Election Section
Cragmont Rock Park
Neighborhood residents bought the land for Cragmont Rock Park from the Cragmont Land Company and donated it to the City of Berkeley at purchase price. It was dedicated for park purposes in 1920. Dick Leonard, the “father of technical climbing,” formed the Cragmont Climbing Club, which was absorbed a few months later into the Sierra Club’s Rock Climbing Section.
Using the techniques he had learned climbing at Cragmont Rock, Leonard planned the first technical rock climb in Yosemite in 1934. Leonard led over a hundred expeditions and climbs in the Sierra Nevada, at times with his friend, environmentalist David Brower, making many first ascents on mountains earlier thought impossible to climb. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/parks/parkspages/CragmontRock.html
As a lifelong resident of Berkeley (born here, 1949), I have enjoyed Cragmont Rock Park at many times during my life: as a kid playing football on the oddly-shaped terraced fields; as a teen in a film my Berkeley High School English class made of Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews; as a young adult showing my Cal English professor the beautiful view.
Now in middle age, as a librarian at the Berkeley Public Library and as a poet and performer working with another Berkeley native, dancer Lucinda Weaver, I want to celebrate this wonderful park.
I have done research at local, regional, and national institutions, and I have found little: its history remains hidden, but still I persevere.
If you have information on the history of Cragmont Rock Park, its beginnings, its Easter Celebrations, the Friends of Cragmont Park, its many uses for climbing, picknicking, and recreation, please contact me at: 684-0931 or abbern@sbcglobal.net
A Dream of Set-ups: Tableaux Vivants
At Cragmont Rock Park
There are Terraces there,
two flat as playing fields,
one just barely level
that spreads to a steep hill
encouraging rolling down.
Any of these spaces
invites us to parade
music, dance, poetry
and instructs with drama,
characterful or not,
primal dreams of set-ups,
figures sculpted, moving,
or imaginary,
measured Tableaux Vivants.
By figures we mean not
only dogs or people,
but anything that fits
the dream, once medieval
and miniaturized,
but now universal,
if we agree, joyful,
and, yes, mandatory.
Imagine with us, please,
those spaces at that Park,
Cragmont Rock Park, with trees,
grass, climbing rocks hidden,
views to both Town & Gown,
Bay and Tamalpais,
Oakland and Albany,
Richmond, San Francisco,
whose patron saint, Francis,
has moved the world to peace
for these 1000 years,
his Tableaux in Chapels
in the Sacro Monte
above Lago d'Orta
in Northern Italy.
Here at Cragmont Rock Park,
these wondrous 3 acres:
"Neighborhood residents
bought the land for Cragmont
Rock Park from the Cragmont
Land Company and
donated it to
the City of Berkeley
at purchase price. It was
dedicated for park
purposes in 1920."
From the earliest years,
Easter ceremonies
awakened neighbors there
with trumpets, songs, and walks
up Easter Way from Spruce,
Cragmont, Euclid to the top.
Later, with Cragmont rock,
the CCC built walls
and park bathroom building
under WPA
to beautify the Park
à la mode so that rock-
to-rock they built fit to
Nature's rocks and wild brush
as cousins, exactly as the preservation
would dictate and desire.
Picture on climbing rocks
David Brower, leader
of the Sierra Club,
learning from Dick Leonard
“the father of modern
rock climbing,” holds for
Yosemite's long climbs:
Brower "used this special
knowledge to prepare training
manuals during World War II,
which proved critical in
enabling the 86th
Regiment of the U.S.
Army to surprise the Germans
at Riva Ridge in the North
Appennines in Italy,
the major action
disrupting German lines
in southern Europe."
All this from a small park
hidden in Berkeley's hills!
The upper terrace there,
later a parking lot
for neighbors and for teens,
viewing from their large cars
the views that teens must view.
A call to festivals
dedicated to parks
and the ecologies
of harmony we dream.
Remember the sweet songs
and find the little building
tucked into the north side
of Cragmont Park's hill rock,
a building framed with rock --
self-same rock -- once bathroom
to the park, now shut down
unsafe. Open locked doors,
put inside as set-ups,
behind the barred windows,
clear glass for visitors,
to view a new set-up,
glory to Cragmont Park,
to San Francesco,
to Leonard and Brower,
even to Easter Way,
to the teens who still come,
and to all of us here
who would visit the Park
for a celebration of peace, harmony
and some resolution
of the other dark roads
we must travel, if not
alone or underneath
Imperial Bush skies,
then at least together.
And the briefer set-ups,
waystations for our stays
on the drying grass lawns,
that will be created
to tell partial stories
of Cragmont Rock Park, jewel
hidden in Berkeley's hills,
waiting for your walk up.