect land in the Napa Valley.  

ONE DARK NIGHT 

Jess Dooley’s dog and Ralph’s old Duchess 

Have booed the hoodlums off our vineyard hill. 

Oppossums and raccoons and skunks have slid away 

And two fine dogs lie down upon tranquility, 

Full of the best ill-will... 

On a dark night perhaps like this 

There was a dingy shed made beautiful 

By a smack of radiance  

And silver of fresh fallen clover hay, 

But here at home, dear one, we say 

To Jess’s dog and Ralph’s old Duchess, Dogs, alas, 

The times are gnawed clean out of chance 

For a second savior to be born... 

And as we hear the tread of turmoil toward us 

We can only try to do 

Whatever it is that we do best, 

And in a dark night of the soul’s inconsequence 

Humbly to make love, 

Boldly to make sense. 

Dogs, amen.

It began with a phone call: Jean Moss, a Berkeley reader, had an odd nest that had fallen from a Cecile Bruner rosebush. She suspected it was some kind of hummingbird nest, because she had seen a female hummer hanging around it acting territorial. But what she described sounded more like a bushtit nest, bag-shaped with a small entrance hole near the top. Curious, I arranged to stop by and take a look at it. 

Bushtit is what it was, all right, very much like the one I discovered last year in the Lady Banks rose outside the kitchen window. It was a remarkable object, tightly felted from plant matter and spiderweb and decorated with moss and lichen. According to Hal Harrison’s Field Guide to Western Bird Nests, bushtits may also use leaves, grasses, and cocoons for the basic construction and plant down, wool, hair, and feathers for the lining. 

Mrs. Moss was adamant that she hadn’t seen any bushtits—chubby long-tailed grayish birds—in the neighborhood, and I am convinced she knows a bushtit from a hummingbird. So what about the hummer? I have a theory about that, and I’ll get to it later. 

Bushtits are interesting little birds, though. (I don’t know who saddled them with that name.) Once thought to be close relatives of the chickadees and titmice, the last taxonomic reshuffle put them in a separate family along with the Eurasian long-tailed tits, and recent studies suggest they may be close to the Old World warblers. They got here some 10 to 12 million years ago, via the Bering land bridge, and have spread as far south as Guatemala. 

They’re even more social than chickadees. You hardly even see a lone bushtit. Except for the nesting season, flocks stick together year-round, and pairs rejoin the flock as soon as their nestlings fledge. Flock members roost together, huddling close for warmth on chilly nights. They forage as a group, bridging the gaps between trees one bird at a time. 

In some parts of their range, bushtit sociality goes even farther: two or more females may lay their eggs in the same nest, and supernumerary helpers—maybe last year’s offspring—help the parents rear the brood. But this seems more common in southern Arizona than in coastal California. 

There seem to be two basic nest-building techniques. In heavy vegetation, the pair attaches spiderweb and plant material to a couple of support points and stretches the incipient nest into a loose sack. Alternatively, they start with a platform bridging a fork in a branch. One or both of the builders stretches the platform into a cup by sitting in it. Eventually the cup becomes a sack. I couldn’t track it down, but I recall reading somewhere about some northern people—the Saami, or some Siberian tribe—using the nests of long-tailed tits as children’s footwear. 

Like many Bay Area resident birds, bushtits start their nesting season early; eggs have been confirmed in California nests as early as February 26. Some coastal California populations raise two broods a year.  

So it’s reasonable that a bushtit nest should be active in May. But how to account for the hummingbird? Some birds do reuse the nests of other species; the piratic flycatcher of the New World tropics boots the original owners out and takes their nest over. But I could find no account of our local hummers using another bird’s nest. Their own open-faced cup-shaped nests are completely different in size and shape; all they have in common is the decorative lichen. 

Huh. Lichen. Instead of nesting in the bushtits’ construction, maybe Mrs. Moss’s hummer was recycling it—using its components to build her own nest. That wouldn’t be unheard-of. Bushtits are known to steal nest material from each other, and in the Chiracahua Mountains of Arizona warblers and vireos dismantle bushtit nests for material. As for the hummer’s behavior, she might have seen the nest as a resource to be defended, like a patch of nectar-bearing flowers. 

Who knows? Birds do go to extremes to get their nesting material. I’ve seen lichen-covered hummingbird nests a long way from the nearest lichen. The grand prize would have to go to the South American fork-tailed palm swift, which lines its nest with feathers. It was assumed for a long time that it just picked up feathers that were lying around. But no. Recent observations indicate it plucks the feathers from the backs of other birds, in flight. Victims range in size from thrush to turkey vulture, but the swifts seem to have a preference for pigeon and parrot feathers. Must be an unsettling experience for the donors. 

Photograph by Joe Eaton. The mystery nest, with a pair of binoculars for scale. 

Joe Eaton’s “Wild Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday in the Berkeley Daily Planet, alternating with Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column on East Bay trees.

TUESDAY, JUNE 26 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit the Eastshore State Park. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll look for insects from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 1247 Marin Ave. 524-9122.  

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Documentaries at 7 p.m. at the Gaia Arts Center, 2140 Dwight Way. Donation of $5 benefits the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. 665-0305. 

Berkeley PC Users Group meets at 7 p.m. at 25 Dartmouth Dr . near Claremont Hotel. Call for directions. 841-4411. 2rhs07@comcast.net 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. 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. We always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 

The Unveiling of A Mural In Tribute to Maudelle Shirek from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Maudelle Shirek Building, Outside City Council Chambers, 2134 Martin Luther King Way. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll look for insects from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Green Chamber of Commerce Mixer at 5:30 p.m. at Sam’s Log Cabin, 945 San Pablo Ave., Albany. Cost is $5, members free. 219-7211. www.greenchamberofcommerce.net 

“Increasing Energy Efficiency and Renewables in our Homes and Businesses” from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. Sponsored by the Energy Commission. 981-7081. 

“The Threat to Civil Rights and Habeas Corpus” with Ann Fagan Ginger at the Berkeley Gray Panthers meeting at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 548-9696. 

“The Global Gardener” With Bill Mollison on his film on sustainable agriculture around the world at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., between Telegraph and Broadway, Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

“Berkeley-Ukraine Partnership for the Environment” A roundtable discussion on ways to address the globe’s most pressing environmental challenges at 7 p.m. at Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

”Punishment Park” A pseudo-documentary about controlling mass protests set during the Vietnam War at 8 p.m. at Long Haul Infoship, 3124 Shattuck Ave. www.thelonghaul.org 

Project BUILD Kickoff Berkeley United in Literacy Development summer reading program at 11 a.m. at James Kenney Recreation Center, 1718 8th St. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/recreation/jameskenney.html 

East Bay Traveling Travel Writers Salon at 6:30 p.m. at 515 Pomona Ave, Albany. 524-2459. 

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. 548-9840. 

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, JUNE 28 

Community Workshop on East Touchdown Plaza at Aquatic Park, including bicycle and pedestrian access improvements, seating, signage and landscaping, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-6715. 

Walkin’ Pride An LGBT nature walk for the whole family at 6:30 p.m. at Tilden’s Inspiration Point. Bring layered clothing and water. 525-2233. 

CSI at Your Library A hands-on crime-solving program for children 10 and older, at 2 p.m. at West Branch Library, 1125 University. Registration required. 981-6270. 

Easy Does It Board of Directors’ Meeting at 6:30 p.m. at 1636 University Ave. 845-5513. edi@easyland.org  

“Postcards from Italia: Food, Land and Culture” and the parallels and inspiration for California farms and gardens at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Quit Smoking Class from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., with optional accupuncture, at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. For more information call 981-5330. 

Storytime for Babies and Toddlers at 10:30 a.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Red Cross Mobile Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Oakland State Building, Training Room 1, 1515 Clay St., Oakland. To schedule an appointment call 622-3200. 

Free Skin Cancer Screening at Alta Bates Summit, Oakland. Appointments required. 869-8833, ext. 2. 

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. 

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Mayor Tom Bates on “State of the City” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Indigenous Permaculture Progam in El Salvador” A slide show on rural community development and sustainable communities, and a Mayan cultural presentation, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Donation $10-$35. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

Free Compost for Berkeley Residents Self-serve for the general public from 11:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. at Berkeley Marina Maintenance Yard, 201 University Ave., next to Adventure Playground, Berkeley. 644-6566. 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 9 to 11 a.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St. at Ashby. 981-5332. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction. Potluck supper at 7 p.m., dancing at 8 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navellier St., El Cerrito. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253.  

0 to 100 Watts in 4 Days A workshop to build an FM broadcast transmitter, sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley. With an emphasis on hands-on learning, you will learn how to solder, identify electronic components, assemble a 40 watt transmitter from a kit of parts, build and tune an antenna, properly setup and test broadcast equipment, and more. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day, at 2311 Adeline, Unit P, Oakland. Cost is $200-$250 sliding scale. 625-0314. www.freeradio.org 

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 

Drip Irrigation A workshop on landscape watering that utilizes low-flow and conservation principles from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sponsored by the Alameda County Cleanwater Program and EBMUD. Call to register and for location. 548-2220, ext. 233. 

“Restore Wetlands in Oakland” A volunteer opportunity with Save the Bay on a wetland restoration project near the Oakland Airport. From 9 a.m. to noon. RSVP to 452-9261 ext. 109. 

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Full Moon Walk at John Muir National Historic Site Join a Park Ranger for a walk under a full moon to see noctunal animal life. Reservations required. Call for details. 925-228-8860. 

Canned Food Donation for the Alameda County Community Food Bank at the film showing of "Ratatouille" at Berkeley 7 Theater, 2274 Shattuck Ave. Bring 2-8 canned food from 1 to 5 p.m. 635-3663, ext. 358. 

Origami for All Ages Learn to fold five different origami shapes from 2 to 4 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext 17. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best cat friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500.  

Preschool Storytime for 3 to 5-year-olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720 ext. 17. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

SUNDAY, JULY 1 

Habitat Hunters A hike for the whole family to discover what makes a habitat, at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233.  

“Open Garden” Join the Little Farm gardener for composting, planting, watering and reaping the rewards of our work, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

EcoHouse Tour Visit the the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., entrance on Peralta. Cost $10, sliding scale. 548-2220 ext. 242. 

Insect Hunt A capture and release program for the whole family at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. www.ebparks.org 

Social Action Forum with Eric Mills on animal rights at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Peach Tasting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmers’ Market, 303 Arlington, behind ACE Hardware, Kensington.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

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 Jack Petranker on “Learning to Be” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JULY 2 

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. 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., June 27, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Energy Commission meets Wed., June 27, at 6:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5434.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., June 27 at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Police Review Commission meets Wed., June 27, at 7:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-4950.  

Mental Health Commission meets Wed., June 28, at 5 p.m. at 2640 MLK Jr. Way, at Derby. 981-5213.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., June 28, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. Mark Rhoades, 981-7410.

Healthy Living 

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, the Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues. 

East Bay Guide 

The Daily Planet invites readers to contribute to a guide for newcomers to the area. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words, describing a favorite or little-known aspect of East Bay life, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.