RADICAL MANIFEST DESTINY: MAPPING POWER OVER URBAN

GREEN SPACE IN THE AGE OF PROTEST, 1968-1988

by

Kera N. Lovell

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of American Studies

West Lafayette, Indiana

December 2017

ii

THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL

STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL

Dr. Nancy Gabin

Department of History

Dr. Kathryn Cramer Brownell

Department of History

Dr. Shannon McMullen

Department of Art and Design / Program in American Studies

Dr. Laura Zanotti

Department of Anthropology

Approved by:

Dr. Nancy Gabin

Department of Hisory

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation was funded by a range of grants, fellowships, and awards, including

Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Purdue

University’s American Studies program, Purdue University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality

Studies Program, and Purdue University’s Office of Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs. Over

the past few years, several awards have funded my research, including the Carter Manny Award

by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Lynn Fellowship at Purdue

University, the Berenice A. Carroll Feminism and Social Justice Award at Purdue University, the

Chester E. Eisinger Research Award and the Chester E. Eisinger Paper Prize by Purdue

University’s American Studies program, and the Purdue Research Foundation Grant.

Research trips to archives could not have been completed without substantial awards and

grants, including the Michigan Technological University Archival Travel Grant to research at

Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library, the James P. Danky Fellowship to research

at the Wisconsin Historical Society at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the Bordin-Gillette

Researcher Fellowship to research at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library,

the Silas Palmer Fellowship to research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a short-

term travel fellowship to research for a month at the University of Illinois, Chicago, as well as

several travel grants awarded by Purdue University’s American Studies program, the College of

Liberal Arts, the American Studies Graduate Student Organization, and the Purdue Graduate

Student Association. In additon, an adaptation of this project was also awarded by the Fulbright

Program as semi-finalist for the National Georgraphic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. Thank

you to countless organizations that awarded travel grants to present my research, including the

Annette K. Baxter Travel Grant by the American Studies Association, the American Society for

Envrionmental History’s National Science Foundation travel grant, a grant awarded by Boston

University’s Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, a grant awarded by the Society

for American City and Regional Planning History, the Promise Award by Purdue University’s

College of Liberal Arts, and the Global Synergy Research Grant to conduct research in Italy for

one month as awarded by Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts.

The list of individuals who contributed their time and energy to the completion of this

dissertation is exhaustive. To begin, I would like to thank my advisor, Nancy Gabin, who has

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been my champion and rock since I began a Master’s program at Purdue University in 2009. She

has read thousands of pages of my writing, always providing line-by-line comments, signatures,

and recommendations for years. I cannot repay her for taking precious time away from her

family to always give help. Without her, I could not have written this dissertation. Bill Mullen,

Rayvon Fouché, Shannon McMullen, Susan Curtis, Kathryn Brownell, and Laura Zanotti have

served as invaluable mentors, colleagues, and references when I needed an advocate and a critic

over the years. Other Purdue University faculty, including Jon Teaford, TJ Boisseau, and John

Larson have connected me with other scholars and sources of funding, while providing helpful

feedback. Over the twists and turns of this project, I have had the privilege to receive input and

inspiration from such leading scholars as Simone Cinotto, Suleiman Osman, Ann Keating,

Temma Kaplan, Giovanna Di Chiro, Stephanie Gilmore, Lisa Banu, Daniel Horowitz, Frank

Zelko, Rob Gioielli, David Stradling, Tammy Ingram, Bettina Aptheker, Chad Montrie, Joshua

Clark Davis, Garrett Nelson, and Jessica Frazier. Had it not been for my undergraduate advisor,

Mary Cain, at Agnes Scott College recommending that I pursue graduate work in American

Studies, my life would be radically different. I try to model my teaching after her classroom.

My friends and colleagues have taken time away from their own fantastic scholarship,

teaching, and families to help this project succeed, including Jaime Hough, Katje Armentrout,

Stephen Horrocks, Wes Bishop, Dara Walker, Rachel Bunker, Brandon Ward, Andrew

McGregor, Lisa Banu, Olon Dotson, Michel Mounayar, Chelsea Stripe, Nick Marino, and

Valerie Wiesner. Your inspirational work and your support have been invaluable. My parents

gave me a push to go away to graduate school and helped support me financially as a Master’s

student and offered support and praise when I really needed it. My siblings, Brooke, Mikhail,

and honorary sister Somaly, have remained enthused about my work even when it did not make

any sense, driving nine to ten hours each way to Indiana to visit and celebrate my

accomplishments—all while I missed seeing their children grow up. Thank you.

Most importantly, I would like to thank S.B. who I met a year into my Ph.D. program,

who has been my rock and cheerleader over the past few years. S.B. has given countless hours in

support, including buying me books, bringing me coffee, reading drafts, hiding quietly in other

rooms preparing meals for me while I write, tolerating me typing by the campfire on “vacation,”

and singing my praises while working on a career. You have tried to make this really exhausting

process as painless as could be. I could not ask for a better friend and advocate. Thank you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ……………………………………………………………………….…..…vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..……………………………………………………...………….viii

ABSTRACT ..…………………………………………………………………………..………...ix

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………..…….1

1.2 Historiography and Theoretical Frameworks ...………………………………..……..19

1.3 Chapter Outline …………………………………………………………..…………..32

1.4 Reexamining Failure: Limitations and Further Research ……………………..……..39

CHAPTER 2. “THE RAPE OF MOTHER EARTH”: GENDERED WORK, WOMEN’S

EMPOWERMENT, AND ROMANTICIZED NATURE IN THE PEOPLE’S PARK

MOVEMENT

2.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….....47

2.2 Interrogating Masculinity in Historiography …………………………………….…..50

2.3 Redefining Work: Labor in the Origins and Experience of Berkeley’s People’s Park

……………………......…………………………………………………………….…...64

2.4 Emotional Labor and Hidden Park Hierarchies …………………..………………….71

2.5 The Reclamation of Masculinity in the Construction of Racial Harmony …..……….79

2.6 Gender, Sexuality, and Work: Women’s “Natural” Labor in People’s Parks ….….....92

2.7 Conclusion ...………………………………………………………………………..111

CHAPTER 3. DESIGNING ANARCHY: MAPS, PLANTS, AND OBJECTS IN THE

CONSTRUCTION OF LIBERATED ZONES

3.1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………114

3.2 Mapping Berkeley’s People’s Park …..……………………………………………..119

3.3 Sod, Gardens, and Trees: Plant Matter in the Reclamation and Regulation of a Gendered

Native Wilderness .……………………..………………………………………………….130

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3.4 Making Sense of Randomness in the Search for Authenticity …..…………….……146

3.5 Representations of Women and Artistic Autonomy ………………………………..154

3.6 Conclusion .…………………………………………………………………………164

CHAPTER 4. CONSUMING REBELLION: FOOD AND THE POLITICAL

THEATRICALITY OF INSURGENT PLACEMAKING

4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………169

4.2 “Deciphering a Meal”: People’s Stews as a Lens into Identity Politics at People’s Parks

……….…………………………………………………………………………………….174

4.3 Going “Whole Hog”: Masculine Performances on Fire at People’s Parks …………184

4.4 Politicized Consumption: Gender, Race, Class and the Alternative Economies of Food

Production and Consumption in People’s Parks …………………………………………..203

4.5 The Origins of the Criminalization of Free Food Giveaways ………………………214

4.6 Conclusion ...………………………………………………………………………..225

CHAPTER 5. FROM BULLDOZER TO BUCKSHOT: POLICING, BUREAUCRACY, AND

VIOLENCE IN THE ORIGINS OF PEOPLE’S PARKS AS PUBLIC BATTLEGROUNDS

5.1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………228

5.2 From Berkeley to Chicago: The Rise of Political Territoriality in Postwar U.S. Cities

...…......................………………………………………………………………………….231

5.3 Natural Aggression: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Representations of Violence in

Chicago’s Poor People’s Park ……………………………………………………………..253

5.4 Conclusion ...………………………………………………………………………..280

CHAPTER 6. EPILOGUE

6.1 Berkeley’s People’s Park …………………………………………………………….289

6.2 Current Spatial Occupations and the Historical Memory of Berkeley’s People’s Park

……………………………………………………………………………………….304

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...……………………………………………………………………………312

VITA ………………….....……………………………………………………………………..349

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1.1 “Map of People’s Parks” .………………………………………………………...…9

Figure 1.1.2 “U.S. Map of People’s Parks” .………………………………………………..…….9

Figure 1.1.3 “Berkeley Map of People’s Parks” ………………………………………………....10

Figure 1.1.4 “Midwest Map of People’s Parks” .…………………………………………..……..10

Figure 1.1.5 “Abbreviated List of People’s Parks, 1968-1988” …………………….……..……..11

Figure 2.4 “Filming Berkeley’s People’s Park” …….…………………………………………...73

Figure 3.2 “People’s Park IS” ……………….……………………………………………..…..120

Figure 3.5 “Tourists in San Diego’s Chicano Park” ……….……………………………….......157

Figure 6.1 “Welcome to Berkeley, Map” ……………………………..……..…………..……..296

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

American Indian Movement (AIM)

Associated Press (AP)

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)

Chicago Police Department (CPD)

Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC)

Commercial Recreation (CR)

Concerned Citizens Survival Front (CCSF)

Democratic National Convention (DNC)

Department of Urban Renewal (DUR)

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Lincoln Park Conservation Association (LPCA)

Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council (LPCCC)

Michigan Technological University (MTU)

National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE)

Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF)

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

University of Wisconsin (UW)

United Farm Workers (UFW)

United Press International (UPI)

University of California (UC)

Young Lords Organization (YLO)

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ABSTRACT

Author: Lovell, Kera, N.

Institution: Purdue University

Degree Received:

Title: Radical Manifest Destiny: Mapping Power over Urban Green Space in the Age of Protest,

1968-1988

Major Professor: Nancy Gabin

My dissertation traces how conflicts concerning power over green space in the urban

realm sparked a pattern of insurgent park creation as a form of political placemaking in the late

Cold War era. While urban and environmental historians and spatial studies scholars have

illuminated how cities became the context of political disputes over power and space in the

twentieth century, my work sheds light on radical, community-driven environmental design as a

method of protest between the late 1960s and late 1980s. While focused on a handful of central

case studies across the U.S., my work situates them within a disconnected network of more than

forty activist “People’s Parks,” created illegally on vacant lots as civil disobedience tactics.

Using critical theory on gender, race, and urban space to frame my archival research and oral

history interviews, my analysis reveals how activist-created green spaces were not only sites of

coalitional resistance but mediums for critiquing structural inequality. Linking the right to free

speech with freedom from police brutality, urban renewal, and colonialism, park creators

positioned the basic components of these spaces—landscape design, public feasts, and art—as

valuable labor, performances of political theater, and public consciousness raising. The visual,

material, and performative culture of People’s Parks united different communities through the

shared goal of asserting power by claiming and creating urban green space. Their popularity and

wide reach illuminate an important yet undocumented political shift in the late Cold War era in

which demands for spatial citizenship intersected with cultural activism.

1

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

#RhodesMustFall. #BlackLivesMatter. #OccupyWallStreet. While some remember the

headlines that triggered the chant, few perceive the semblance of strategy––takeovers or die-ins

as public performances of political theater to seize power through insurgent placemaking. Using

their bodies and urban landscapes as canvases for protest, grassroots movements like these

demonstrate how space is not property but a symbolic representation of power. Historians,

political anthropologists, and spatial studies scholars have shed light on how civil disobedience

tactics have become more strategic over the course of the late twentieth century in harnessing the

power of public visibility and environmental spatial creations and takeovers to communicate

political resistance.1 Access to and control over green space is a key thread connecting different

forms of spatial occupations. In 2011, the Occupy Movement transformed dozens of parks and

plazas across the U.S. into encampments to protest the bailout of big banks.2 Over the past few

1 For examples on this type of protest as well as the conditions of segregation, the privatization of space, violent

policing, and pollution that they argue have produced these tactics of spatial resistance, see Don Mitchell, The Right

to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (Guilford Press, 2003); Troy Johnson, The Occupation of

Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (University of Illinois Press, 1996);

Yolanda Retter, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Gordon Brent Ingram, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public

Spaces, Sites of Resistance (Bay Press, 1997); Bradford Martin, The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Public

Performance in Sixties America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the

Right to the City to Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012); Ronald Shiffman, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, and Lynne

Elizabeth, Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space (New Village Press,

2012); Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square?: People, Protests and Movements in the

Egyptian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2014); George McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism, and

Rebellion in the Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2011); Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the

Promise of Occupy Wall Street (It Books, 2012); W. J. T Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig,

Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Craig Peariso, Radical Theatrics:

Put-Ons, Politics, and the Sixties (University of Washington Press, 2014); Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong,

eds., Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (Rowman and Littlefield International,

2016); Luisa Martín Rojo, Occupy: The Spatial Dynamics of Discourse in Global Protest Movements (John

Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016). 2 See Occupy Wall Street, http://occupywallst.org/.

2

years Londoner Paul Harfleet memorializes incidents of homophobic street harassment he has

experienced by planting pansies at those sites, creating a network of small flower gardens to

mark both these experiences and his resilience.3 In Chicago, members of the #LetUsBreathe

collective steer Black Lives Matter campaigns in public space, like the creation of Freedom

Square in 2016 to protest the violent policing of black bodies.4 These direct actions make urban

green space both the medium and the message of their social justice politics, revealing the

texture of the environment itself as a palette for political identity formation and community

building. In symbolically creating or reclaiming urban green space to challenge their

displacement, these takeovers use art, performance, plant matter, and shared meals to shed light

on the limitations and privileges of spatial citizenship that shape access to and control over urban

space in the urban realm.5

These actions are part of a growing movement of political placemaking in the late

twentieth century and early twenty-first century that uses the public visibility of insurgent

political theater to challenge displacement.6 In confronting institutionalized spatial power

structures, takeovers, occupations, and activist-created parks reveal green space as not only a

3 See Paul Harfleet, http://www.thepansyproject.com/home. 4 #LetUsBreathe Collective, “Freedom Square Phases Out Overnight Occupancy after 41 Days of Loving Lawndale

and Imagining a World Without Police,” (2016): https://www.letusbreathecollective.com/freedomsquare. 5 I have adapted the term “spatial citizenship” from spatial studies scholarship on “the right to the city.” I adapt my

definition of “spatial citizenship” from Joshua Sbicca and Robert Todd Perdue. I define spatial citizenship as the

limitations and privileges shaping access to and control over urban spaces and the ability to participate in spatial

decision making. Spatial studies scholarship devotes attention to how spatial regulations disproportionately displace

those most marginalized in society in both de jure and de facto ways. See Joshua Sbicca and Robert Todd Perdue,

“Protest Through Presence: Spatial Citizenship and Identity Formation in Contestations of Neoliberal Crises,” Social

Movement Studies vol. 13, no. 3 (2014). 6 I am modeling my definition of “placemaking” on Jeffrey Hou’s definition of insurgent public space as a

momentary rupture in power hierarchies, indicative of a larger erosion of public space. “Making” indicates activity

in creation and power of self-determination rather than “using” which affirms the power of the state. Hou models his

definition on John Holston’s notion of “insurgent citizenship” or the “insurgent space of citizenship” that positions

this form of placemaking as oppositional to public space regulated and maintained by the state. See Jeffrey Hou, ed.

Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Routledge 2010); James

Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton University Press,

2008).

3

crucial site of urban political resistance, but its symbolic reclamation a method of protest. While

scholarship by sociologists, anthropologists, and other spatial studies scholars has analyzed

contemporary patterns in radical environmental political placemaking as forms of self-

determination, this dissertation uses a microhistorical lens to explore the growth of insurgent

park creation in the fight for spatial citizenship in the late Cold War era.7 Putting dozens of

activist-created parks often called “People’s Parks” in conversation with one another reveals how

patterns of heightened policing, segregation, gentrification, and the privatization of public space

across United States cities have functioned as forms of “new urban colonialism” in the postwar

era.8 Focused on the process of postwar urban renewal and its resistance, this dissertation reveals

how postwar activists began to articulate access to space as a component of citizenship and

disempowerment. By examining the emergence and popularity of insurgent park creation as a

method of protest from the late 1960s through the late 1980s, we can see how a variety of activist

groups and coalitions began to articulate urban displacement as a form of modern colonialism

that shaped their access to and control over urban green space. Activists used insurgent parks to

7 For more on territoriality and insurgent placemaking as forms of self-determination see Laura Zanotti, Radical

Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó’s Fight for Just Livelihoods (University of Arizona Press, 2016);

Allan Charles Dawson, Laura Zanotti, and Ismael Vaccaro, eds., Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues

Between State and Tradition (Routledge, 2014); Steve Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles

Police Department (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Troy Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian

Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (University of Illinois Press, 1996); Maria Rovisco and Jonathan

Corpus Ong, eds., Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (Rowman & Littlefield

International, 2016); Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations

and Uprisings are Changing the World (Palgrave, 2014); Michael Rios and Leonardo Vazquez, eds., Diálogos:

Placemaking in Latino Communities (Routledge, 2012); Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The

Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); Gi-Wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change

in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2014); Luisa Martín Rojo, Occupy: The Spatial Dynamics of

Discourse in Global Protest Movements (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016); Michael James Miller, The

Representation of Place: Urban Planning and Protest in France and Great Britain, 1950-1980 (Ashgate Pub, 2003);

Teresa Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930 (Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1997). 8 Term taken from Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, eds. Gentrification in a Global Context (Routledge, 2005).

Focusing on gentrification, Atkinson and Bridge argue that the process of contemporary gentrification reproduces

elements of colonialism, such as the privileging of whiteness in aesthetic and cultural forms, the expansionist

neoliberalism of deregulated housing and entrepreneurial style of urban governance, and how these forces displace

largely low-income people of color, immigrants, and non-citizens.

4

make politicized aesthetics and discourses of territoriality consciousness-raising experiences.

Comparing the ways in which park creators designed and interacted with politicized visual and

material culture within these spaces reveals how insurgent park creation, at times, became a

medium for coalition building that imagined a transnational, transhistorical, and cross-cultural

community of resistors to displacement in the urban realm. Using their bodies, design, the

landscape, and the media, activists argued that the issue of spatial citizenship intersected with

political discourses of racial, class, and ethnic self-determination as well a gender empowerment.

Park creators’ exploration in multiculturalism simultaneously became sources of conflict within

these protest spaces that, in turn, have become erased in the historical memory of this protest

movement.

Because the issue of spatial citizenship and growing demands for access to space were so

diverse by the late 1960s and 1970s, providing a comprehensive overview of insurgent park

creation in this era remains difficult. Archival research across more than fifteen repositories in

seven states has revealed more than four-dozen case studies of insurgent park creations spanning

across multiple continents and two decades. While never an organized “movement,” I argue that

many parks resembled one another in labor, design, and reception that illuminate how visual,

material, and performative culture was essential to producing political territoriality. Despite these

similarities, parks were also very different—even those constructed in the same neighborhood at

the same time catered to different activist groups and political issues, reflecting how

relationships to urban green space were politicized in different ways. The People’s Park

movement cannot be told from the perspective of one park, nor even a handful of parks, as each

project was shaped by the political, racial, class, ethnic, and gender identities of its creators, how

they worked with one another and networked within their communities, as well as how the

5

spaces in which they occupied were rendered vacant. Numerous factors shaped the

representation and reception of activist-created parks, forming a constellation of political

pinpoints that informed the meaning of parks differently. However, I argue that the notoriety of

the late Cold War-era People’s Park movement begins with the transformation of one vacant lot.

One chilly April morning in 1969, a group of leftists and “street people” between the ages

of 18 and 30 began constructing a park on a vacant lot at the corner of Haste and Bowditch in the

South Berkeley area.9 The lot was nothing special. The University of California (UC), Berkeley

had demolished depreciating Victorian-era homes two years prior in a sweeping urban renewal

campaign to gentrify neighborhoods south and west of campus. The parcel was now a 2.8-acre

barren clay desert-turned mudhole on rainy days that served as an informal parking lot for the

2400-block of Telegraph Avenue. A group of white men and one woman, some with ties to

politically radical groups, met to organize an insurgent park creation on the lot. The park was

simple at first—nothing that a park commissioner or state-employed urban planner might have

written home about, yet its spontaneity and immediacy over the next two weeks signaled an act

9 Leftists refers to individuals in this era that identified as part of New Left social movements, while not necessarily

being a particular member of a political group. Street people is a common term used to describe street-dwelling

hippies. This narrative of Berkeley’s People’s Park has been recited often since the very beginning of the park

creation, with park creators telling the history of the vacant lot at the corner of Haste and Bowditch as one beginning

with stalled urban renewal, cruel profit-driven demolition of poorer student housing, and the intent to remove leftist

political radicals and hippies from the South Berkeley area by physical violence if necessary. Historians have

reiterated this narrative. For a broad summary of historical work on Berkeley’s People’s Park, see W. J. Rorabaugh,

Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford University Press, 1989): pp. 154-171; Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s

War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York City: Picador, 2012): pp. 447-487, 493; David

Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” PhD

Dissertation (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of

Rage (Bantam, 1993); Anthony Ashbolt, A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area

(Pickering and Chatto, 2013): pp. 1-28, 135-170; Jon Cash, “People’s Park: Birth and Survival,” California History

vol. 88, no. 1 (2010): pp. 8-29, 53-55. For primary sources from park activists and advocates reciting this history,

see Terri Compost, ed., People’s Park: Still Blooming, 1969-2009 and on (Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books, 2009);

Wendy Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park (and other political events)—a love story from a Leader’s

point of view,” Unpublished Manuscript (ca. 1969), Courtesy of author; Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai, eds.,

People’s Park (New York City: Ballantine Books, 1969).

6

of rebellion to university administrators who owned the lot and politicians who anticipated an

insurrection. During the first work day, hundreds of locals visited the site to enjoy the

performance and spectacle of manual labor. By the end of the day, park workers had cleared and

leveled part of the lot, patched together a sod island, and barbecued two hogs for the evening

celebration. Those who participated described the experience in different ways: as a joyous

manifestation of an alternate reality, a chaotic experiment, a countercultural “happening,” or a

symbolic resistance against state regulation. Although police and firefighters periodically visited

the park to question workers or put out fires, park creators were largely left alone until the lot

was fenced a few weeks later. To the park creators, this small timeframe felt like the beginning

of a revolution. Testimonies of park goers in the spring of 1969 often agreed that the project

made them feel alive despite the displacement they felt due to urban renewal, heightened

policing, and political repression.

The park grew over the next two weeks as the design became more intricate, its

materiality more cluttered. At the same time that organizers raised their expectations about the

park’s potential as a birthplace of liberation, university administrators began issuing statements

that the park, built on university-owned land, would have to close. Although the university

announced in the beginning that their development of the lot would resume in two to three

months, seeing park advocates continue to build encouraged the university to expedite their plans

to begin construction. At approximately 4 AM, the morning of May 15, 1969, the university

mobilized police to retake the park. Later that day when park advocates marched to the lot after a

noon rally on campus, California Highway Patrol Officers and Alameda County Sheriff’s

Deputies forcibly defended the border wall with tear gas and shotguns, killing one and injuring

dozens as they expanded outward into the city arresting protestors and urban dwellers. More than

7

2000 National Guardsmen were stationed in Berkeley to keep order for the next two weeks,

while police troops occupying the park ripped up trees and broke benches and sculptures. The

sod turned a crispy golden brown while the military vehicles left divots in the newly-planted

lawn. With the city on lockdown and many other cities across the world shocked over the

violence in Berkeley, the fenced park symbolized a loss of life, in both human bodies and the

dissolution of the park’s vibrant spirit of resistance to the state.

Histories of Berkeley’s People’s Park often end here. In only situating Berkeley’s

People’s Park within local politics, many scholars have inadvertently characterized Berkeley’s

People’s Park as an isolated incident.10 Park creators who wrote about their experiences often

constructed Berkeley’s People’s Park and the state violence that followed as exceptional.11

Situating this park within a movement of insurgent park creations, however, reveals how their

demands for urban political territoriality, their method of insurgent park creation as a form of

civil disobedience, and the violence this tactic provoked were not unique. Activist coalitions in

other cities shared their frustrations. However, widespread media attention that Berkeley’s

People’s Park received in the mainstream and underground press catalyzed a movement of

insurgent park creation across the United States. Although fear, mourning, anger, and resentment

dominate the memories of both park critics and park advocates, Berkeley’s park creators called

for others to follow their lead and “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom.”12 More coalitions across the

10 Works that have focused on the park as part of local or regional politics, include Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War;

Rosenfeld, Subversives; Glick, “The People’s Park;” Ashbolt, A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San

Francisco Bay Area; Cash, “People’s Park.” 11 Historian Anthony Ashbolt offers a compelling summative analysis as to how Bay-area activists believed that

their experiences as students could “‘serve as illustrations for other places,’” “elucidating the possibilities for the

New Left in America and elsewhere.” This mythic symbolism of Bay-area or Berkeley exceptionalism as a

subcategory of American western exceptionalism has remained potent. See Ashbolt, A Cultural History of the

Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area, pp. 27-30. 12 For two examples using what would become a popular phrase, see Frank Cieciorka, “Let a Thousand Parks

Bloom,” Poster, (1969), All of Us or None Archive, Oakland Museum of California, reprinted online at:

http://picturethis.museumca.org/pictures/let-thousand-parks-bloom; and Lennie Lipton, Let a Thousand Parks

8

country and beyond began illegally converting privately owned lots rendered vacant by urban

renewal into vegetable gardens, tent cities, and dozens of other insurgently-created parks (See

Figures 1.1.1-1.1.5). In the summer of 1969, Puerto Rican, African American, and Mexican

American activist groups began reclaiming vacant lots as forms of agrarian self-determinism in

cities from Chicago to Berkeley.13 By the following year when National Guardsmen shot

students at Kent State University, activist park creations resurged to memorialize the wounded

and challenge state violence through political placemaking on college campuses like Michigan

Tech University and the University of Missouri.14 Park narratives became interwoven with the

expansion of ecological activism for the first Earth Day in April of 1970, influencing more parks

and vegetable gardens on vacant lots.15

By the mid-1970s, more coalitions led by immigrants and people of color created parks to

challenge how their working-class neighborhoods had been targeted for urban renewal, such as

Bloom, Film, 16 mm (1969), in the Pacific Film Archive Film and Video Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and

Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, archived online: https://archive.org/details/cbpf_00002. 13 For examples see Chicano Park, San Diego, CA, created April 22, 1970, cited KPBS News, “San Diego Chicano

Movement Archival Film c. 1970 (Silent),” 16 mm Film Footage, KPBS News (April 22, 1970), archived online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llb4-DrYUVQ; Poor People’s Park, Chicago, IL, created summer 1969, cited

“And it did happen,” The Chicago Seed vol. 4, no. 4 (Fall 1969): p. 3; Steve Haines, “Black Peoples’ Victory Plots

Growing Fast,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11; Mike Schechtman, “People’s Park, Garden

United,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11; “A Little Potpourri of Gridley History from the

Gridley Museum,” Gridley Herald (July 1, 2016):

http://www.gridleyherald.com/article/20160701/NEWS/160639954. 14 Peoples’ Park, Houghton, MI, created May 1970, cited in “Michigan Tech Students Build Park in Protest,” The

Arizona Republic (May 14, 1970): p. 16-A; Abigail Keel, Ryan Famuliner, and Jack Howard, “Why Peace Park is

Called ‘Peace’ Park,” KBIA Radio (September 10, 2014): http://kbia.org/post/why-peace-park-called-peace-park-

0#stream/0. 15 For examples see brief coverage of Earth People’s Park in Felicity Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of

Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (Zone Books, 2016); another activist-created park called Walden

Park in Madison, WI, was created 1970, cited in Whitney Gould, “Park or Parking Lot: U Planner and Students

Argue Value of Each,” Madison Capitol Times (December 3, 1971), in Folder “Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of

Students, Student Affairs Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University Archives, University of Wisconsin,

Madison.

9

Figure 1.1.1, “Map of People’s Parks”: Kera Lovell, “Radical Manifest Destiny,” Google My Maps, Map Data, ©

2017, Google, INEGI: http://bit.ly/2wVlXcb .

Figure 1.1.2: “U.S. Map of People’s Parks”: Kera Lovell, “Radical Manifest Destiny,” Close-up on United States,

Google My Maps, Map Data, © 2017, Google, INEGI: http://bit.ly/2wVlXcb .

10

Figure 1.1.3, “Midwest Map of People’s Parks”: Kera Lovell, “Radical Manifest Destiny,” Close-up on Midwest

to East, Google My Maps, Map Data, © 2017, Google, INEGI: http://bit.ly/2wVlXcb .

Figure 1.1.4, “Berkeley Map of People’s Parks”: Kera Lovell, “Radical Manifest Destiny,” Close-up on Berkeley,

Google My Maps, Map Data, © 2017, Google, INEGI: http://bit.ly/2wVlXcb .

11

Figure 1.1.5, “Abbreviated List of People’s Parks, 1968-1988,” recorded online via interactive

Google Map: http://bit.ly/2wVlXcb.

1. Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, Berkeley, CA, created May 1968, cited “Hope for

Herrick,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 22 (May 31-June 6, 1968): p. 23.

2. People’s Park, Berkeley, CA, created April 1969, cited Stew Albert, “People’s Park: Free

for All,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5.

3. People’s Park Mobile Annex, Berkeley, CA, created May-June, 1969, cited “People’s

Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Film, KRON-TV News, Young Broadcasting of San

Francisco, Inc. (Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, May 1969), San Francisco Bay

Area Television Archive: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/208853.

4. Poor People’s Park, Chicago, IL, created summer 1969, cited “And it did happen,” The

Chicago Seed vol. 4, no. 4 (Fall 1969): p. 3.

5. Chicano Park, San Diego, CA, created April 22, 1970, cited KPBS News, “San Diego

Chicano Movement Archival Film c. 1970 (Silent),” 16 mm Film Footage, KPBS News

(April 22, 1970), archived online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llb4-DrYUVQ.

6. Solstice Park, San Francisco, CA, created July 1968, see Photographs (ca. July 1968),

Folder “San Francisco – A People’s Park – July 1968,” Box 3, Ecology Action Records,

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

7. Peoples’ Park, Houghton, MI, created May 1970, cited in “Michigan Tech Students Build

Park in Protest,” The Arizona Republic (May 14, 1970): p. 16-A.

8. People’s Park (corner of Shattuck and Cedar), Berkeley, CA, created 1969, referenced on

flyer in Folder “People’s Park,” Box 13, Kenneth Fuller Collection, Hoover Institution.

9. People’s Park, Seattle, WA, created 1970, cited in Kery Murakami, “Memories of a

Protest and ‘People’s Park,’” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (July 26, 2005):

http://bit.ly/2y8Mrb0.

10. Plaza Caribe, New York City, NY, created 1971, see Gary Tyler, “Shoot: 710173

People’s Park Built by Squatters, Plaza Caribe (112th Street and Broadway),” (July 25,

1971), Box 32, Daily Worker and Daily World Negatives Collection (PHOTOS.223.001),

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library,

New York University.

11. Walden Park, Madison, WI, created 1970, cited in Whitney Gould, “Park or Parking Lot:

U Planner and Students Argue Value of Each,” Madison Capitol Times (December 3,

1971), in Folder “Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs

Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University Archives, University of Wisconsin,

Madison.

12

New York City’s Lower East Side.16 Parks continued to develop through the 1970s and 1980s at

the same time that earlier park creations began to transform. In the mid-1980s, black South

Africans protested their forced removal during apartheid by creating parks in the Johannesburg-

area as forms of protest.17 At the same time, students in the United States created shantytowns on

campus quads to mimic the conditions of squatters camps to which black African and Indian

immigrants in South Africa were legally confined.18 Meanwhile, Berkeley’s People’s Park and

San Diego’s Chicano Park adapted to demands for more diverse representation and accessibility

while a dependency on external funds at times created stagnant bureaucracies.19 Other parks that

do not fit within this chronology emerged during this time as well, as activists took over vacant

lots to protest urban renewal, racism, pollution, and the censorship of student activism and free

speech on college campuses.20

While insurgent park and garden creations pre-dated the emergence of Berkeley’s

People’s Park in April of 1969, the violence at Berkeley’s People’s Park sparked a wave of

16 For examples see Plaza Caribe, New York City, NY, created 1971, see Gary Tyler, “Shoot: 710173 People’s Park

Built by Squatters, Plaza Caribe (112th Street and Broadway),” (July 25, 1971), Box 32, Daily Worker and Daily

World Negatives Collection (PHOTOS.223.001), Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Elmer

Holmes Bobst Library, New York University; Liz Christy Community Garden, http://www.lizchristygarden.us/. 17 Michael Parks, “Youths Erase ‘Eyesores’: Black Parks Blossom in South Africa,” LA Times (January 18, 1986),

archived online: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-18/news/mn-724_1_south-africa. For more on this see Bradford

Martin, “‘Unsightly Huts: Shanties and the Divestment Movement of the 1980s,” Peace and Change: A Journal of

Peace Research vol. 32, no. 3 (July 2007): pp. 329-360. 18 For an example see David DeBrincat, “Campus Life: Michigan State; Bringing Back the 60’s: A Retro Shanty

Town,” reprinted in The New York Times (May 20, 1990), archived online:

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/20/style/campus-life-michigan-state-bringing-back-the-60-s-a-retro-shanty-

town.html. 19 These parks have struggled over the years in different ways, from financial support and development to

representation. For one commentary on the struggles at Berkeley’s People’s Park see Gordon Sullivan, “Visions of

People’s Park,” The Monthly (ca. 1985): in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric Dibner Papers, Bancroft Library, University of

California, Berkeley. For commentary on different struggles over representation and reception at Chicano Park, see

Gail Pérez, “Women Muralists Return to Chicano Park,” La Prensa-San Diego (2012):

http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/women-muralists-return-to-chicano-park.php; Lyndsay Winkley, “Brief but

explosive shouting match erupts at Chicano Park demonstration,” San Diego Union-Tribune (September 3, 2017):

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me-chicano-park-20170903-story.html. 20 For examples see “People’s Park,” The Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana, June 23, 1998); See flyers within

“People’s Park (Protest of Construction on Campus),” Folder 36, Box 1, Campus Unrest Collection, 1967-1972, M.

E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, University of Albany.

13

supporters and allies.21 Taken together, these parks reveal how a variety of activist groups sought

to situate urban renewal, police brutality, and environmental racism as larger transnational and

transhistorical forms of violent colonialism. In many cases, states responded with physical and

institutionalized forms of violence to displace and depoliticize the issue of urban environmental

spatial power. Listening to and mapping these strands of activism across urban and political

boundaries reveals connections between political communities. Their shared demands for access

to and control over the representation of urban green space shed light on how 1960s-era

movements for land reclamation intersected with movements celebrating cultural politics.

Putting these parks in conversation with one another reveals how calls for both “resistance

aesthetics” and “communal separatism” crossed political, racial, ethnic, and gender divides

within the urban realm.22

21 Scholars have documented pre-1969 parks created by immigrants as tools of agrarian survival, parks created by

African Americans as a tactic of self-determination in resisting the racialized label of blight, gardens created by a

range of protesters and urban dwellers, parks created white environmental activists as techniques to draw attention to

the elimination of safe and healthy urban green space, as well as parks and gardens within squatter settlements and

homeless encampments. Parks that pre-date Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969 include (but are not limited to) the

following: Solstice Park, San Francisco, CA, created July 1968, see Photographs (ca. July 1968), Folder “San

Francisco – A People’s Park – July 1968,” Box 3, Ecology Action Records, Bancroft Library, University of

California, Berkeley; Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, Berkeley, CA, created May 1968, cited “Hope for Herrick,”

Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 22 (May 31-June 6, 1968): p. 23. For work on insurgent parks and gardens prior to 1969,

see Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT Press, 1982); Karl Linn,

Building Commons and Community (New Village Press, 2007); George McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics,

Idealism, and Rebellion in the Garden (Frances Lincoln, 2011). 22 The term “resistance aesthetics is taken from Nato Thompson, “Contributions to a Resistant Visual Culture

Glossary,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest vol. 1, no. 3 (2004): pp. 167-178. Thompson distinguishes this

form of aesthetics from broader visual culture, stating, “Resistant visual culture is not about art or traditional

activism. It is a method for building a real, living culture…As opposed to a vocation or sentimental pursuit, I think

of this field as a way to productively communicate amongst those who are dedicated to social change.” My use of

the term “communal separatism” is taken from James Tyner, The Geography of Malcolm X: Black Radicalism and

the Remaking of American Space (Routledge, 2006): p. 115, and James Tyner, “Urban Revolutions and the Spaces

of Black Radicalism,” Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods

(Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007): pp. 218-232. Focused on urban revolutions and the spaces of black radicalism,

Tyner uses the term to distinguish separate African American communities, where black occupants retained

political, economic, and social control of their surroundings as a form of self-determination, from transnational

separatism, which refers to the return of diasporic return to the African homeland. Prior to movements for feminist

and lesbian separatism in the 1970s, the People’s Park movement, in its attempt to create insurgent, autonomous,

community-designed recreation and agricultural areas, was rooted within black radical calls for a territorial

imperative. Constructed on vacant urban property, these parks were intended to challenge the authority of the state’s

use of eminent domain and capitalist-driven development.

14

Situating Berkeley’s People’s Park within a broader movement of activist placemaking,

this dissertation, Radical Manifest Destiny: Mapping Power over Urban Green Space in the Age

of Protest, 1968-1988, is the story of how vacant lots were mediums for protest in the late Cold

War era. While acknowledging the differences distinguishing activist-created parks, I argue that

the sensory-driven experience of creating and defending People’s Parks often connected these

projects in a mission to reclaim territory and power from the state. Tracing a movement of

insurgent park creations as a method of protest reveals a historical moment in which activist

identities and social justice communities began to take root within the urban environment,

merging visual, material, and performative culture to construct a narrative about power, identity,

and space. Often constructed on vacant lots, People’s Parks as public gathering places and

recreation areas were intentionally designed as protests using landscape architecture, public art,

and shared cooking and eating spaces that became a chaotic patchwork of identity politics. Each

park developed within its own geographic, racial, economic, and political context, yet always

emerged outside of formal urban planning. By staking claim to the urban realm as a form of

radical manifest destiny, People’s Parks attracted attention because they disrupted ideas of

private property ownership as equated with power. Many park creators envisioned urban place-

making and territorial reclamation as new methods of political praxis, and in doing so sought to

reimagine the relationship between the urban environment and politicized labor and

consumption. More than gardens, People’s Parks were dynamic political protests—at times

existing within and fueling their own alternative economies. In contrast to ephemeral sit-ins or

walkouts, this innovative strategy of protest challenged urban power structures by demanding

shared, creative control of urban ecological design.

15

The look and feel of each park varied widely, from encampments to art pieces, that drew

positive support from urban renewal critics like Jane Jacobs, designers like Buckminster Fuller,

as well as political activists like Black Panther Bobby Seale. Park coalitions across divides of

race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, and class used visual, material, and performative

culture to experiment with building new communities that attempted to reject capitalism and

oppose social hierarchies within public space. The popularity and wide reach of this civil

disobedience tactic illuminate an important postwar political innovation in which movements

advocating for grassroots community-based urban ecological design intersected with methods of

political radicalism to reveal the tenuousness of one’s spatial citizenship.

Putting stories of activist land reclamation in conversation with one another sheds light

on the ways in which politics inform spatial citizenship, as well as how access to space informs

both political interests and organizing strategies in the urban realm. Within this historical

moment, this movement of insurgent park creation offered a new medium for a variety of

political organizing strands. From environmentalist groups to racial self-determination groups,

park creators designed these green spaces as sensory-driven and politically symbolic narratives

that challenged nationalist discourses of modern progress, the paternalist expansion of urban

renewal, and white western imperialism. At the same time, park creators sought to reclaim safe,

collaborative, and flexible urban green space for grassroots communities that celebrated

diversity, centered the environment, and deliberated shared needs. Park creators struggled to

sustain these communities. In this process of park creation, many park advocates appropriated

colonial discourses of manifest destiny that at times marginalized groups within these projects.

This dissertation examines how a variety of coalitions began to construct a narrative

about power over urban green space that took shape through visual, material, and performative

16

culture, connecting the body to the environment through political storytelling. Putting these

narratives about space and power in conversation with one another in the late Cold War era sheds

light on how the emergent tensions between neoliberal urbanism and multiculturalism took shape

within American cities and within social movements in the late twentieth century.

Anthropologists like Charles Hale have analyzed international case studies where governments

have endorsed intercultural equality while failing to account for structural inequalities. 23 Laissez-

faire economic policies have bolstered states’ abilities to stifle political opposition by reducing

systemic patterns of racism and classism within the urban environment to individual choices and

problems. In doing so, patterns of neoliberal urbanism have reproduced power hierarchies.

Similar struggles have plagued social movements since the beginning of the postwar era, as new

groups marginalized in larger movements, from women’s liberation to welfare rights and gay

liberation, formed their own caucuses within larger organizations or separated entirely to speak

to their own needs. Analyzing this emergence of park creation through individual park case

studies offers a microhistorical lens into how this process of intertwining neoliberalism and

multiculturalism impacted a wide variety of activist coalitions and their attempts to create their

own version of urban environmental utopias in the late Cold War era. In many ways, park

creations became processes in which activists reproduced inequality within their own social

justice circles—hiding behind laissez-faire, colorblind, gender-neutral discourses of

empowerment, multiculturalism, and individual exploration that, at times, functioned as forms of

violence.

23Charles Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central

America,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review vol. 28, no. 1 (2005): pp. 10-28; Charles Hale, Más

que un indio (More Than an Indian): Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (Santa Fe,

NM: School of American Research Press, 2006); also see Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial

Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text vol. 24, no. 4 89 (2006): pp. 1-24.

17

As an exploration of the relationship between protest culture and the political exploration

of spatial citizenship in the late Cold War era, this interdisciplinary project builds on the

scholarship of urban, social movement, and environmental historians interrogating postwar

power relations, while providing historical perspective to new spatial studies scholarship on

placemaking in the twenty-first century. Urban and social movement historians have illuminated

how cities became the context of contentions over power and space in the postwar era.24 U.S.

cities became increasingly regulated over the twentieth century, as segregation, urban renewal,

and violent policing displaced poorer communities of immigrants, politically radical students,

and people of color. Coalitional park creations illustrate broader patterns in multicultural

environmental justice organizing in the postwar era, in which activists united across lines of

gender, racial, and political borders to advocate for a healthier urban environment, using creative

resistance strategies like placemaking to assert power in the urban realm.25

Contests over access to urban green space have only broadened since the late Cold War

era, indicating global patterns of insurgent placemaking as a method of creative resistance to

24 See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton

University Press, 2014); Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar

Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Michael Miller, The Representation of Place: Urban Planning and

Protest in France and Great Britain, 1950-1980 (Ashgate 2003); Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and

Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the

Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert Gioielli, Environmental Activism and the

Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago (Temple University Press, 2015); Andrew Hurley, Environmental

Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana (University of North Carolina Press, 1995);

Elizabeth Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class and Gender in Environmental Activism (University Press of

Kansas, 2008); Carl Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (NYU

Press, 2017). 25 For scholarship on multicultural environmental justice organizing in the postwar era, see Laura Pulido,

Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press,

1996); Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the

Environmental Justice Movement (NYU Press, 2001); David Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for

Environmental Justice in Chicago (MIT Press, 2004); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban

Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2006); Elizabeth Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and

Gender in Environmental Activism (University Press of Kansas, 2008); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).

18

police brutality, environmental racism, and gentrification.26 Analyzing the emergence of

placemaking as a political movement in the late Cold War era demonstrates how issues over

power transformed urban green space from a politicized destination and political issue over its

development into a method of protest. Reading these placemaking projects like texts reveals how

citizens were challenging urban power structures by linking domestic and global conflicts

through cultural politics. Park creators used landscape design, performative rituals, and visual

media to create what they believed were landscapes of resistance that became a medium for

imagining new communities that, they believed, were colorblind, gender-neutral, anti-capitalist,

and both indigenous and immigrant-centered. Transforming vacant lots into the new frontier,

activists challenged police brutality and profit-driven development by asserting territoriality over

their own cities, yet in doing so, park creators often simultaneously reinforced many of the same

power hierarchies from which they were seeking to escape. With politicians, developers, and the

police enacting forms of institutionalized violence against activists, many park coalitions

fragmented from within.

This dissertation is not a comprehensive overview of the People’s Park movement

between 1968 and 1988. This dissertation focuses on several visual, material, and performative

threads that united these insurgent park creations. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex

method of protest into a childlike metaphor, imagine that this collection of insurgent park

creations resembles a room of individuals holding Slinkies. Like the parks, the toys are all

different sizes and colors, with their holders positioned in different directions to reflect their

26 Jeffrey Hou, Insurgent Public Space Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Routledge,

2010); Jeffrey Hou, Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (Routledge, 2013); Jeffrey Hou, City

Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (Routledge, 2017); David

Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012); David Kaplan, Navigating

Ethnicity: Segregation, Placemaking, and Difference (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse,

and Margit Mayer, eds., Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City

(Routledge, 2011).

19

different geographic contexts. This dissertation seeks to examine the very moment in which these

pre-compressed helical springs, machine-molded and highly controlled, are released. Within this

moment, these Slinkies—these parks—share similar experiences in rising and falling before they

begin to descend in different directions independently, at times crashing into one another. While

these case studies cannot be equated, comparing them reveals their similar structural weaknesses

and successes in how they progress. Doing so sheds light on why insurgent park creation was so

politically powerful within an historical moment in which the rise of both neoliberal urbanism

(through urban renewal, heightened policing, and political repression) and multiculturalism

helped produce this iconic age of protest. Taken together, this examination of the emergence of

the insurgent park creation movement illuminates how urban dwellers succeeded and struggled

to build activist communities on occupied territories, how state violence fragmented these cross-

cultural coalitions, and how the murder of civilians and the desecration of land sparked a

movement to remember histories of displacement and resistance.

1.2 Historiography and Theoretical Frameworks

In contrast to clear-cut chronologies of political movements, I argue that Cold War-era

insurgent park creation was inherently a language of “anti-disciplinary protest”—what Julie

Stephens defines as a historical moment when the boundaries between the political and the

cultural blurred.27 While urban, architectural, and social movement historians have examined

specific People’s Parks, this dissertation proposes that the People’s Park movement must be

examined through an interdisciplinary lens—bridging the fields of social movement history,

urban history, environmental studies, and critical spatial studies, while using feminist theory,

27 Term taken from Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, p. 26.

20

critical race theory, and queer theory to critique parks as discourses of identity. This project

exists at the intersection of several fields of historiography: postwar social and political history,

American environmentalism, and urban history. This dissertation is grounded in historiography

on the long 1960s, with works examining how postwar social and political movements

challenged inequality, Cold War-era containment, histories of white male American

exceptionalism, and U.S. militarism as a form of colonialism.28 Previous historiography on

postwar social justice activism was shaped by the attempts of activists-turned-scholars to respond

to the rhetoric of countercultural failure by pinpointing the moment of declension for and

distinctions between each group and movement.29 Earlier works by historians Sara Evans, Alice

Echols, and Todd Gitlin, for example, at times affirmed strict boundaries within the postwar left:

28 For more on the periodization of the long 1960s, see Stuart Hall, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long

1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History vol. 43, no. 4 (2008): pp. 655-672. Key works on the sixties that have

been foundational for this dissertation include David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (Hill

and Wang, 1994); Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American

Counterculture of the 1960s & ‘70s (Routledge, 2001); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The

Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 1995); Todd Gitlin The

Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1993); Alexander Bloom, ed. Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then

and Now (Oxford University Press, 2001); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture,

Society, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Farber, The Sixties: From Memory to History

(UNC Press, 1994); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (Hill and Wang, 1994); Beth

Bailey and Dan Farber, eds., America in the 1970s (University of Kansas Press, 2004); Dan Berger, The Hidden

1970s: Histories of Radicalism (Rutgers University Press, 2010); Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Harvard

University Press, 2002); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

(Oxford University Press, 2015); Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How women Changed America at Century’s End (Free

Press, 2004); Van Gosse and Richard Moser, The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America

(Temple University Press, 2003); Terry Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from

Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Oxford University Press, 1996); Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against

Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2016); Sara Evans,

Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and New Left (Vintage, 1980);

Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 29 Carl Boggs calls this the “total break thesis,” or the notion that social justice organizing came to an “explosive and

sudden halt” between 1968 and 1970. See Carl Boggs, “Rethinking the Sixties Legacy: From New Left to New

Social Movements,” in Social Movements: Critiques, Concepts, Case Studies, ed. Stanford Lyman (NYU Press,

1995): pp. 331-355. Also see Simon Hall, “Framing the American 1960s: A Historiographical Review,” European

Journal of American Culture vol. 31, no. 1 (April 2012): pp. 5-23. Three good examples monographs by activists-

turned-historians that reiterate this burnout thesis are Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

(Bantam, 1993); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of

Minnesota Press, 1989); and Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights

Movement & the New Left (Vintage, 1980).

21

between liberal and radical activisms, political and cultural activism, hippies and politicos, and

race, gender, and sexual identity politics. In an attempt to clarify the origins of ideological

divisions, these texts focused on identifying the crests and troughs of these activisms within a

larger liberal evolution to chart the significances of these groups, movements, or protests. Within

historiography on postwar social movements, the transition from 1968 to 1970 has been

positioned as a significant moment in the downfall of postwar social justice organizing, often

generalized as a loss of hope due to the rise of police violence against protestors, the divide

between nonviolent and militant activism, and the turn toward inner personal consciousness

raising.30 Over the past two decades, recent historians have embarked on an effort to put “the

movement” back together to see the connections between groups, ideologies, and coalitions

within and beyond the borders of the United States, revealing how critical, cross-cultural

organizing happened after 1969 while still recognizing how power structures developed within

these activist coalitions.31

30 Wini Breines has argued that because earlier works on the 1960s were written by white men, that this negative

characterization of the late-1960s as a moment of fragmentation was in part due to white men’s disappointment with

the expanded leadership of women and people of color. See Wini Breines, “Sixties Stories’ Silences: White

Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power,” NWSA Journal vol. 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): pp. 101-121. Additionally,

Julie Stephens offers an excellent critique of this presumption of post-sixties political disengagement, arguing that

the framework pits the “childish aspirations and excesses of the sixties against the dispiriting but adult character of

later decades (presumably the eighties and nineties).” See Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, p. 2. Additionally,

focusing on the cultural politics of the Chicano Movement, Randy Ontiveros makes note of how this declension

narrative centers and generalizes white hippie hedonism in the 1970s, marginalizing activists of color by deriding

“identity politics” as divisive. See Randy Ontiveros, In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the

Chicano Movement (NYU Press, 2013). 31 For examples, see Stephanie Gilmore, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave

Feminism in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2008); Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle,

eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & ‘70s (Routledge, 2001); Amy Sonnie and James

Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times

(Melville House, 2011). For scholarship examining the transnational counterculture or the global postwar left, see

Judy Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell

University Press, 2013); George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (South

End Press, 1999); Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Harvard University

Press, 2005); Jeremy Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960-1975,” The American

Historical Review vol. 114, no. 1 (February 2009): pp. 45-68.

22

My analysis of the People’s Park movement reflects shifts in late twentieth century

scholarship turning toward materiality, spatiality, and performance born from social movements

in the 1960s. My work is a reaction to how earlier historiography on the 1960s, in particular,

Berkeley’s People’s Park, has focused on the clear-cut leadership structures and defined goals of

postwar political leaders that have often been told within chronologically linear narratives. This

version of Berkeley’s People’s Park has reinforced a white, straight, male-dominated depiction

of postwar organizing while creating little room for cross-cultural and transnational perspectives

that take into account how race, gender, and ethnicity shaped.32 In her analysis of historiography

on the 1960s, Julie Stephens calls for an examination of the 1960s through the lens of “anti-

disciplinary politics.” Within this historical moment, Stephens argues that a new language of

protest emerged “which aimed to transgress the boundaries between the political and the

aesthetic.” Resisting a categorical analysis, “This new politics was a playful and self-referential

celebration of ambiguity, where the theatrical and the spectacle were privileged over the politics

of State policy (such as the allocation of public goods, or political-economic structure), and

totalities like socialism, society, and in some cases even objective reality itself were parodied and

dismissed.”33 Despite Stephens’s criticisms of the creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park, her

argument opens a window onto how insurgent park creation as a form of protest resists

categorical analysis in both its embodiment of political resistance and its celebration of civil

disobedient play. A social and cultural historical analysis of Berkeley’s People’s Park reveals

32 As historian Wini Breines has argued, books timed with the twentieth anniversary of 1968 were written by white

male new leftists, often leaders, connected to Students for a Democratic Society. See Wini Breines, “Sixties Stories’

Silences: White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power,” NWSA Journal vol. 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): pp. 101-

121. Additionally, in his review of Doug Rossinow’s The Politics of Authenticity, historian David Farber illustrates

how historiography on the 1960s has shifted dramatically since the 1970s, with an increased focus on women,

people of color, and religion. In the two decades since Farber published his review, See David Farber, “New Wave

Sixties Historiography,” Reviews in American History vol. 27, no. 2 (June 1999): pp. 298-305. 33 Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest, p. 22.

23

how the design and experience of insurgent park creation was a form of community-building and

communication. Situating Berkeley’s People’s park within a larger movement of insurgent park

creations critiques the white, male-dominated perspective of this form of spatial protest,

revealing how not only white men in Berkeley but a wide range of activists designed parks to

imagine transhistorical, transnational, and multicultural communities within an urban ecological

system. The visual, material, and performative culture of People’s Parks also offers a clearer

picture as to how racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic exoticism took shape in the landscape

beyond clear-cut political chronologies.

Grounded within historiography on postwar social movements, this dissertation situates

these protests within histories of postwar urban renewal and environmentalism. Urban

historiography has followed the trajectory of American environmental historiography, moving

from identifying city or region-specific typologies to the “new urban” historiography since the

1960s which has analyzed the relationship between power relations and the processes of

urbanization.34 Since the publication of such foundational works as William Cronon’s Nature’s

Metropolis and Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, historians have centered race

relations in their analysis of urban development and city politics, demonstrating how cities do

not become sites of racism, but their organization constitutes racism.35 New suburban historians

have situated suburban sprawl as the modern frontier, with middle-class white families retreating

from the intercultural city to homogenous communities on the “crabgrass frontier” in the postwar

34 Stephan Thernstrom, “Reflections on the New Urban History,” Deadalus vol. 100, no. 2 (Spring 1971): pp. 359-

375); Howard Spodek, “Twentieth-Century Urbanization: In Search of an Urban Paradigm for an Urban World,” in

Essays on Twentieth-Century History, ed. Michael Adas (Temple University Press, 2010): pp. 53-82; Robert Self

and Thomas Sugrue, “The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis,” A

Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002): pp. 20-43; Jon Teaford, The Twentieth-

Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Jon Teaford, The

Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1945-1980 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 35 Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.

W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1992).

24

era.36 Others have centered marginalized groups and movements as resistant to colonialist urban

power structures that institutionalized community displacement through urban renewal,

gentrification, and environmental devastation.37

Over the past few decades, historians have looked beyond national or coastal coverage of

the movement, using underreported local studies to analyze the origins and impacts of postwar

activism within particular urban and regional contexts that put different strands of social justice

organizing and experiences of displacement in conversation with one another.38 Moving beyond

the geographic locations of activisms, historians have increasingly analyzed how urban space

shaped and was shaped by political ideologies and protest methods within the urban realm.39

36 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1987);

Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2007);

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2002);

Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism

(Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of

Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 37 See Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century

(University of Chicago Press, 2005); Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City; Sara Deutsch, Women and the City:

Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2002); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting

Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University

Press, 2007); and Robert Self, American Babylon. 38 See William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom

(Oxford University Press, 1980); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (Hill and Wang,

1994). Important local studies relevant to my work include Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights

Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (University of

North Carolina Press, 2014); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the

Mississippi Freedom Struggle (University of California Press, 2007), Robert Self, American Babylon; Lisa

Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar

Philadelphia (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real

Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Laura Pulido, Black,

Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2006). 39 See Daphne Spain, Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City (Cornell

University Press, 2016); Bradford Martin, The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties

America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Finn Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space,

and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press, 2007); James Tyner, The Geography of Malcolm X: Black

Radicalism and the Remaking of American Space (Routledge, 2005); Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay

Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Duke University Press, 2013); Aaron Betsky, Queer Space:

Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (William Morrow, 1997); Yolanda Retter, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Gordon

Brent Ingram, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of Resistance (Bay Press, 1997); Angel

Nieves and Leslie Alexander, eds., “We Shall Independent Be”: African American Place-Making and the Struggle

to Claim Space in the United States (University Press of Colorado, 2008); Troy Johnson, The Occupation of

Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (University of Illinois Press, 1996);

Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, eds., Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (South End Press, 2007).

25

New scholarship in the field of urban studies has analyzed how patterns of gentrification have

functioned as forms of new urban settler colonialism in which, in the words of scholar Neil

Smith, “the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the

market.”40 Interdisciplinary urban and spatial studies scholars have revealed how urban political

discourses celebrating and protecting American democratic individualism and free market

capitalism further marginalized poorer neighborhoods of political radicals, immigrants, and

citizens of color in the postwar era.41 Putting local issues over political territoriality and reactions

to urban renewal that precipitated Berkeley’s People’s Park in conversation with other park

creations reveals shared experiences within the urban environment across the United States. The

field of spatial studies, as shaped by spatial and urban sociology and anthropology, landscape

architecture and community-based practice, and political ecology, informs the project’s

exploration of space, power, and placemaking that historians of postwar social movements have

40 Quoted from Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,” Antipode: A

Radical Journal of Geography vol. 34, no. 3 (July 2002): pp. 427-450. For more on this see Neil Smith, “Toward a

Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” Journal of the American Planning

Association vol. 45, no. 4 (1979): pp. 538-548; Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City

Movement by Capital, not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association vol. 45, no. 4 (1979): pp. 538-

548; Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, Gentrification (Routledge, 2008); Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and

Elvin Wyly, The Gentrification Reader (Routledge, 2010); Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, eds. Gentrification

in a Global Context (Routledge, 2005); Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist

City (Routledge, 1996); Nicholas Blomley, Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property

(Routledge, 2004). 41 See Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism

(Cornell University Press, 2013); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social

Insecurity (Duke University Press, 2009); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal:

Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Suleiman Osman, The Invention of

Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University

Press, 2012); Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso 2011); Brian Tochterman,

“Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs,” Radical History

Review vol. 2012, no. 112 (2012): pp. 65-87. For more insight into how the sociological study of gentrification

needs to be historicized, see, Suleiman Osman, “Gentrification Matters,” Journal of Urban History vol. 43, no. 2

(2017): pp. 172-179.

26

not fully explored.42 Collectively, spatial studies scholars have analyzed how power is

constituted in space, both as forms of regulation and resistance.43

Environmental historians over the course of the late twentieth century likewise have

focused on making the environment a central actor rather than merely a geographic setting in the

history of human interactions. Earlier environmental discourses, as influenced by concerned

scientists, naturalists, and preservationists like Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold,

concentrated on exalting pre-industrial natural beauty or unveiling narratives of the human

objectification and extraction of land and natural resources.44 Scholarship by Donald Worster,

William Cronon, and Alfred Crosby have married social, cultural, political, and economic history

with biological and geographical history to situate the environment within a larger ecological

system connecting people to one another and to the landscape.45 Recent historiography has

42 See Jo Guldi, “The Spatial Turn in History,” Spatial Humanities: A Project of the Institute for Enabling

Geospatial Scholarship (University of Virginia Library, Scholars Lab): http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/the-

spatial-turn-in-history/index.html; Charles Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,”

Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 70, no. 4 (October 2009): pp. 637-658; Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, “At

Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the ‘Spatial Turn,’” History and Theory vol. 52 (October

2013): pp. 305-318; Ralph Kingston, “Mind Over Matter?: History and the Spatial Turn,” Cultural and Social

History vol. 7, no. 1 (2010): pp. 111-121; Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, and Kathryn Gleadle, “Introduction:

Space, Place, and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn,” Women’s History Review vol. 21, no.

4 (September 2012): pp. 523-532. 43 Although the field of spatial studies is wide-reaching, I have relied on texts that speak to the ways in which power

relations are constituted in spaces. For work in this field, see Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Sharon Zukin,

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford University Press, 2010); Sharon Zukin,

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (University of California Press, 1993); Don Mitchell, The

Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (Guilford Press, 2003); David Harvey, Social Justice

and the City (University of Georgia Press, 2009); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space

in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 2011); Setha Low, Dana Taplin, and Suzanne Scheld, Rethinking Urban Parks:

Public Space and Cultural Diversity (University of Texas Press, 2005); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

(Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995);

William Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (The Project for Public Spaces, 2001); Mitchell, Landscape

and Power; Anthony Orum and Zachary Neal, ed. Common Ground?: Readings and Reflections on Public Space

(Routledge, 2009); Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer, eds., Cities for People, Not for Profit; David Harvey, Spaces of

Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Routledge, 2011): pp. 188-207. 44 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Anniversary Edition (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002); John Muir, John Muir

Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of

California; Stickeen; Essays (Library of America, 1997); Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1st Edition

(Ballantine Books, 1986). 45 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979); Donald Worster,

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992); William

27

interrogated the rise of a postwar ecological consciousness, while new cross-cultural

environmental histories have blurred the borders between civil rights protests and

environmentalism.46 The rise in environmental justice scholarship in other fields like

anthropology, geography, sociology, public health, and environmental studies has broadened the

scope of environmental history to include topics of food justice and systemic environmental

racism alongside analyses of pollution.47 Additionally, ecofeminist scholarship has helped draw

attention to gender within intersectional analyses of environmental justice issues, revealing how

women’s social justice activism has centered the environment as part of spatial citizenship

throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.48 Analyzing the People’s Park movement

Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983); and

Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood, 1973). 46 In addition to previously cited texts, for more work on the environmental movement see Andrew Kirk,

Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas,

2007); Frank Zelko, Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (Oxford University

Press, 2013); Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the first Green

Generation (Hill and Wang, 2014); Anthony Chaney, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of

Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive:

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007);

Dorceta Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection

(Duke University Press, 2016); Dorceta Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s:

Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2009); Ian Tyrrell, “Modern Environmentalism,”

in A Companion to Post-1945 America, eds. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Blackwell Publishers

Ltd., 2002). 47 David Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007);

Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Westview Press, 2000); Laura Pulido,

Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press,

1996); Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the

Environmental Justice Movement (NYU Press, 2001); David Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for

Environmental Justice in Chicago (MIT Press, 2004); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban

Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2006); Elizabeth Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and

Gender in Environmental Activism (University Press of Kansas, 2008); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011); Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the

Movement for Environmental Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Susan Cutter, “Race, Class and

Environmental Justice,” Progress in Human Geography vol. 19, no. 1 (March 1995): pp. 111-122; Robert Bullard,

ed., Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (Sierra Club Books, 1997); Robert

Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution (Counterpoint, 2005);

Robert Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (South End Press, 1999);

Dorceta Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (NYU

Press, 2014). 48 For theoretical overviews see Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, 2nd Edition (Zed Books, 2014); Carol

J. Adams and Lori Gruen, eds., Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury

Academic, 2014); Karren Warren, ed., Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Indiana University Press, 1997);

28

requires examining not only parks as practices of radical environmentalism, but the ways in

which park advocates articulated the urban environment as a dispute over territoriality and,

therefore, green spaces as sources of power.49

Case studies of local environmental justice organizing and urban protest have often been

approached from a “sedentarist” or static viewpoint that has inadvertently confined these direct

actions and their issues to particular geographic coordinates or social movements.50 Approaching

these protests from a “new mobilities” framework, I argue that insurgent park creation was

kinetic—adapted across urban geographies, national borders, and political distinctions that

mobilized larger discussions about space as a representation of power. I argue that the material,

spatial, and visual culture of insurgent park creation was the engine that propelled this movement

of resistant community-building. My dissertation reveals how activists and urban designers

worked together in both imaginative and concrete ways to root white middle-class practices of

land ownership, segregation, and urban redevelopment within violent histories of colonialism

and urban imperialism. Studying the mobility of insurgent park creation across ethnic, racial, and

national borders throughout the Cold War era demonstrates how park creators understood their

lack of access to and control over urban green space as indicative of larger transnational and

transhistorical struggles for spatial citizenship.

Christina Holmes, Ecological Borderlands: Body, Nature, and Spirit in Chicana Feminism (University of Illinois

Press, 2016); Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material

Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations vol. 23, no. 2 (Summer 2011): pp. 26-53; Noël Sturgeon,

Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action (Routledge, 1997). For specific case

studies see examples see Shannon Bell, Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for

Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and

the Legacy of DES (Yale University Press, 2011); Joyce Barry, Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental

Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal (Ohio University Press, 2014); Rachel Stein, eds., New

Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism (Rutgers University Press, 2004). 49 W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 50 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning vol. 38 (2006): pp.

207-226.

29

Building on these historiographical trends, my dissertation uses the design of parks to

examine the ideological connections between different postwar social and political movements in

divergent urban contexts. By examining People’s Parks as political symbols, geographical

locations, and processes of community-building, my dissertation analyzes how activists’

critiques of urban power structures and American imperialism impacted how parks were

constructed, experienced, and ultimately remembered differently. While my dissertation is

grounded in twentieth century historiography, my project’s interdisciplinary analysis of the

tensions shaping activist-created parks requires examining these political projects as site-specific

yet mobile, designed yet flexible, and both visual and material sites of metaphorical power. This

approach requires linking these parks and their corresponding social/political movements

together within a larger network of rebellion, examining parks as both processes and products.

Looking beyond the physical geography of parks, this dissertation analyzes the

relationship between identity, materiality, space, and power embedded within the discursive

symbolism of postwar cities. This dissertation examines how park creators embedded political

symbolism within the food, murals, landscape design, protest performances, art, and

underground journalism within and connected with these parks. Functioning as a microhistorical

analysis if late-1960s protest, this targeted read of People’s parks illustrates how activists saw

their identities as constituted through visual, material, and performative culture. Interrogating

People’s Parks through a visual studies lens offers new insight into this era of protest, revealing

how park goers understood their experiences within these landscapes of resistance as embedded

within systems of spectatorship—the cultural capital of being seen, the consciousness-raising

experience of seeing others plant and dig on private property as a material reimagining of urban

power structures, and the ability for park creators to reassert the surveillant gaze of the state by

30

creating their own media, their own archives, and their own narratives of the experience.51

Combining visuality, with materiality, and performance in a new spatial form of consciousness-

raising at times resulted in empathic connections with one another and the urban environment.

Looking beyond the traditional historiographical depiction of Berkeley’s People’s Park to

examine how park creators across the U.S. had emotional connections to these social, political,

and cultural landscapes reveals the limitations of assumed “objective” archives—often only

manuscripts, oral histories, or articles the underground press that have reduced People’s Park to

one site and a linear chronology rather than an emergent pattern of resistance in the late-Cold

War era.52

The fields of transnational American studies, borderland studies, and critical race theory

weaving through these historiographies of visual and material culture collectively offer a critical

framework with which to investigate the role that culture played in constructing racial, gender,

class, heteronormative, and transnational identities within People’s Parks, and by extension late

51 I have relied on the following theories on “the gaze”: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Gallimard, 1943);

Jacques Lacan, “The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,

ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (W. W. Norton & Company, 1973): pp. 67-78; and Laura Mulvey,

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo

Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): pp. 833-844. For key works in visual

studies that ground this dissertation, see Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with

Visual Materials (SAGE Publications, 2001); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S.

Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race,

War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The

Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011); Warren Susman, Culture as History:

The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon Books, 1973); Martin Berger, Seeing

through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011); Maurice

Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale University Press, 2010);

Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press, 2010). 52 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Johns Hopkins University Press,

1995); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University

Press, 1999); Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to

Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS

Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997); Diana Taylor, The Archive and

the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003); Kathy Ferguson,

“Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors,” Theory & Event vol. 11, no. 4 (2008).

31

Cold War era protest.53 Returning to foundational American Studies scholarship on the shifting

frontier as the fuel for U.S. practices of manifest destiny, my analysis of the People’s Park

movement sheds light on how landscape and power shaped discourses of postwar American

exceptionalism that guided both urban design and urban politics.54 I argue that park creators

capitalized on the ambiguity of semiotics and performative racial play to ally with marginalized

people of color they constructed as more exotically authentic. Using these theoretical

frameworks and methods, this dissertation analyzes how activists viewed racism and colonialism

as embedded within traditional urban power structures that took shape through the material form

of urban renewal. Activists in each city situated urban renewal campaigns that displaced

communities of color as extensions, remnants, or metaphors of colonialism, and, in doing so,

framed their reclamation and conversion of private property into People’s Parks as retribution for

the history and practice of white western imperialism. By inscribing the urban realm with global

anticolonial discourses, activists could then use park material culture to resist the aesthetics of

“the Man.” At the same time, park creators relied on racialized, gendered, and sexualized tropes

of nature in their creation of resistance landscapes that constituted their own appropriation of the

53 Several works within this broad field include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the

Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An

Introduction, 2nd Edition (NYU Press, 2012); Bill Ashcroft et. al, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts

(Routledge, 2013); Winifried Fluck, Donald Please, and Jon Carlos Rowe, eds., Re-Framing the Transnational Turn

in American Studies (Dartmouth, 2011); José Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

(University of California Press, 1997); Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of

the Earth (Grove Press, 2005); Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination

(Cornell University Press, 2001); Deloria, Playing Indian; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New

Mestiza, Third Edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2007); Lee Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano

Movement and Its Legacies (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 54 American Studies scholars in particular have explored the mythology of American exceptionalism as rooted in the

frontier; for examples see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard

University Press, 1950); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

(Oxford University Press, 1964); Annette Kolodny, Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in

American Life and Letters (University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through

Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Richard

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum, 1992).

32

American frontier mythology.55 Examining this method of protest offers insight into the

successes and struggles of similar forms of spatial occupations as forms of political placemaking

today.

1.3 Chapter Outline

Utilizing a wide range of archival collections and oral histories, I compare the design,

defense, and memory of a collection of several People’s Parks, analyzing how they were created,

defended, and maintained between 1968 and 1988. Over four chapters, my dissertation

demonstrates how different groups of park creators positioned the basic components of these

spaces—such as landscape architecture, public feasts, and murals—as valuable labor,

performances of political theater, and public practices of countercultural consciousness raising.

These parks challenged state support of urban renewal that pushed vacant lots as the new frontier

for developers expanding territory through postwar urban renewal campaigns. In Chapter 2, I

discuss how labor became an essential component of park experiences that spoke to broader

countercultural discourses reacting to alienated labor and urban displacement through calls for

individual self-making. Labor at Berkeley’s People’s Park was envisioned as a new medium for

political organizing that united political radicals and apolitical hippies. Park work was not just a

means to accomplish gardening, but a spectacle, performance, embodiment of countercultural

consciousness raising, and a discourse reflecting a shift in definitions of work within social

movement organizing.

55 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1999); Kolodny, Lay of the Land; Mitchell, Landscape and

Power; Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the

Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The

Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (University of Georgia Press, 1996).

33

Labor did not only create these spaces, but remained an ongoing activity that shaped

participants’ sensorial experiences. The sound of clinking shovels at Chicago’s Poor People’s

Park—their labor characterized by historian Studs Terkel as an archaeological dig in a

postindustrial city—as well as images of white men pick-axing the hard clay at Berkeley’s

People’s Park reflect broader postwar interest in reclaiming working-class masculinity as a

source of political resistance. With attention to how park workers defined valuable and authentic

labor, this chapter analyzes how People’s Parks became stages for masculine performativity and

heteronormativity.56 Focusing on race and gender embedded within parks, I analyze how new

definitions of park work as natural, physical, shared, insurgent, and varied created opportunities

for marginalized groups to claim space within white, male-dominated movements. Many parks

were imagined as having leaderless, collective work structures that attracted diverse contributors.

Park labor at times facilitated multicultural and gender-neutral unity, and encouraged women to

play with the gender roles that they were often relegated to within parks, such as food

preparation and childcare, by participating equally in manual labor as well as taking on

leadership roles in environmental design and political negotiating. When activists used the

visual, material and performative culture of parks to critique “the Man” as a form of hegemonic

masculinity, male park creators simultaneously used paternalist discourses of “outlaw

masculinity” to defend territorial reclamation as a form of Robin Hood-esque anti-capitalist

paternalism.57 While parks created spaces for exploring liberated sexuality, queer identity, and

women’s empowerment, the sexual objectification of women’s bodies also reinforced a

56 See Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist

Theory,” Theatre Journal vol. 40, no. 4 (December 1988): pp. 519-531; Michael Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a

Queer Planet,” Social Text no. 29 (1991): pp. 3-17. Also see Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” reprinted in Deviations:

A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2011): pp. 137-181; Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality

and Lesbian Existence,” Signs vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer, 1980): pp. 631-660. 57 R.W. Connell, Masculinities (University of California Press, 1995); Timothy Hodgdon, Manhood in the Age of

Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities (Columbia University Press, 2008).

34

heteronormative gaze in parks’ cultural memories. Although activists imagined the labor of park

creations as a new form of coalitional political organizing, emphasis on the visuality and

performance of the bodies of park workers at times reinforced ableist park discourses that guided

how hierarchies developed, with more attention given to park goers who worked in parks than

those who did not.

In Chapter 3, I analyze how this characterization of park work informed park designs and

landscapes, comparing how plants, objects, and art transformed these parks into “representational

spaces.”58 Park material cultures functioned as forms of “aesthetic power” for white radicals,

immigrants, and poor activists of color seeking to reclaim their “right to the city” amidst

displacement.59 To begin, I analyze how the first People’s Parks were constructed in the

Berkeley area by Ecology Action in 1968. Using the frameworks of Kevin Lynch and Dolores

Hayden, I analyze an anonymous map drawn of Berkeley’s People’s Park to determine how the

park was designed, what was omitted, and what these silences reveal about inequalities of power

within the park. 60 Often reiterating the colonial language of urban renewal in their critiques of it,

many park advocates utilized capitalist frameworks advocating for highest and best use to defend

park projects as beautiful, valuable, used, and therefore symbolically owned by park goers. Park

creators transformed vacant lots into alternative communities—what participants believed were

more authentic and natural landscapes that encouraged both individual exploration and

teamwork.

58 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley-Blackwell, 1992). 59 Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Zukin, Landscapes of Power. 60 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes

as Public History (MIT Press, 1995). Also see Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (2nd Edition) (University of

Chicago Press, 1996).

35

Park creators used plants to prove themselves and parks as both revolutionary and

legitimate, using landscaping, gardening, and architecture to counter top-down development

discourses of blight, disrepair, and filth that disparaged working-class politically radical

neighborhoods of color targeted for urban renewal. In many ways, the landscape design of some

parks replicated patterns in suburban landscapes: the quick placement of expensive, homogenous

sod allowed the creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park to envision an immediate utopia built on

the back of farm labor, chemical weed control, and heavy machinery. Transforming vacant lots

into verdant green spaces allowed park creators to imagine themselves as reclaiming the

American frontier that, when contested, became a discursive tool to reinforce gendered and

racialized tropes pacifying nature as an embodiment of white virginal innocence that they now

protected. At the same time, park advocates constructed vivid narratives of parks, using print

culture, material culture, and performance within parks. Many park narratives that glorified the

masculine protection of innocent land and the fantasy of racial play relied on the bodies of

sexualized women and militarized men of color to tell these stories. Ethnic tropes in park

narratives intended to forge cross-cultural alliances with Chinese, Vietnamese, Native

Americans, and Mexicans became what Brian Norman has called “imperfect analogies,” as

efforts to form transnational political relationships reinforced strategic essentialism of ethnic

minorities.61 Race and class shaped how park creators saw plants as symbols of preservation or

sources of survival. While some white park creators advocated reclaiming ownership of urban

green space by returning to a romantic view of more “natural” native horticulture, insurgent

61 See Brian Norman, “The Consciousness-Raising Document, Feminist Anthologies, and Black Women in

Sisterhood Is Powerful,” Frontiers 27, no. 3 (2006): p. 50; Brian Norman, "Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's

Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays," Women's Studies 35, no. 3 (2006): pp. 241–264.

36

gardens created by immigrants and people of color offered nutritional stability as a form of racial

self-determination.

Putting San Diego’s Chicano Park in conversation with Berkeley’s People’s Park reveals

how discourses of labor, ritual, and design at times privileged the bodies, voices, and leadership

of straight, cisgender men as captured in park narratives. Women muralists worked together to

fight for the right to add to murals painted on the concrete pillars of the Coronado Bay Bridge

underpass, engaging in insurgent placemaking of their own to center their representations of

women’s transnational mestizo bodies and heritage within Chicano Park. In other cities, park

goers celebrated indigeneity and anti-colonialism through art, print culture, food, and

performance using racialized rhetoric that transformed these direct actions into political, ethnic,

and national borderlands—la frontera.62 This “mythohistorical intervention” created space for

activists to embody multiple overlapping identities as indigenous, Spanish-speaking, and

American to challenge displacement.63

As I discuss in Chapter 4, many parks were sustained because of food service integrated

into park design, labor, and experience. Rituals of food production and consumption were critical

to park efforts to create new sustainable communities. Challenging both Cold War containment

as well as the demolition of affordable housing, parks pushed kitchen and dining spaces outdoors

by centering picnic areas and barbecue pits. While food was necessary for feeding workers at

People’s Parks, it seldom involved prior planning, resulting in spontaneous culinary

collaborations mixing processed ingredients and handmade meals with a heavy dose of wine and

drugs. Earlier free food giveaways by the Diggers and the Black Panthers influenced these

shared suppers that became mediums with which park goers could consume political rebellion.

62 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. 63 Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions.

37

Two common meals served in People’s Parks—potluck stews and pig roasts—reveal how food

not only filled workers’ bellies but served as forms of culinary political theater that imagined

parks as multicultural coalition against police. While at Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, women

created Puerto Rican stews like asopao de pollo to demonstrate solidarity with the plight of

displaced, in Berkeley women facilitated people’s stews made from random donations that

became edible discourses of racial harmony. Across park boundaries, cooking and eating

gendered and racialized food unified park goers, signifying a multicultural, anti-assimilationist

revolt for ethnic self-determination and historical agency.

Envisioned as a complement to these vegetable-based potages, men slow-roasted hogs on

spits to celebrate the metaphorical shared dismemberment and consumption of white male police

officers. Pig rhetoric politicized white-dominated parks by putting them in conversation with the

Yippies and the Black Panthers. Hog roasts transformed the socializing atmosphere of park

bonfires into spaces reifying masculine power and dominance. Park food cultures created holistic

sensory experiences that park goers characterized as more authentic, more sensual, and more

fulfilling than those imagined as defining mainstream America. Meals cooked on site created a

smoky atmosphere, had to be eaten on mismatched paper plates with your hands, and required

creative innovation in cooking for dozens outdoors that made meals in parks feel like

collaborative feats. Campfire meals, combined with drum circles, shared wine jugs, and

exploratory dancing transformed parks into imagined frontiers for “playing Indian.”64 At the

same time that hog roasts enlivened men and women who joyfully danced topless in tune with

their own bodies around the campfires, the expectations of women’s culinary carework often

reinforced women as a servant class to male leaders within People’s Parks.

64 Deloria, Playing Indian.

38

Chapter 5 examines People’s Parks as contested territories, and analyzes the variety of

tactics, from violent to bureaucratic, that city councils, universities, and police forces utilized to

reassert authority over protestors in the urban realm. Although critics argued that park creators

incited violence in their attempts to provoke a reaction from the state, I argue that parks were

created within existing contexts of institutionalized violence that connected police brutality with

urban renewal. Comparing the urban histories of Berkeley and Chicago, I analyze how postwar

gentrification targeted affordable housing in neighborhoods of working-class immigrants,

political radicals, and people of color. Police targeted park organizers who affiliated with

political radical groups or past direct actions challenging displacement. Using the 1968 Yippie

Festival of Life in Chicago to link park creators in Lincoln Park and Berkeley, I demonstrate

how earlier activist placemaking tactics were met with fierce police brutality. Critics capitalized

on these arrests as a way to prove park organizers were inappropriate users of space.

Shared experiences of police harassment became a foundation for cross-cultural

coalitions across lines of race, class, and politics in People’s Parks. Positioning the defense of

green space as innocent and progressive, both activists and the state manipulated the language of

manifest destiny to assert power over parks as the new frontier. These protests were violently

regulated by the state, revealing how politicians, developers, and the police worked together to

discredit activists and parks. At the same time park creators harnessed transhistorical and

multicultural narratives of violence to legitimize their demands for space. Park narratives of

social and urban environmental utopianism often regenerated a visual culture of violent

resistance that frequently resorted to gender and racial tropes of the ethnically exotic

revolutionary warrior, the white siren, and the white outlaw.65 Activists used the media and

65 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence.

39

placemaking to reproduce a cultural memory of trauma that became “entangled” with park

materialities.66 Cities responded by heralding profit-driven development, while defining property

ownership as a “correct” performance of one’s spatial citizenship.

In conclusion, I reflect on how these contests over parks transformed cities into literal

and symbolic battlegrounds that shaped the legacies of these placemaking projects. Reflecting on

how violence shaped park creation in Berkeley after “Bloody Thursday,” May 15, 1969, provides

insight into the successes and struggles of contemporary political placemakers. Using the

examples of the Occupy Wall Street movement as well as the #LetUsBreathe Collective who

created Chicago’s Freedom Square in 2016 to protest the violent policing of black bodies, I argue

that insurgent park creators continue to use materiality, performance, and labor to realize worlds

without the disempowerment of displacement. While patterns of urban renewal and police

brutality grow, limiting access to safe, healthy, and free public space, developers and park critics

reject claims of spatial disenfranchisement by asserting the criminality of People’s Park users.

1.4 Reexamining Failure: Limitations and Further Research

This dissertation is not a comprehensive history of activist-created green spaces. Instead,

this project seeks to capture a historical moment between 1968 and 1988 when this method of

protest became popular and why it did. This is the story of how several People’s Parks came into

being—what catalyzed the takeover of lots, how parks were designed and constructed to speak to

particular political issues, what factors pushed universities, politicians, and the police to reclaim

these lots, and how these initial experiences of birth and loss shaped the memories of these

radical ecological direct actions. By mapping insurgent park creation as a method of protest, we

66 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering

(University of California Press, 1997).

40

can see how larger systemic patterns of spatial and environmental inequality shaped postwar

social justice organizing that draws our attention to the ways in which spatial citizenship is

regulated. While paying attention to discourses of whiteness and ethnic exoticism,

hypermasculinity and women’s empowerment, this dissertation still centers white narratives by

focusing on Berkeley. This study puts the most well-known People’s Park in conversation with

others to demonstrate the popularity of the protest tactic as a lens into broader debates

concerning displacement in the late Cold War era. This study sheds light on undocumented parks

created by marginalized groups, as well as the ways in which women struggled to negotiate

power structures within these spaces. However, in critiquing the white male leaders of

Berkeley’s People’s Park, I have also given them a wider stage in the historical narrative. In

doing so, my analysis has inadvertently made parks created by groups of color peripheral to a

straight white middle-class narrative.

My reliance on published sources to pinpoint locations and dates to quickly put dozens of

parks in conversation has further narrowed my scope to examining parks covered in media

largely controlled by white straight, middle-class men. Due to the widespread media attention

directed at Berkeley during altercations between park allies and the police, archival material on

Berkeley’s People’s Park is exhaustive, encompassing hundreds of boxes of material across

numerous archives from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to the Library of Congress in

Washington, D.C. The extensive material on Berkeley’s People’s Park contrasts sharply with the

dozens of other case studies of activist-created parks as civil disobedient placemaking projects

that I have identified in my own research that might only have one folder’s worth of material

formally archived. The voices of men—particularly white heterosexual middle-class men in

positions of power—are the most well-documented. The papers of white male politicians and

41

university administrators are collected and organized chronologically within university and state

archives, making them more accessible for researchers. Additionally, white male political leaders

in the left who had access to the press as a platform for power, such as Stew Albert, Abbie

Hoffman, and John Sinclair, have also had their papers collected and stored, while print,

microfilm, and digital archives of their writings have reinforced their dominance within 1960s

activism. In contrast, some parks created by people of color might have only been documented

by one photograph—the park’s creators now scattered across the United States nearly fifty years

later with little memory of the park’s development. In an historical moment in which protestors

were wary of hierarchical leadership structures and eager to make cross-cultural, transnational

connections in anti-racist organizing, the names of white men ironically became fundamental to

telling the stories of Berkeley’s People’s Park and the People’s Park movement.

Even within historiography on Berkeley’s People’s Park, the focus on white male

organizers has overshadowed the experiences of women, particularly working-class women of

color, who are nearly invisible. In Berkeley’s People’s Park historiography, Wendy Schlesinger

often remains the only woman mentioned in relation to the original organizing circle of

Berkeley’s People’s Park.67 Historians who have focused on centering white male park leaders

have continued to allow the same male historical figures to approve and regulate how parks are

remembered. While many organizers of Berkeley’s People’s Park that I interviewed are eager to

see how their direct action inspired the creation of other parks, many interviewees with whom I

67 Although Stanley Irwin Glick cited Schlesinger’s unpublished monograph in his dissertation and first major

historical work on Berkeley’s People’s Park, no scholar has used her memoir to analyze gender relations within the

space. No historian has ever analyzed her feminist critiques of gender role stereotyping and sexualization that she

and other women experienced at the park as workers. Her memoir reveals how her gender and sxuality shaped her

experience laboring as a park leader. For examples of her isolation in historiography, see Glick, “The People’s

Park,” Ibid.; Robert Sheer, writer, David Goldstein, photographer, “Dialectics of Confrontation: Who Ripped off the

Park?’ Ramparts (August 1969): pp. 41-53; Jon Cash, “People’s Park: Birth and Survival,” California History vol.

88, no. 1 (2010): pp. 8-29, 53-55.

42

have spoken are resistant to the idea that any parks predated theirs in 1969. While this method of

activist placemaking in Berkeley was not unique, I argue that park organizers’ methods of

recruiting advocates to, at times, literally fight for parks were significant. Their ability to harness

the underground and mainstream media through empathic photographs, as well as their ability to

frame urban renewal and police brutality as extensions of white western imperialism attracted a

range of advocates who adapted the People’s Park method to their own identity-driven agenda.

While many People’s Parks have been created, the organizers of Berkeley’s People’s Park

harnessed the power of white, straight male leaders with access to the media to attract listeners.

If measuring the impact of the park on its discussion in the mainstream media and subsequent

historiography, its reach is impressive.68 However, this isolating focus on Berkeley’s People’s

Park has overshadowed how it was embedded within a movement of activist environmental

urban placemaking as a form of political territoriality. Putting these parks in conversation with

one another reveals how issues of urban spatial power came to the forefront of debates

concerning citizenship in the late Cold War era.

When recording oral histories, I have found men, particularly white men, much more

willing to share their experiences on insurgent park creation. Within primary source materials,

white men seldom critiqued power hierarchies within parks—perhaps blind to how their actions

disenfranchised others or how they were content with the privileges afforded by de facto

hierarchies within these spaces. These topics remain uncomfortable. With nearly a half-century

since the creation of Berkeley’s People’s Park, and attempts to develop the park expanding in the

twenty-first century, many interviewees resist critiquing park experiences or have no memories

68 Many scholars have cited the impact of Berkeley’s People’s Park on the historical of postwar social justice

organizing, the media, and on food activism. Even if measuring reprints of photographs and articles from the

People’s Park conflicts that critiqued police violence, the impact is substantial.

43

altogether of parks. Some women have turned down my interview requests claiming they have

nothing to add to what has been published, while others repeat exact phrases from published

articles or memoirs from this era—revealing an almost obsessive search for validation in the

decades since its creation. Poring over the written record, many reaffirm the memories they had

while disregarding any critical analysis of what it could have been. Interviewees respond to

questions about patterns of systemic displacement by relying on the very passive, laissez-faire

discourse of equal opportunity on which parks were imagined to have been structured.

Women often unintentionally adopt male-centered language in their own recollections of

parks. Because many were involved in the project as parts of heterosexual couples, women park

creators center men in their own narratives by discussing how they worked or were in

relationships with powerful men. Most often when questioning interviewees about sexism within

parks, they simply cannot remember. “Sure,” they say. “Sexism, racism, and other

marginalization likely happened in the park,” they assure me, but it simply was not an issue.

“The women’s liberation movement had not even happened yet; it did not even occur to us,” is

the common refrain, across lines of gender. In contrast, park users often remember the emotions

they felt connected with what they saw. The joy in seeing and touching the sod, the grip of the

shovel, or the fear of seeing a woman place a daisy in the barrel of a shotgun became

quintessential anecdotes that became the foundation for larger visual, material, and performative

narratives characterizing parks. Within parks as shared happenings, the memories of individuals

blur as, “me” becomes “we,” the empowerment of one the strength of all. In this discourse, the

oppression of the violent colonization of the racial Other transformed into the lived experiences

of all within this political borderland. While acknowledging how memory functions as a “ritual

of power” in setting precedents for hegemonic “memorializations,” this dissertation also

44

embraces forgetting as a form of resistance to displacement.69 How might women be forgetting

patterns of sexism that invalidated the empowerment they felt at the wheel of a rototiller or

behind a camera? And simultaneously, how might thinking about the racial play of food and

plants ignite uncomfortable feelings about cultural appropriation and white privilege that might

destabilize the foundations of utopian equality on which these parks were imagined? Some

women have pushed through, such as the powerful Chicana feminists at San Diego’s Chicano

Park who have subverted men’s absolutist authority since its creation by insurgently painting

their own murals of women. Their actions, characterized by some men in the park as treasonous,

inspired other women and girls to reclaim space within the park, and, by extension, their history

within the movement. And, as the historical context has shifted, with white supremacists calling

for the erasure of murals celebrating multi-ethnic history within Chicano Park, women center

themselves within the activist resistance and, by extension, the history of the park.70

Examining the People’s Park movement through interdisciplinary lenses of critical theory

allows us to understand how park goers imagined their politics as exploratory. People’s Parks

designated space within the urban realm for the interconnection of economic, political, social,

and environmental issues. The method of insurgent park creation attracted a range of bodies,

backgrounds, and political differences because the effort to realize a gender-neutral, racially-

harmonious, anti-colonial, pro-work utopia was a radical act. The creation of green space was

imagined as creating seropositive energy from which the broader movement and city could

69 Terms from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1995); framework

from Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011): p. 15. 70 Lyndsay Winkley, “Brief but explosive shouting match erupts at Chicano Park demonstration,” San Diego Union-

Tribune (September 3, 2017): http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me-chicano-park-

20170903-story.html.

45

benefit.71 In contrast, the visceral experience of police violence against parks became a form of

“ecocide”—a term Sara Schulman uses to describe how AIDS and gentrification together wiped

out entire urban ecologies of queer subcultural experience.72 Paranoia, police brutality, profit-

driven development, and urban political bureaucracies splintered park coalitions by removing the

power to create, and in doing so erased entire subcultures resisting urban renewal in late Cold

War era cities. These forces enhanced the political fragmentation that came from the fear of

hearing increasingly more diverse voices within the postwar left. At the same time, infighting

over equality and power fragmented parks from within.

Linear, chronological narratives that center men in People’s Parks position police

violence, urban renewal, and disagreements among park advocates as the logical conclusion to

an illogical method of resistance. Focusing on the demise of parks rather than the life they

created makes teleological sense of the 1960s as a childishly idealistic historical moment before

the 1970s’ “me decade,” and a 1980s’ return to profit-driven adult normalcy. Parks like

Berkeley’s People’s Park are criticized as failures for not measuring up to institutionalized

standards of success, including appropriate spatial use and structured design from which park

organizers were seeking to escape. Parks’ inherent ephemerality, mobility, and ideological

flexibility—aspects that made them revolutionary as radical postwar social justice organizing

techniques—become redefined in the historical narrative as indicators of inherent structural

weakness within the postwar left. As Marita Sturken argues, “The desire for narrative closure

thus forces upon historical events the limits of narrative form and enables forgetting.”73 In the

71 Sara Schulman uses this phrase to describe the work of ACT UP in creating positive energy for people suffering

from the combined struggles of AIDS and gentrification as forces feeding on negative energy. See Sara Schulman,

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (University of California Press, 2012). 72 Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: p. 15. 73 Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 8.

46

case of People’s Parks, the focus on park closures has erased the radical political placemaking

that occurred before and after, as well as the simultaneous layers of coalition building and

negotiating power that shaped these spaces in between.

Moving beyond an approach that seeks to define parks as successes or failures, I argue

that analyzing People’s Parks requires embracing them as what Jack Halberstam defines as a

“queer art of failure.” Halberstam argues that queerness is a history of failing to measure up to

societal norms. Its study, therefore, demands embracing failure as a lens of alternative being,

including “unleash[ing] new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard

evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.”74 As rejections

of private property ownership, anarchist park creations intended to defy capitalism, private

property ownership, and top-down urban design as integrated forms of neocolonialism. Because

their history “teems with the remnants of alternative possibilities,” this dissertation begins to

“trace the lines of the worlds they conjured and left behind.” I argue that by returning to the

initial burst of creativity that catalyzed park coalitions, and by redefining success and failure, we

can embrace the power of their queerness. In doing so, we can “access traditions of political

action that, while not necessarily successful in the sense of becoming dominant, do offer models

of contestation, rupture, and discontinuity for the political present.”75 By reexamining these so-

called failures through new critical lenses, we can gain greater insight into the ways in which

current political placemaking actions similarly counter definitions of success by creating space

for subjugated knowledges within existing colonial conditions.76

74 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 15. 75 Halberstam The Queer Art of Failure, p. 19. 76 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (Tavistock Publications Ltd.,

1972).

47

CHAPTER 2. “THE RAPE OF MOTHER EARTH”: RACIAL

INSPIRATIONS, GENDERED WORK, AND ROMANTICIZED

ENVIRONMENTAL LABOR IN THE PEOPLE’S PARK MOVEMENT

“The conversation stopped in mid-air as we drove up Dwight Way past Telegraph.

Wow—it was only one o’clock…but already there were about one hundred people hard at work,

spaced out in rhythmic, patterned teams…Four or five people pushing wheelbarrows full of

rocks scurried about. Women dragged boxes also full of rocks…Many lines of ten people were

hard at work with rakes, hoes and pitchforks. They fanned out in brigades. There was a human

storm of activity…I couldn’t believe that everything had worked out so perfectly.”

Wendy Schlesinger, ca. 19691

2.1 Introduction

When Wendy Schlesinger, a young white, Jewish, college-educated woman from a

middle-class East coast family, arrived in Berkeley in 1968 to begin a graduate program in

English at the University of California, she was both captivated and revolted by campus. In

contrast to the heavily manicured lawns, restrictive signs, and the dry desert climate that she

disliked, Schlesinger was drawn to the counterculture and cross-cultural action that would

quickly become part of her new identity. Leaving her parents’ home in upstate New York,

Schlesinger had felt liberated by the cross-country car ride to campus with her boyfriend Peter,

as they now felt “free to live out our particular ‘manifest destinies.’” Frustrated with parental

control and by women’s competition for her boyfriend’s attention, the vacant miles ahead of her

became a frontier for her own self-making: “We tasted the sharp freedom of driving in one

direction only, west, west with no turning back.” Northern California—the hippie mecca,

birthplace of the Black Panthers, and home to escalating student protests—would become her

1 Wendy Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park—and other political events,” Unpublished memoir courtesy of

author (ca. 1969): Chapter 2, pp. 15-16. Numbering begins again with each chapter.

48

new frontier. Having felt confined to Peter by gendered expectations of monogamy, in Berkeley

she emerged as a sexually liberated woman in a cosmopolitan political environment.2

In her unpublished memoir, Schlesinger described this period of exploration in Berkeley

as a form of sensory liberation. She locked eyes with potential lovers walking down Telegraph

Avenue, got a “taste” of Eldridge Cleaver at his lecture at the University of California, and

absorbed the wild “sensual din” and spectacle of the ongoing Third World Strike on campus.3

For her, Berkeley felt like an ocean of political and cultural energy coming from a privileged

background. The walls she had built dividing her social, cultural, and political borders began to

crumble as she opened her mind to new ways of knowing. Consciousness-raising experiences,

like dancing and chanting in the Third World Strike, merged performance and political action,

sexuality and friendship. She wanted to feel politically empowered, and found direct actions like

these for black coalition and survival not only mind-opening, but fun. At one point in a change of

tactics at the Third World Strike, a man took her by the arms to lead a cross-campus snake dance

or jiguzagu.4 She could taste the freedom that the chaotic yet streamlined civil disobedience

tactic fostered. “Pow, boom, it’s as sweet as tangerine ices…I was in the tail of the snake, and

then the front was out the other end and back into the comforting sunlight already.” As her

blonde hair and white skin glided past tones of caramel and sable, she felt she was “soaring up,

up, up, leaving fear down on the ground, finding in the unity of people…a new kind of warmth.

Comradeship.” Reflecting on the experience, Schlesinger wrote how her political visibility and

2 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 2, p. 16. 3 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 3, pp. 14, 16. 4 For more on this protest tactic and how it was adopted by postwar leftists, see William Andrews, Dissenting

Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945 to Fukushima (Hurst 2016): pp. 42, 98.

49

cross-cultural alliances became a form of doing something constructive beyond national

borders—working toward “something irrefutably good” that police could not stop.5

Schlesinger became one of the organizers of Berkeley’s People’s Park within a year, and

helped define the park’s ideology of individual liberation through shared communal labor. Her

participation in anti-racist actions like these, as well as her white, heterosexual, female identity

and middle-class background, shaped how she understood her work in the creation of People’s

Park. For her, the park became a liberating experience similar to the snake dance because park

labor facilitated connections between her body and politics. She felt empowered and connected

in seeing the park creation a form of literal community-building that used materiality, form, and

context to create a more meaningful links within the Berkeley community. In contrast to

paternalist, profit-driven property development that estranged citizens from urban design on

campus, place-makers like Schlesinger argued that People’s Park was revolutionary because it

asserted that average citizens, women like her, and their bodies were valuable producers and

users of public green space in deeply political ways. Schlesinger was one of dozens of women

who helped develop, maintain, and enliven Berkeley’s People’s Park, yet women have been

displaced in the park’s memory. Most often in historical narratives and activist accounts,

femininity—through images and names of women—is erased while feminine gender pronouns

are written onto oppressed people and objects. Women are often framed as feminine accessories

to masculine mythologies of urban anarchist self-making—as caregivers, sex symbols, and

emotional advocates—unless they are forgotten altogether.

To analyze how power hierarchies have structured People’s Parks and, in turn, discourses

of territoriality and placemaking in the late Cold War era, this chapter interrogates work within

5 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 3, p. 23-24.

50

the People’s Park movement. Using archival research and memoirs, I analyze how gender shaped

how park creators positioned their projects as forms of political resistance. This chapter builds on

work by historians who have analyzed how access to and control over space shaped the

relationship between identity and citizenship in the postwar era.6 Putting Berkeley’s People’s

Park in conversation with other case studies of activist-created green spaces in this era reveals

how the production of People’s Parks relied on rhetoric that seamlessly infused nature and work

in performance and discourse. Park work cultures demonstrate the visual, performative, and

material processes by which insurgent park creators not only destabilized traditional definitions

of work within a capitalist economy, but also simultaneously reaffirmed racialized and gendered

hierarchies of labor and nature within these liberated zones. Representations of work within

some white-dominated People’s Parks played on histories of white heterosexual male control of

the frontier as a form of radical manifest destiny. In other parks created by people of color,

women’s bodies were accessories to men’s reclamation of physical strength through labor and

territorial control. Taken together, disputes over leadership, work, and nature within People’s

Parks were embedded within larger patterns of sexism that connected postwar social justice

movements.

2.2 Interrogating Masculinity in Historiography

Prompted by largely white and male eco-friendly free speech activists, anarchists, and

hippies, Berkeley’s People’s Park has been heralded as the first, only, or best activist-created

6 For examples see Bradford Martin, The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties

America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Finn Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space,

and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press, 2007); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for

Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press, 2003); Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History

and the Politics of Violence (Duke University Press, 2013); James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port

Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1994).

51

park by many scholars and participants to such an extent that it is often referred to as the

People’s Park rather than part of a network of activist-created green spaces. Historians tend to

ground Berkeley’s People’s Park in the rise of white student activism, countercultural rebellion,

and environmentalism, promoting a myopic view of the park as a site of protest with focus on

white men.7 New scholarship by urban design scholars and spatial studies scholars offers new

insight into the collaborative design process of Berkeley’s People’s Park, as well as the creation

of other People’s Parks in San Diego, Vancouver, and Chicago, but they too focus on largely

men.8 The historiographical gap on this widespread movement of activist-created green spaces

has been compounded by layers of erasure, in which primary and secondary sources center

attention on white men at Berkeley’s People’s Park as the face of the movement.9

7 See W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford University Press, 1989); David Farber, Chicago ’68

(University of Chicago Press, 1994); Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” PhD Dissertation (State University

of New York at Stony Brook, 1984); Jon Cash, “People’s Park: Birth and Survival,” California History vol. 88, no.

1 (2010): pp. 8-29, 53-55. 8 See Michael Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of

Liberalism in Postwar America,” PhD Dissertation (University of Chicago, 2010); Greg Castillo’s coverage of

Berkeley’s Ohlone Park in “Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet,” Places

Journal (October 2015): https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-modernism/; Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s

Park, Architectural Modernism and Urban Renewal,” ISSI Fellows Working Paper (University of California,

Berkeley, 2007): http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vz4s7jj; For a sampling of texts that have mentioned other illegal

activist-created parks, see Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War; Eric Avila’s coverage of San Diego’s Chicano Park in The

Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2014); Richard Griswold del Castillo, Chicano San Diego: Cultural Space and the Struggle for Justice (University

of Arizona Press, 2008); for more on Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, see Wilfredo Cruz, City of Dreams: Latino

Immigration to Chicago (University of Arizona Press, 2007); Frank Zelko cited Vancouver’s People’s Park in Make

It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2013): p. 58. 9 A great example of the erasure of women in the People’s Park movement is the case of the Red Square dress

boutique where the first organizing meeting for Berkeley’s People’s Park was held. Liane Chu, a Chinese American

UC Berkeley student, was known for having been arrested in the first Sproul Hall sit-in December 2, 1964

(“Students Claim Innocence”) before becoming Miss San Francisco Chinatown in 1966 (“Gung Hay Fat Choy”).

Chu and Delacour started the Red Square dress shop together where she made the clothes. She continued to run the

store after Delacour left their romantic relationship. However, because some articles (“Cops Ambush LA

Protestors”) and subsequently historiographies (Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, and Rorabaugh, American Hippies)

attributed the shop to Delacour, Chu has been written out of the history of Berkeley’s People’s Park altogether.

Small missed details like these reinforce a white male narrative of People’s Park that position women as working

under men or invisible altogether. For a detailed description of Chu’s shop and its importance to the park, see

Schlesinger, “The Creation,” Chapter 4, p. 2. Also see Dalzell, “The Riches of Rag Theater: Nacio Jan Brown’s

Berkeley,” Berkeleyside (April 14, 2016): http://www.berkeleyside.com/2016/04/14/how-quirky-was-berkeley-the-

riches-of-rag-theater/; “Students Claim Innocence; ‘Just Looking’ at Demonstration,” The Daily Californian vol.

186, no. 65 (December 16, 1964); “Gung Hay Fat Choy,” The Times vol. 66, no. 7 (San Mateo, CA, January 8,

1966): p. 3A; Walter Blum, “Out on a Limb,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (October 8, 1967):

52

As the representative synecdoche for the People’s Park movement, the history of

Berkeley’s People’s Park is often told through the labor of white heterosexual men. Mike

Delacour—a thin, white, pony-tailed hippie—is considered the father of the park. Delacour is

remembered as having the original idea for the project as a site for both free speech and rock

concerts.10 More than forty years later, Delacour remains as one of the park’s key icons, and

continues to promote the significance of the park through YouTube videos, events, and activist

demonstrations.11 Stew Albert, with long frizzy, sandy blonde curls and wide bearded grin, wrote

the original call-out for workers in the Berkeley Barb with the signature “Robin Hood’s Park

Commissioner.” After serving as a key spokesperson for the park in the underground press due to

his work at the Barb and the Berkeley Tribe, in 1970 Albert ran for Sheriff of Alameda County

on an anti-police, pro-People’s Park platform.12 In 2006, the Oakland City Council honored his

work at Berkeley’s People’s Park among a list of his political accomplishments by naming

February 1, 2006 “Stew Albert Day.”13 Landscape Architect Jon Read became a professional

designer for the park, guiding workers in leveling the site, removing asphalt and foundation, and

planting sod, trees, and shrubs. Read remained involved in the park through struggles with law

enforcement in the 1970s and broader Berkeley-area environmentalism through the 1990s.14 UC

Berkeley professor and architect Sim Van der Ryn argued on behalf of the organizing committee

for the university to allow the park to stay as an experiential learning laboratory for the College

section, California Living; “Cops Ambush LA Protestors,” Berkeley Barb vol. 4, no. 26 (June 30-July 6, 1967):

cover. 10 The politicization of Delacour’s original motive shifts from source to source. 11 Cash, “People’s Par;” for examples on Delacour’s continued contributions to the park, see Walter Smith Rebel,

“Michael Delacour People’s Park Founder’s Forum,” YouTube (July 7, 2012):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoN1r58Jj08; Charles Scamahorn, “People’s Park and Rag Theater with

Michael Delacour, Berkeley,” YouTube (February 11, 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D60xRXT0Qc8. 12 The Flying Zig Zag Man, “Sheriff Stew, Posse Power,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 2, no. 13, issue 39 (April 3-10, 1970):

p. 5. 13 Compost, People’s Park, p. 157. 14 Compost, People’s Park, p. 161.

53

of Environmental Design.15 In an impassioned speech at a noon rally on campus the day of the

fencing, UC Berkeley Student Body President Dan Siegel “inadvertently” encouraged a horde of

leftist students to leave a political rally on campus, storm the streets of Berkeley, and reclaim the

fenced park.

Although the counterculture largely shunned formal leadership structures and citations as

part of its renunciation of authority, the names of additional men, including Paul Glusman, Art

Goldberg, Frank Bardacke, Steve Haines, Alan Copeland, and others often accompanied stories

on the park. A report on the park published by the Office of Governor of California in 1969

listed of seven white men as the park’s ringleaders, using their ties to other protests, arrests, and

political organizations as evidence of their presumed intent to incite an armed revolt.16 Men’s

names, in turn, have been reinforced in historiography on Berkeley’s People’s Park since 1969.

White male leaders at Berkeley’s People’s Park had the greatest access to the press as a platform

for disseminating their positive reflections on and support of the project. Stew Albert was a

freelance reporter for the Berkeley Barb while Art Goldberg reported for Ramparts. The Barb

and the Berkeley Tribe included articles by Albert, Bardacke, Glusman, and other men. Their

writings told from white middle-class male perspectives that allied with working-class, racial

self-determination movements that frequently reinforced the park as a space for gender

neutrality, racial harmony, and cross-class cohesion within the park, yet their writings still often

focused on masculinity. Within one week of the park’s emergence, notorious revolutionary men

like Bobby Seale and Abbie Hoffman and local celebrities like City Councilmen Wilmont

Sweeney, County Supervisor Joseph Bort, and Mayor Wallace Johnson were cited in the

15 Sim Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus: Current Issues in Higher Education, ed.

G. Kerry Smith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1970): pp. 54-71. 16 Office of the Governor, State of California, “The ‘People’s Park’: A Report on a Confrontation at Berkeley,

California,” (July 1, 1969): p. 4.

54

underground press as having made appearances on site. Max Scherr, editor of the Barb published

a picture of himself with Seale at the park.17 Male business owners such as Frank Cody of

Cody’s Bookstore and John Alsberg of Nicole’s clothing boutique were cited for their support of

the park.18 At both Berkeley’s People’s Park and Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, architects Sim

Van der Ryn and Buckminster Fuller have been constructed as objective, supportive judges

whose approval and influence have helped to construct the parks as sites of forward thinking

experimental design.

In opposition to park organizers, Governor Ronald Reagan and Sheriff Frank Madigan

are remembered as the white ringleaders—“the blue meanies”—of the park’s fencing and the

arch-enemies of the park’s creators.19 Reagan’s public statements calling for zero tolerance of

anti-capitalist protestors helped catapult the park into an international news story. Reagan

reiterated his negative perceptions of the park in radio commentary broadcasts while running for

president a decade later.20 These white male figureheads in the public narrative of Berkeley’s

People’s Park were coupled with visual rhetoric produced by the underground and mainstream

media that often focused on archetypal masculine figures and bodies as symbols of sacrifice and

resistance. Photographs of the riot-gear-covered bodies of armed National Guardsmen dominated

underground and mainstream press coverage immediately after the fencing. In contrast to their

clothed physiques serving as the corporeal personification of hypermasculinity, the slain body of

James Rector became the resistance movement’s Christ figure. Shot and killed by troops while

watching scuffles between park advocates and police, the young white construction worker was

17 Albert, “People’s Park.” 18 Kathy, “Everybody’s Happy,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17, issue 193 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5. 19 See W.J. Rorabaugh, American Hippies (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 20 “People’s Park I, Program 79-08, May 29, 1979,” Folder 1979, Box 2, Ronald Reagan Radio Commentary Sound

Recordings Collection (200C19), Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University; “People’s Park II, Program 79-

08, May 29, 1979,” Folder 1979, Box 2, Ronald Reagan Radio Commentary Sound Recordings Collection

(200C19), Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

55

portrayed as an apolitical bystander by park allies and a surreptitious agitator by the state.

Photographs of his bloodied body as a product of police brutality inspired other parks across the

Berkeley area, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, that eulogized his death through

public memorials as violence between protestors and states escalated through the early 1970s.21

Women are almost entirely erased from this historical overview. From the bodies of white men

who figuratively sacrificed themselves as workers and allies to the creative geniuses behind the

protest and its downfall, white men dominate the narrative of Berkeley’s People’s Park long after

it is fenced. This reiteration of men’s names reduces the complexity of the park’s creation to a

linear chronology of birth to demolition.

In memoirs, Delacour is often heralded as the park’s father figure. Sim Van der Ryn,

Wendy Schlesinger, Carol Denney, Paul Glusman, and numerous others depict Delacour as the

park’s originator, guide, and a key voice in negotiations. While lauding his advocacy of the

park’s leaderless structure, Van der Ryn described Delacour’s behavior as one of a “natural”

leader. “His position was made clear by the role he was playing at the park. He did not lead by

giving orders, but by moving among the task groups and giving directions by initiating action

and asking the participants what they wanted to do. Then, by virtue of his actions, people

naturally followed his lead. They seemed fully willing to work but not sure of making

decisions.” Van der Ryn described Delacour as naturally commanding attention with his body; at

one meeting, Delacour stood in the corner, “one foot on a chair” to center his groin while leading

the discussion.22 In addition to guiding new workers on site, Delacour took charge of arriving

early at the lot to block parking cars from entering. Part of Delacour’s self-policing of the park

21 Although dozens of parks were created illegally across the U.S. after the park was fenced, two parks in particular

were named after James Rector in Ann Arbor and Madison; See John Sinclair, Ann Arbor Sun vol. 1 no. 6 (June 4,

1971): p. 5; Bill Paul, “Comin’ Thru Cheese,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1 no. 12 (September 26, 1969): p. 6. 22 Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park,” p. 57.

56

required informing park goers how to best use and respect the space and in doing so gave him

autonomy in making decisions about how the park should best represent itself to the critical eye.

Each choice made to remove debris, correct behavior, or secure specific material donations for

the park helped reinforce a particular park design as well as Delacour’s decision-making role as a

leading designer. Now, nearly fifty years since the creation of Berkeley’s People’s Park,

Delacour is discussed as the founder or father of the project that has given him a greater veteran

status than other workers at the park. As almost a mythological representative of the 1960s, his

critical eye offers insight into whether current park initiatives speak to the park’s original

ideology.

Scholars have largely accepted park creators’ discourse on environmental labor

utopianism, overlooking how the construction of nature and labor within People’s Park both

reflected and constituted power structures within leftist organizing. Some scholars have argued

that the idealism of nature and work in the first iteration of Berkeley’s People’s Park, as

expressed through visual and material culture, was highly influential, catalyzing movements for

radical environmentalism and local food while connecting groups interested in spatial rights with

those against the Vietnam War and police brutality nationally.23 The imagining of labor at

Berkeley’s People’s Park as “natural work” in the urban environment was produced discursively

by park creators and allies in the underground press through radio interviews, footage by

photographers and local television news crews, witness testimonies, and art that now serve as

“technologies of memory.” Participants often describe their experiences through footage,

referring to specific photos and quoting articles published in the 1960s rather than their own

23See Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War; Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the

Food Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural

History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2007); Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public

Space (New York City: Guilford Press, 2003).

57

recollections.24 While initially part of a larger park discourse that centered lived experiences in

1969, this residual visual and material culture of parks has all but replaced individual memories

of parks rather than serving as mnemonic aids.25 Yet as Mei Mei Evans argues, “Popular U.S.

American cultural constructions of ‘nature’ serve to empower some members of our society

while simultaneously disempowering others.”26 Holding up the park as the epitome of

environmental labor utopianism hides the racialized and gendered power structures shaping work

and play within the project and subsequent archives. While approached as factual evidence

within historiography, participant accounts were narratives rather than exact replicas

experience.” 27 Park labor embedded semiotic storytelling within real space that has blurred the

lines of historical memory between idealism and reality. The tableaux of communal natural labor

at People’s Park has helped to memorialize certain histories of this placemaking project that have

privileged the voices of white men who often spoke for marginalized identities.

Women have become peripheral in the park’s representation of masculine self-making.

While politician Ilona Hancock who was running for Berkeley City Council was called a

“darling,” others were called “chicks,” “girls,” “L.O.L” (little old ladies). Women were described

as beautiful and lovely, and at times in need of protection and support, such as one Barb story

focused entirely on a woman who needed assistance climbing down from a pile of logs in the

park.28 Schlesinger, often singled out by reporters and historians as the only female leader, hated

how she was described in the press. “The adjectives were demeaning and sickening, such as:

24 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering

(University of California Press, 1997): p. 9. 25 Several interviewees with whom I spoke cannot remember anything about these projects. In response, they offer

photographs and articles they have saved that become forms of transactional memory. 26 Mei Mei Evans, “‘Nature’ and Environmental Justice,” essay in The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics,

Poetics, and Pedagogy, eds. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (University of Arizona Press, 2002):

pp. 181-193. 27 Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 7. 28 “Lovely L.O.L.,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 3.

58

‘short, pert, cute, attractive, bubbly, innocent, clean-cut, fluffy!’ They may has well have been

talking about a pet, caged parakeet.”29 While women’s bodies, relationships, or emotions became

the focus of their coverage, men were often assumed to be leaders and described by their

political affiliations or arrest records.30 These descriptions added to visual narratives of gender

told through photographs. In a recent interview with the Assistant Editor of the Berkeley Barb

during the People’s Park conflicts, John Jakobson stated that the newspaper prioritized

publishing photographs of young, beautiful, topless women, photographs of women working,

and babies in the park to sell more copies. According to advice from the newspaper’s legal team,

as long as women’s nude bodies were “below the fold,” they could print women’s nudity. 31

In her memoirs, Wendy Schlesinger wrote about how on the morning after the first

workday, she and Mike Delacour grabbed the morning papers to see if the sod chain at the park

had been covered. The Berkeley Gazette included three pictures of the park across the top of the

page, yet Delacour and Schlesinger were frustrated that the images did not reflect their leaderless

and diverse experiences in the park. “They mostly featured whichever so-called prominent

radical leaders the reporter ferreted out,” they complained, handpicking Reese Ehrlich, Mike

Smith, Stew Albert, and Art Goldberg as “‘noted workers among the Berkeley land

reformers.’”32 Schlesinger asked Delacour, “I know [men] worked as hard as anyone, especially

Art, who had had six months [sic] pick-axe experience in jail. But, still, why single them out of

29 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 14. 30 Although on sexism in rock culture, Lisa Rhodes offers an astute analysis of sexism in this white male-dominated,

seemingly more authentic style of gonzo journalism; See Lisa Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Other good sources on sexist representations of women in the media

include Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York City: Three

Rivers Press, 1995); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of

California Press, 1993). 31 John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). Note that Jakobson’s name is spelled numerous ways in

the Berkeley Barb, including Jon Jakobson. Jakobson states that he did this in an attempt to throw officers

surveilling the Barb of his track. 32 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 1.

59

what was truly a collective, anonymous experience. Immediately he replied: ‘They do it

everytime [sic]. They are the ones who create the hierarchies which oppress us, not us.’”33 Even

when Schlesinger took Delacour’s advice to speak to the press herself about women’s projects in

the park, interviewers and photographers focused on the work of white male bodies.

A deeper read of materials produced by organizers and advocates of Berkeley’s People’s

Park reveals that despite calls for gender neutrality, gender shaped park creators’ construction of

nature, labor, and space that grounded the project. After Schlesinger suggested to the press that

they interview Sondra du Fosse about the construction of her brick walkways throughout the

park, the white male reporters refused—she believes because du Fosse was over thirty and

photographers and journalists sought to depict a youth revolution.34 Although coverage on the

park at times included photographs of women laborers, women who tried to display strength

were denigrated by the press. Schlesinger recalled how when Judy Gumbo as part of a group of

feminists marched into the park in “quasi-military formation” and matching workpants to plant

trees, the male reporters began “making derisive cracks, on the uncouth order of: All that those

silly broads need is a good lay.”35

Since the first callout for park workers, Berkeley’s People’s Park articulated its

emergence as a stand against histories of white male rule personified by the white male police

officer—“the Man.” Mike Delacour and Steve Albert argued in early defenses of the park that

reclaiming the power to self-police was foundational for leftist political survival in the city.36

Establishing sovereignty over state land required the metaphorical displacement and gendered

33 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 2. 34 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 11. 35 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, pp. 12, 13. 36 Delacour quoted in Schlesinger “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 23-24; also see phrases used by

Stew Albert in “Ever on Sunday,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5; Robin Hoods Park

Commissioner, “Hear Ye, Hear Ye.”

60

appropriation of the cop as the enforcer of (white male) authority in the West. Portraying vacant

lots as the new frontier and insurgent gardens as the pastoral ideal, park narratives reinforced

white male heterosexual power fantasies of eminent domain. White middle-class male hippies

who had been alienated from the schoolhouse to the factory or feminized by emasculating critics

of their long hair and behavior could reclaim their masculinity in physical form through the

creation of Eden in the urban realm.

Footage of shirtless tool-wielding men captured an emergent form of “outlaw

masculinity” that contrasted the armed white police officer in uniform or riot gear.37 The visual

celebration of rebellious white men’s bodies gardening, manipulating machinery, and stoking

fires in the barbecue pit helped re-define these state-owned territories as radicalized green

spaces. Their white, tool-wielding bodies piercing the dusty barren landscape drew on the boot-

strap histories of white European pioneers building a new life in the west. Park discourses both

rejected and appropriated historical narratives about white men’s right to autonomous work and

territoriality within American culture.38 Workers’ full-bodied physical labor with tools in hand

represented a modern adaptation of the idyllic yeoman farmer characterized by Thomas Jefferson

as the backbone of American self-making, as well as a white agrarian version of the armed Black

Panther. Work in the park became a medium for performing “hip manhood,” what Timothy

Hodgdon has defined as, “socially marginal, dangerous, dedicated to evading modern time-

37 The term “outlaw masculinity” is taken from Timothy Hodgdon, Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity

in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-1983 (Columbia University Press, 2007): 15. Albert would go on to

reinforce this image of outlaw masculinity when running for Sheriff, challenging the incumbent Frank Madigan to a

duel on Telegraph Avenue and proclaiming on his final campaign poster, “If Frank Madigan dies, Stew Albert will

be Sheriff.” See Stew Albert, “Stew Albert Runs for Sheriff,” Berkeley Bulletin (1970), archived at:

http://stewalbert.com/almostsheriff.html. 38 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard University Press, 1950); Leo

Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964);

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (University of

Oklahoma Press, 1973); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

(University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

61

disciplined work and professional success, and free from bourgeois family responsibilities.”39 In

the park, everyone could embody the self-made man.40

Participants’ belief in the park as an enactment of environmental labor utopianism

depended upon constructing People’s Park as racially inclusive. Many participants nostalgically

remember that month of gardening as a labor of activism in growing both plants and cross-

cultural coalitions. This diversity was captured in the commemorative mural “A People’s

Bicentennial History of Telegraph Ave” with the inclusion of mixed-race groups of tree planters

who smiled while working together in Berkeley’s People’s Park.41 Terri Compost’s fortieth

anniversary edited collection of primary sources on the park contains several reflections on the

park’s inclusivity that illuminate how descriptions of racial harmony and gender neutrality often

became equated with productive, valuable work. Grace Dilley wrote in the Berkeley Gazette in

1969 how the park attracted various types of people that revealed Berkeley’s hidden

multiculturalism: “With good will, with united effort, merchants, residents, architects, ministers,

long hairs, short hairs, young, old, black, white, brown, yellow hard working enthusiastic

Berkeleyans are together building something they all need.”42 Historian Michael Rossman

similarly wrote in his reflection on Berkeley’s People’s Park how multi-racial groups embraced

the concept of manual communal labor equally. “Black people, hippies, longshoremen, working

wives, children, old people, hardline activists––here for the first time all came together in

common work.”43 Looking back on the park, Anne Weills wrote in 2009 that the diversity of the

park created a powerful positive energy that both adults and children of all classes enjoyed. “We

39 Timothy Hodgdon, Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-

1983 (Columbia University Press, 2008): p. 43. 40 For more on the self-made man, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America. 41 Osha Neumann “A People’s Bicentennial History of Telegraph Ave,” Mural (Berkeley, CA, 1976). 42 Compost, People’s Park, p. 13. 43 Michael Rossman, “The Bare Facts About People’s Park,” memoir from personal website,

http://www.mrossman.org/www/aboutpark.html.

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were seeing ourselves as basically fighting for the children,” Weills explained. “The children

loved this park. This was an unbelievably beautiful place and the energy, the multi-level, the

strata, rich, poor, middle class, working, homeless, it was a place for everyone and it was

incredibly compelling to be there, that energy was so full of love and joy.”44 Participants felt that

the park was a space in which separatist identity politics did not matter. To many, consensus-

driven and community-based urban ecological design offered opportunities for enacting a world

without racism. These emotionally charged memories of park work as socially, environmentally,

and physically beneficial have nearly erased conflicts over power and difference in the park

altogether.

Primary source footage demonstrates how people of a variety of races were essential to

the construction and experience of Berkeley’s People’s Park.45 Photographs in collections edited

by Alan Copeland and Terri Compost reveal that, despite UC Berkeley’s almost entirely white

population and years of displacement of people of color in the South Berkeley area, people of

color were attracted to and helped shape Berkeley’s People’s Park.46 Videos by KRON-TV news

of both Berkeley’s People’s Park and the Mobile People’s Park Annex created nearby echoed

these claims of the park’s cross-cultural appeal. Footage featuring mixed race groups of black

and white adults and children sharing snacks and wine or gleefully enjoying the playground.47

44 Weills quoted in Compost, People’s Park, p. 13. 45 I argue that this construction of park diversity evidences black women’s critiques of the left, as “all the women are

white, all the blacks are men.” Women of color are almost nonexistent in footage of Berkeley’s People’s Park, and

are peripheral in visual and material discourses of other People’s Parks. Their non-white and non-male bodies beg

the question of how their experiences of oppression shaped the design and experiences of Berkeley’s People’s Park?

And, do the presence of marginalized groups ensure equality? While not intended to further displace people of color

and women from the park, I do seek to destabilize the park archive as an exact replica of experience. See Gloria

Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are

Brave (Feminist Press, 1982). 46 See photos in Compost, People’s Park, pp. 11, 16, 38; and Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai, eds., People’s Park

(New York City: Ballantine Books, 1969): pp. 13, 16, 17, 21-23, 87. 47 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Film, KRON-TV, San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe.

63

Black and white men worked together in park manual labor, often simultaneously sharing the

same tools. And, amidst accusations that white radical anarchist men were taunting sheriff’s

deputies with brick-throwing, photographs showed African Americans in the streets during the

march against the park’s fencing as well as later dates when the National Guard occupied

Berkeley. One photo in particular shows two African American women, most likely UC

Berkeley students, approaching two black soldiers in a line of armed National Guardsmen

blocking a street.48 African Americans and other people of color were likely part of the dozens of

activists, reporters, and bystanders who were hospitalized for wounds incurred from police

harassment on Bloody Thursday.

Desaturated black and white photos of the park and the ensuing conflict reveal how

photographic and print media shaped the park’s historical narrative about diversity. The

technological limits of photography along with the park’s ethos of colorblindness and lack of

political affiliations reinforced a black and white binary, transforming whiteness into a

homogenizing racial category that eliminated difference and structural inequality. At a time

when Americans were centering race within discourses of oppression while increasingly

embracing their own intersectional identities as a form of body politics, such as UC Berkeley’s

unified Third World Strike in 1968, the monochromatic lens combined with white park creators’

demands for a colorblind space reduced coverage of park attendees to one-dimensional political

identities.

48 Getty Images, Photograph, “National Guard in Berkeley” #586959269, (May 1969), in Toby

Thornton/Underwood Archives: http://www.gettyimages.dk/license/586959269.

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2.3 Redefining Work: Labor in the Origins and Experience of Berkeley’s People’s Park

The organizers of Berkeley’s People’s Park advocated for a new form of work that

combined urban environmental improvement with the communality of shared manual labor.

With no formal plan published on the park’s work structure, early accounts and writings by park

organizers celebrated labor on site as spontaneous, reflecting their vision as an experimentation

with community-based urban design as a form of cultural activism.49 Park construction was

announced with little advanced notice—a callout published anonymously in the Berkeley Barb

and circulated by word of mouth one week prior to the park’s commencement. The first call-out

for Berkeley’s People’s Park recruited artists as workers, stating that that the “rural reclamation

project” would become alive through beautiful shared communal labor.50 Park creators

appropriated national discourses concerning land in the Early American Republic, defending the

lot takeover as praxis of usufruct rights. In an addendum to its report on Chicago’s Poor People’s

Park in 1969, the Chicago Seed quoted a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in

1789, stating, “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Arguing that Americans as the new

generation had a greater right to the land than the British and indigenous peoples, Jefferson

erased discourses of racist colonialism to make way for American settler colonialism of

indigenous lands.51 Park advocates argued that the transformation of the vacant lot into a green

recreation area was a better use of the land than its current idle state as a vacant lot.

49 My use of this term is rooted in earlier histories of women’s liberation that differentiated between radical, liberal

and cultural feminism, as exemplified in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975

(University of Minnesota Press, 1989). More recently, Michael Buser, Carlo Bonura, Maria Fannin, and Kate Boyer

have argued that urban placemaking is a form of cultural activism in that it uses creative practice as a form of

resistance. See Michael Buser, Carlo Bonura, Maria Fannin, and Kate Boyer, “Cultural Activism and the Politics of

Place-Making,” City vol. 17, no. 5 (2013): pp. 606-627. 50 “Robin Hoods Park Commissioner (Stew Albert), “Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17: p. 2. 51 Thomas Jefferson, “Usufruct,” Chicago Seed vol. 3, no. 13 (1969): p. 1, in Box 35, John and Leni Sinclair Papers,

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

65

While many politicians, university administrators, and police officers perceived the

property takeover as another youthful rejection of gainful employment as practiced by hippie

street people. The park callout, however, centered labor, stating that participants should be

“prepared to work” and to produce “lots of sweat” at the park, arguing that manual labor was the

foundation for enlightenment at Berkeley’s People’s Park.52 Park creators challenged how

traditional definitions of paid hierarchical work were considered more valuable in capitalist

societies. At the same time, park organizers rejected the hippie mentality of leisure without labor

by encouraging park spectators to actively participate in its construction. Many organizers of

Berkeley’s People’s Park wanted to liberate space differently from hippie groups like the

Diggers that had used civil disobedient performance art to disentangle capitalism from

relationships that they argued were the foundation of middle-class privilege. Critics of the

Diggers were quick to identify flaws in their rejection of capitalism.53 Many critics argued that

free giveaways took advantage of capitalist structures without fully critiquing them, or took

advantage of the paid labor of others without contributing their own to the cause. Critics claimed

that in announcing giveaways in the underground press, the Diggers had manufactured the

massive hippie migration to the Bay area that had amounted to a crisis in the 1960s.

When she arrived in Berkeley, Wendy Schlesinger remembered several people describing

the history of Berkeley in the mid-1960s through critiques of the Diggers, arguing how the

group’s anti-capitalism that depended on the labor of others was ruining the counterculture.54

The escalation of police harassment of street people and the spaces they occupied, made work to

produce territories an issue of survival. Happenings, be-ins, and love-ins connected people

52 “Robin Hoods Park Commissioner (Stew Albert), “Hear Ye, Hear Ye.” 53 See Michael William Doyle, “The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the Cultural Politics of Utopia, 1965-1968,” (PhD

Dissertation, Cornell University, 1997); Bradford Martin, The Theater is in the Street, pp. 86-124. 54 See Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 2, p. 27 and Chapter 4, pp. 3-4.

66

through ephemeral events, yet, Michael Delacour argued, failed to foster meaningful

relationships that would extend countercultural advocacy of cooperative social and economic

relations. At the first meeting on Berkeley’s People’s Park in Liane Chu’s dimly lit clothing

store, the Red Square, Delacour argued that the sustainability of the socialist counterculture

required reimagining the relationship between identity, space, and work—in particular, seeing

manual labor as art, beauty, and part of the “trip.” By normalizing shared labor as a tool to take

collective ownership in creating and regulating spaces, the park as a form of political

placemaking could build a community while asserting power against displacement.55

Park creators’ calls for more authentic, shared work reflected shifts in twentieth-century

discourse on labor. The dawning of the industrial revolution fueled the resentment of once self-

made men who felt alienated by both middle-management and the machine.56 After World War

II, a growing counterculture resistant to regulated work as a foundation for middle-class

normality emerged.57 White males vociferously resisted societal expectations of men as sole

breadwinners and family protectors, arguing that working in “gray flannel suits” was mentally

debilitating and emasculating.58 Calls to rethink power structures reproduced in traditional

definitions of work crossed divides of race, gender, and class. Proclaiming “I AM A MAN” on

signs during the Memphis Sanitation Strike in 1968, activists in the Civil Rights Movement led

55 For more on placemaking as a form of activism, see Michael Buser, Carlo Bonura, Maria Fannin, and Kate Boyer,

“Cultural Activism and the Politics of Place-Making,” City vol. 17, no. 5 (2013). 56 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): pp. 61-

86; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2005). 57 Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011); Theodore

Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition

(University of California Press, 1995); Michael William Doyle and Peter Braunstein, eds., Imagine Nation: The

American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s (New York City: Routledge, 2002). 58 Phrase taken from Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1955). For

sociological context see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale

University Press, 1961); William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956).

67

marches and sit-ins to argue that African Americans did not have access to the same privileges of

citizenship as those in the white community, including gendered respect, equal pay, stable

employment, and freedom from racial discrimination in the workplace.59 The United Farm

Workers began an international campaign to advocate for just labor practices in agriculture,

using visual narratives of the poisoned and disembodied farmworker as a consciousness-raising

tool to draw in middle-class consumers with shame and disgust.60 At the same time that

disenfranchised women of color and immigrants fought for respect within civil and labor rights

organizing, the frustrations of working women who felt trapped by the glass ceiling helped

catalyze the creation of cross-cultural and cross-class coalitions like the National Organization

for Women to advocate for equal access to education, employment, and benefits.61 In seeking to

diversify the workplace, these movements often fought for equal access to traditionally (white)

male-dominated, hierarchical, sheltered, and capitalist-driven forms of employment.

59 See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press,

2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University

Press, 2000); Steve Estes, I Am A Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2006);

Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University

Press, 1996); Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty

in Postwar Philadelphia (UNC Press, 2009). 60 For work on the United Farm Workers, see Raj Patel, “Survival Pending Revolution: What the Black Panthers

Can Teach the US Food Movement,” in Food Movements Unite!... Strategies to Transform our Food Systems, ed.

Eric Holt-Giménez (Oakland: Food First Books, 2011) 115-136; Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The

Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (Oakland: University of California Press,

2007); Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Lauren Araiza, To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the

United Farm Workers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution:

Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Martin Deppe, Operation

Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017);

Mary Potorti, “Food for Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle and the Politics of Food” (Ph.D. Dissertation,

Boston University, 2005); Margaret Rose, “From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott,

1965-1975,” essay in No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest, ed. Kathleen Blee (New York City: New

York University, 1998): 225-250; Margaret Rose, “Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and

Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union,” (PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 1990). 61For work on women in the diverse postwar labor movement, see Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of

Wage-Earning Women in the US (Oxford University Press, 1983); Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican

Women in Twentieth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1998); Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the labor

Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 (Cornell University Press, 1990).

68

In contrast, a growing cadre of young white hippies and activists began critiquing the

norm of stable employment—arguing that the education system, the draft, the Red Scare, and the

bureaucracy of middle management colluded to reinforce labor as an instrument of social

control.62 Young critics of mainstream America argued that the postwar industrial boom had

encouraged suburbanization, mass production, and urban renewal that had alienated people from

their neighbors, modes of production, and their own consciousness. Work was no longer a means

of self-sufficiency nor a contribution to the common good, but a tool to regulate conformity. As

expressed by UC Berkeley Free Speech activist Mario Savio, college students argued that the

education system made them the “raw material” of the military industrial complex. In his most

well-known speech, Savio proclaimed that resistance to this obedient mentality required

challenging traditional forms of work with your bodies. Like a figurative reimagining of the

1936 film Modern Times in which Charlie Chaplin as a factory worker uncontrollably slides

through the gears of a giant industrial machine, Savio instructed students to reclaim their power

by stopping the engine. Speaking to a crowd of UC Berkeley students, Savio famously

proclaimed, “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,

upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people

who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from

62 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1993); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams:

America in the 1960s (Hill and Wang, 1994); Karen Manners Smith and Tim Koster, eds., Time It Was: American

Stories from the Sixties (Routledge, 2007); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-

1975 (University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnick, The Free Speech Movement:

Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2002); W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The

1960s (Oxford University Press, 1989); David Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Todd

Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (University of

California Press, 1980); Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to

Wounded Knee (Oxford University Press, 1996); Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (University of

Tennessee Press, 2011); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

(Oxford University Press, 2004); Doyle and Braunstein, Imagine Nation.

69

working at all!”63 Because power hierarchies functioned like an apparatus in reducing American

workers to alienated operators, he argued that “the machine” needed to be stopped. Dismantling

the mechanisms connecting law enforcement, consumerism, and conformity called for a new

vision of anti-racist, free speech, and anti-war political organizing as active work. Although

some mid-1960s hippie groups like the Diggers resisted centering work in their critics of

capitalism, as alumni of the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, and the anti-

war movement, the creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park called for a new cultural definition of

valuable labor. Blurring the borders of yard work, consciousness raising, performance art, and

environmental improvement with park labor, park advocates argued, could inspire an anti-

capitalist re-visioning of citizenship.

Accounts of work at Berkeley’s People’s Park became part of their efforts to reject

traditional, hierarchical, enclosed, and profit-driven forms of middle-class work that many park

participants had experienced as alienating. Coverage of the park’s first day described beginning

collectively with bulldozing, leveling, shoveling, and sodding a portion of the lot. These various

scenes of work became a constellation of equal, concurrent happenings in the landscape,

described by Schlesinger as a Bruegel painting come to life.64 Park goers celebrated digging as

liberating autonomous work. Eager to share the workload and to take part in the project, workers

took turns with donated tools constantly in use that piled up by the dozens on non-work days.

Because there was such extensive work to be done in the park’s early stages, workers felt

welcome to play with tasks—trying them on like masks while remarking to one other on each

63 Modern Times, directed, written, and produced by Charles Chaplin (Charles Chaplin Productions, 1936); Mario

Savio, “Speech Before the FSM Sit-In,” reprinted at the Free Speech Movement digital archive: http://www.fsm-

a.org/stacks/mario/mario_speech.html. 64 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 15.

70

project’s strenuousness or fun. Participants could pick up and leave off work at their choosing

across the space that symbolized the organizers’ flexible and experiential design ideology.

Because tasks were not assigned, many women felt empowered by the immediacy of

manual labor and the opportunity to work alongside rather than underneath men. For

Schlesinger, being considered an equal worker while jumping from one task to another was

liberating. “I wandered off to find a shovel. A girl handed me hers, as she went off to do another

task. There was really something for everyone. It was easy to get started and not feel nervous.

Usually, when I am new to a certain job I’d rather wait for exact instructions than begin doing

something which might prove to be totally unnecessary, or out of place.” Schlesinger described

how the leaderless work moved fluidly like a well-oiled machine, with work chosen voluntarily

and roles exchanged randomly to reduce specialization and competition. “The moment I tried to

specialize, ie [sic], stick to one task, raking, in order to make things go faster, I found myself

comparing my work to the other raker. Then when their [sic] were new rakers, I found myself

starting to feel smug, because I was doing my job better. But what did ‘better’ mean?”65 The

horizontal structure of leadership at People’s Park became a consciousness raising experience for

Schlesinger that made her re-examine how her typical style of work was not only a product of a

capitalist patriarchal structure, but also actively reproduced it by encouraging workers to

compete with one another rather than support their partners.

A governance structure emerged to help the park consistently achieve these principles,

with an organizational committee making key decisions about the park’s function and experience

as the park’s design continually shifted. Throughout the park’s short history, open meetings were

called to decide upon key decisions in places like the park’s sunken amphitheater where “the

65 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, pp. 17-18.

71

people speaking at any one time could jump into the center and immediately face the approval or

wrath of the crowd.”66 As Delacour has since explained, “If there is a problem or if something

comes down that is serious enough, the threat of the park…then we democratically come to some

type of conclusion and fight back.”67 While the original organizing meeting allocated individuals

responsible for fundraising, press, gathering materials, and leafletting for support and workers,

Van der Ryn described how leaders worked alongside others like “overlapping rows of

shingles.”68 Hundreds of volunteers added their own individual stamp to the park’s various

attributes. This type of consensus-driven design inspired Van der Ryn, who described his first

experience at the park as enamored with the amount of bright-eyed young volunteers eager to

help where they could: “The questions were, ‘What can I do?’ or ‘I would like to do this, can you

tell me how to go about it?’ or ‘I have an idea, does anybody want to work it out with me?’”69 In

contrast to a prescribed recreational experience, the park’s “open process of planning and

building” reflected a constantly shifting leadership structure that contradicted the formality of

design in professional architecture to which he was accustomed.

.

2.4 Emotional Labor and Hidden Park Hierarchies

From the beginning, witness accounts of gazing upon these spaces and park workers

transformed these projects into spectacles as “social relation[s] among people mediated by

images.”70 Challenging the ephemerality of “happenings” while embracing its leaderless

structure, park workers believed that the power of their labor rested in the lingering visual and

66 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 6. 67 Mike Delacour, Interview with Darin Allen Bauer (ca. November 5, 2010):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE0NOcq1u0E. 68 Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus, p. 67. 69 Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus, p. 59. 70 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Austin, TX: Rebel Press, 1983).

72

material trail they produced after bonfires were extinguished. Across People’s Parks in this era,

witnesses often focused on seeing work as well as being seen within these spaces. Accounts

remarked on the multitude of workers present, observing the efficiency of collective work, and

witnessing the diverse appeal of these spaces. Both Stew Albert and Wendy Schlesinger

described the first day of work as a political spectacle that challenged even the most pessimistic

eye.71 Park creators argued that proof of their innovation rested in individuals seeing masses of

people and objects within the park.

For many, the pleasure of looking and the spectacle of being seen at the park became part

of the sensory experience of working at the park. Seeing Berkeley’s People’s Park for the first

time, Wendy Schlesinger “yelled with uncontrollable excitement” at feeling “the peasant

warmth” from the street. “I couldn’t wait to be part of it all. From the car window, I saw the

whole panorama flash by.”72 KRON-TV News footage of Berkeley’s People’s Park as well as

the People’s Park Mobile Annex, created days after the original was fenced, panned across the

park, offering up-close living portraits of workers digging, children playing, and others standing

by, enjoying the space and the company.73 Photographs printed of park workers in the Barb

encouraged a culture of interactive pageantry, with participants wanting to be captured working

(See Figure 2.4). These humanist sketches sought to offer unidealized moments of diverse

groups observed in their “natural” habitat. Looking upon work in Berkeley’s People’s Park

became part of its function to attract both positive and negative attention as a measure of its

political success. Similarly, Studs Terkel began his interviews with Chicago’s Poor People’s

Park advocates and critics by asking them to comment on what they saw at the corner of Halsted

71 Albert, “People’s Park.” 72 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, pp. 15, 16, 15. 73 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Film, KRON-TV, San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe.

73

Figure 2.4, “Filming Berkeley’s People’s Park”: In this photo, photographer John Jakobson captures how labor

within the park served as a form of interactive pageantry. On the left, documentarian Lennie Lipton films his wife

Diane raking in Berkeley’s People’s Park on the first day of construction, April 20, 1969. In his diary entry for the

day, Jakobson wrote, “I took a lot of photos, had to change rolls. Everyone wants to be there—shovel in hand, even

Max and Bobby Seal[e] from the Panthers, wearing a suit. Carol had her levis [sic] and grabbed a shovel too, and

then we switched camera and shovel—ha.”74 Copyright John Jakobson (1969). Permission to publish in this

dissertation provided by Jakobson.

and Armitage.75 As spectacles, parks sometimes drew more “gawking tourists” than workers—to

such an extent that Stew Albert suggested after the first day of work at Berkeley’s People’s Park

74 John Jakobson, Photograph 296 (April 20, 1969), From author’s personal archive, Courtesy of author; John

Jakobson, Diary entry (April 20, 1969), From author’s personal archive, Courtesy of author; Lennie Lipton, Let a

Thousand Parks Bloom, Film, 16 mm (1969), in the Pacific Film Archive Film and Video Collection, Berkeley Art

Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, archived online:

https://archive.org/details/cbpf_00002. 75 Terkel, Interview (T3400SCD), Audio Recording, ca. 60 min. (ca. August 1969): Studs Terkel Collection,

Chicago History Museum.

74

that those only interested in staring should instead check out the police station.76 The quick

visibility of the park’s materiality and the diversity of park workers became a measure of its

success as efficient and harmonious. At the same time, descriptive panoramas of park labor

produced images of natural work as emotional, sensorial, and aesthetic within gendered,

racialized, and heteronormative power hierarchies.77

With no beginning or end and seemingly no formal plans for the park’s design,

participants who spoke about their involvement in the project focused on the embodied

experience of work that challenged the sterility and alienation of state-sanctioned employment.

At the end of the first day of construction at Berkeley’s People’s Park, workers celebrated their

accomplishments by the warm glow of the bonfire. Although law enforcement came to

extinguish the flames, participants left the evening feeling optimistic about the visual impact of

their work. Stew Albert wrote, “For the first time in my life I enjoyed working. I think lots of

people had that experience. Ever since I was eighteen I hated every job and either quit or was

fired. But this was something different, with aching back and sweat on my brow, there was no

boss. What we were creating was our own desires, so we worked like madmen and loved it.”78 In

contrast to paid employment, workers defined labor in the park as a sensorial and emotional

experience. Participants like Stew Albert often described their labor within park constructions as

uncompromising, powerful, and truthful. Labor facilitated moments of rest when workers could

compare and bind their wounds—their scratches, soreness, and hunger manifesting as symbolic

corporeal proof that their activist labor had been arduous and meaningful. In People’s Parks,

76 Albert, “People’s Park.” 77 Term “heteronormative” taken from queer theorist Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text no. 29

(1991): pp. 3-17. Also see Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” reprinted in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke

University Press, 2011): pp. 137-181; Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs

vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer, 1980): pp. 631-660. 78 Albert, “People’s Park.”

75

work felt harder, food tasted juicier, and fires burned hotter, creating an ephemeral experience

that seemed more authentic than traditional forms of employment. To physically connect with

nature, feel the sweat on one’s brow, and see others working independently yet collectively like a

chorus, was to experience community in new corporeal ways.

For park goers, the feeling of achievement over work within the park was palpable.

Looking at uninterrupted streams of work was gratifying for Wendy Schlesinger. Bricklayers

who cleaned and placed each paver “satisfied nearly every sense” Schlesinger had. She

remembered, “The experience typified the essence of non-verbal friendship and

communication…I was awed…It smelled primal, sounded great, looked hilarious.”79 The

pleasure she experienced from the synchronicity of the sod-chain line drew her in like a dance.

Her eyes met theirs as she prepared to pass the rolled sod to the person next in line. She noticed

how the “moist dirt sticks to their chin” as they bent down to lift the bundle out of your arms; the

shared intimacy is over instantaneously, ready to begin again with someone else. Swaying to the

rhythm of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” you catch, whip the weight of the

sod to your right, and “comradely lay your burden on them.” This form of hard work was an

“exhilarating frolic,” that moved some to song, dance, and drink, shaping the experience of

parks. Cymbals, banjos, drums, and chants became integrated into a pulsing beat that called the

workers.80 Highly productive, shared work became a theatrical performance to prove that the

lot’s soil was socially fertile which became a metaphor for their collective orgasmic experience.

Because park projects harnessed different sensory experiences, park participants described this

more meaningful work as resulting in a greater sense of victory and happiness than traditional

employment could offer.

79 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 10. 80 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 21.

76

Anonymity surrounded the park’s leadership structure. Articles by the original park

committee referred to the founding organizers as some “green-seeking people” and “a few mad

men” represented by “Robin Hoods Park Commissioner.”81 The use of passive voice in early

park coverage often abstracted the individual labor that produced it. Passively identifying with

the spectacle of work efficiency and cross-cultural harmony enabled some participants to claim

veteran status by abstracting the labor that produced it. Veteran accounts frequently remark on

the efficiency and collectivity of the sod chain or the construction of the brick pathways as the

apex of how leaderless work was successful, yet often failed to attribute these creations while

giving space to specific (white male) leaders to speak on the park. Frank Bardacke argued in a

radio interview after the park was fenced how the park’s leaderless, anti-capitalist atmosphere

created an authentic experience for participants:

People were building this park which they themselves were gonna use. There’s no boss,

right? They weren’t working around their home but on the other hand they weren’t

working for money. They weren’t like going here and laboring and not giving a shit about

what they were laboring over, just get some money to go buy something else, it wasn’t

like that at all. They were building a park, they were making decisions about what should

go in the park and there was no boss, and they loved it. It was like a completely new

experience, for young people and old people alike. And it was a very joyous thing.82

As a “liberated” zone, Berkeley’s People’s Park was a free space to smoke pot, drink jugs of

wine publicly, and “turn on, tune in, and drop out” on LSD—all substances that would have

heightened their park experiences senses.

Berkeley’s People’s Park welcomed participants to explore their identities as

performances in ways that made cultural appropriation fun. In one recollection shared in Terri

Compost’s fortieth anniversary of Berkeley’s People’s Park, a photo showed a handful of nude,

81 Phrases used by Stew Albert in Albert, “Ever On Sunday,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969):

p. 5; Robin Hoods Park Commissioner, “Hear Ye, Hear Ye.” 82 Terri Compost, ed., People’s Park: Still Blooming, 1969-2009 and on (Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books, 2009): p. 12.

77

mud-covered adults running with long vertical sticks through the park in 1993. Describing the

photo, one person wrote, “My fondest memory of people’s park was last year, when they had

their anniversary celebration. We were sitting in the sun, listening to some bad folk singer, when

a group of twenty people, naked and covered with mud from head to toe, ran through chanting,

singing, and beating drums. I don’t know if it was a protest or a tribal gathering, but I thought

‘This is what this park is for!’”83 Blending racial and nature play by covering their bodies in

mud, the blackface dancers captured in the photo used the park as a platform to perform the

natural, exotic strength of indigenous people. These moments shed light on a broader movement

of hippie performances of “playing Indian” imagined as a form of countercultural liberation from

modern America. When experiencing the park through lenses of colorblindness, gender-

neutrality, and sexual play, Berkeley’s People’s Park created space for the re-envisioning of even

offensive cultural appropriation as enactments of liberation, play, and natural attunement.84

Participants’ focus on pleasure often overshadowed frustration with the park’s shadowy

leadership structure. At times, the individualist spirit inspired by the park’s divergent zones

created a cacophony of noises, activities, and experiences that sparked arguments. While Wendy

Schlesinger enjoyed the “tribal rhythm” of collective brick-banging, Steve Haines wrote in the

Barb about scuffles over noise during the second week of work at Berkeley’s People’s Park.

Describing the account, he stated, “There’s a small hassle over the drums. Two brothers want to

go on beating the drums. More brothers want the music to stop. ‘It’s the People’s Park, man, and

we’re people—we want to play.’ ‘Yeah, but a majority of the people want you to stop.’”85 The

83 Although the collection provides no context for the performance, I would argue that the demonstration is a mock

performance of Maasai warriors. See Compost, People’s Park, p. 130. 84 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1999). 85 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 10; Steve Haines, “A New Kind of Rest: Work in

People’s Park,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 4.

78

park’s spontaneous collective design was at times a chaotic “contest of wills,” in which “one

man began to dig a hole for a barbeque pit, while another started to fill it in” that, at times,

translated into physical disputes.86 Sim Van der Ryn described the project as “wander[ing] with a

life of its own. Some might say it was like herding cats. Actually, it was more like getting cats to

herd themselves. Stoned cats.” When imagining the park as a democratic playground outside the

bounds of capitalist bureaucracies, the give and take of this process became fun.

The “ever-changing plan” of the collaborative design process facilitated innovative

brainstorming sessions that, at times, spun into cyclical argumentation.87 In my interviews with

Schlesinger, she noted how drunkenness at night sparked fights between men. She recalled in her

memoir how she had argued with a man who had shattered a glass bottle when beating it against

a tin can for music around the fire pit, only to feel frustrated with herself for acting like an

authority figure.88 One episode in Schlesinger’s memoir revealed her own internal conflict when

approaching a man who had shattered a glass bottle while beating on a tin can like a drum:

I went up to the brother and asked him who he thought was going to pick up the cracked

remains. ‘I don’t know, man. Why do you care?’ ‘Well, I’m going to be here tomorrow in

the daylight. It’s not really fair for someone to come here fresh in the morning to work on

clearing that rocky ground over there to have to pick up your garbage.’ I didn’t press too

hard, because who…wants to come on as an authoritarian? But, if the police were to be

kept at bay, it was clear that we’d have to evolve a way of dealing with the night time

situations.89

At times, women like Schlesinger struggled to be seen by men both externally and internally as

valuable workers and leaders. Park organizers remained vigilant of outside agitators like SDS

whom they argued would coopt the park and use it for their own political agenda. Park

86 W. J. Rorabaugh uses this characterization when describing work in People’s Park. See Berkeley at War, p. 157. 87 Sim Van der Ryn, “People’s Park: An Experiment in Collaborative Design,” in Design on the Edge: A Century of

Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903-2003, eds. Waverly Lowell, Elizabeth Byrne,

and Betsy Frederick-Rothwell (College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley, 2009): pp.

151-153. 88 Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (April 10, 2016). 89 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 24.

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organizers also struggled with the university who agreed to enter negotiations for the park only

with a selected committee of park representatives. Disagreements have almost disappeared in the

now-established historical narrative of the park, instead positioned as part of the diplomatic

process of consensus-driven design and coalition building rather than indicative of power

hierarchies. The park’s discordant open mic became framed as an opportunity for park dwellers

to work things out for themselves—to imagine a world without troops to police your high. Both

playful and physical conflicts have continued throughout the history of Berkeley’s People’s Park,

yet disputes have often been framed as a unified front of park participants resisting encroachment

from outside, state-sponsored, or university-backed developers.

2.5 The Reclamation of Masculinity in the Construction of Racial Harmony

Experiences of African Americans within Berkeley’s People’s Park shaped how whites

perceived of the design project as politicized. While gender was a common, subtle descriptor for

park workers who were “chicks” or “mad men,” race was not. When park material alluded to

race, they often did so by absorbing black oppression in loosely metaphorical ways. When Stew

Albert stated that “several hundred Berkeley Freemen” arrived to work the park’s first weekend,

he appropriated the term’s history as a moniker symbolizing African American emancipation,

making slavery their shared coalitional oppression.90 Park creators and allies set a tone early on

of colorblind equality that focused on the utility of shared use as a basis for collectively deciding

different park attributes. However, park advocates’ use of images and quotes of people of color

often served as a form of strategic appropriation. Photographs of black park attendees, adult and

child, became additive to white narratives of liberated space. A report about an adult, Brad Fox,

90 Albert, “People’s Park.”

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who was arrested in a “chickenshit bust” for soliciting donations for the purchase of sod in

Berkeley’s People’s Park was juxtaposed with the photo of a young black boy smiling while

carrying a park donation can on his head. The child had been previously photographed by

Ramparts in a black leather jacket, grinning while operating heavy landscape machinery in the

park. While the Ramparts portrait captured the boy’s youthful enthusiasm for work and

masculine heavy machinery, his portrait next to Fox’s arrest account shamed the male police. His

young black body brought empathy to politicized accounts of police harassment while signaling

cross-cultural alliances for future generations of park dwellers.91

The bodies, writings, and voices of Black Panthers undergirded coverage of Berkeley’s

People’s Park in the Barb. The first issue of the newspaper after work began at People’s Park

was a collage that put the park and the Black Panthers in visual conversation with one another.

The photograph overlay included largely white men laboring arduously in pairs as a symbol of

brotherhood. In one photo, a black man and a white man flex their muscles as they sprawl in near

prone positions flattening the ground together. In other photos, a white woman plants a flower,

another dances without restraint; two white children play.92 Towering over their bodies is an

armed, fully uniformed, and stern-faced Huey Newton at more than twice the size of their

cutouts. His inclusion on the cover reflected the Barb’s coverage, written by Albert, of growing

demands by its subscribers to “free Huey,” yet his juxtaposition to park goers here said more.

Albert referred to him in the article as a giant, and Newton’s magnanimous figure kept watch

paternally over the white park dwellers below him. On the cover Newton’s black beret,

ammunition belt, and rifle in hand radicalized the project as one committed to black self-

91 “Tele Pigs Rip Off Alms Box,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no 19 (May 9-15, 2016): p. 2; Elihu Blotnick, Photograph,

in “A Photographic Essay of the People’s Park,” Ramparts (August 1969): p. 34. 92 Cover, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969).

81

determination in the urban realm. Black survival became written onto the carefree joy of white

dancing, or the cross-racial unity of yard work.

Over the park’s short three-week lifespan, references to the Black Panthers became

integrated into the park’s narrative that became a way to visually unify and therefore erase

distinctions between white and black men. In one issue of the Barb, a park proclamation signed

“MADMEN” calling for park allies to wage war to physically defend the park began with a

quote by Eldridge Cleaver calling for “madmen” to liberate America. A photograph of a young

shirtless white man pick-axing gravel accompanied the anonymous submission.93 Accounts of

male Black Panther leaders visiting Berkeley’s People’s Park were big news early in the park’s

history. According to several reports in the underground press written by white men, Black

Panther Party leader Bobby Seale was photographed visiting the park with a serious expression

that was described by Stew Albert as “laugh[ing] in total and happy amazement.”94 Although

nearly fifty years later, Paul Glusman can remember few details of the park, yet he remembered

meeting Seale in the park, describing him as soft-spoken and generous when speaking to park

goers about the Panthers’ free breakfast program.95 Another article by Steve Haines expanded on

this report, arguing that Seale had not only visited the park but “lent a hand enthusiastically.”96

Todd Gitlin asserted, “Seale worked in the Park, praised it, [and] instantly comprehended its

meaning.”97 Seale’s approval was repeatedly mentioned in early park narratives because his

presence signified, to mostly white male park organizers, that their park was revolutionary.

93 Grossman, Photograph, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 3. 94 Stew Albert, “People’s Park: Free for All,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5. 95 Paul Glusman, Personal Interview (September 19, 2017). 96 Haines, “A New Kind of Rest.” 97 Todd Gitlin, “The Meaning of People’s Park,” reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America: The

Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Pilgrim Press, 1970): p. 506.

82

Several key organizers of Berkeley’s People’s Park credit the Black Panthers with

impacting the park’s name. According to Albert, Seale was responsible for naming the project

“People’s Park” by asking park participants, “‘Are you going to call it PEOPLES Park; listen we

got to have some Panthers down here working, this is really socialistic.’”98 In contrast, a different

account written by Wendy Schlesinger months later attributed the naming of the park to a “black

sign-painter”—a young man who had taken initiative to name the park himself by climbing a

telephone pole in the middle of the lot to post the sign. She wrote in her memoir, “In broad

banana colored letters he had painted a series of words [on a set of small wooden plaques]: 1.

PEOPLE’S 2. PARK 3. POWER TO THE 4. PEOPLE…‘Well, can you dig it? Do you like that

name?’ ‘Power to the People,’ The people shouted back. ‘Yaaaaayyy, this is the People’s Park,

right on brother, get it on,’ Someone shouted.”99 By August 1969, Ramparts reported that other

park goers had encouraged naming the park after Eldridge Cleaver: “During a discussion on the

naming of the park, the title Eldridge Cleaver Memorial Park was suggested but quickly dropped

when someone reminded the group that Eldridge was alive and was, in fact, going to return.”100

Although the Black Panthers never claimed the park as their own, their additions to the park’s

historical memory became a way for whites to claim them and the political radicalism of the

Black Panther Party.

Although the discrepancy between these viewpoints on the notoriety of naming might be

due to clouded memories, or the fact that underground reporters frequently paraphrased each

other’s reports. These attempts to publicize the presence of black men early on in park coverage

intended ally with the Black Panthers’ “power to the people” programs in ways that hippies had

98 Albert, “People’s Park.” 99 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 22. 100 Dugald Stermer, “A Photographic Essay of the People’s Park,” Ramparts (August 1969): p. 34.

83

not. Giving black men the power to name their utopia was a show of respect for black masculine

authority—more symbolic narrative than exact replica of the park’s founding. Repeated mentions

of the Black Panthers’ support for the park made sense of ideological contradictions over the use

of violence in defending the park. White park creators could imagine the park as an innocent,

hopeful future for children while simultaneously mimicking rhetoric in The Black Panther by

issuing veiled threats of violence against “the pig” and “the machine” in the same issue of the

Barb. The appropriation of black male oppression became a mechanism to reclaim white middle-

class masculine power from the state.

References to black masculine empowerment adjacent to white-centered narratives

allowed park advocates to embed the park’s regulation within broader transhistorical narratives

of black oppression and ongoing movements to reclaim the power of black masculinity. Black

men’s bodies were visual representations of anti-colonial and anti-police activism. Capturing

black men and black male youths engaging with People’s Park metaphorically legitimized the

colorblind principles of insurgent community-based urban ecological design. Amidst arguments

over the political authenticity of hippies versus politicos, the presence of black bodies helped

imagine the park as a symbol for the future of radical coalitional urban spatial justice rather than

just a white hippie-dominated ephemeral “happening.” Critics of the park would later use this

loose association with the Black Panthers to discredit Berkeley’s People’s Park after its fencing.

In a widely reprinted story on the Associated Press (AP) wire, Thomas Houchins, Chief of the

Alameda County Sheriff’s criminal division, claimed that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios hired

“‘Black Panther types wearing berets and black jackets…to ‘enliven the action’” during People’s

Park demonstrations in May 1969. Black Panther Assistant Chief of Staff June Hilliard countered

that the black individuals who took part in the alleged filming of People’s Park demonstrations

84

were “obviously imposters.”101 The Black Panthers denied any connection to the protest.

However, months later when the Office of the Governor for the State of California released its

report on the People’s Park incident, these claims of radical ties to the Black Panthers were

nonexistent.102 When asked about the connections between the Black Panthers and People’s Park

in a recent interview, Paul Glusman stated that the accusation was nothing more than “a

stretch.”103

Many black radical thinkers like Eldridge Cleaver, however, were attracted to white park

creators’ realizations of urban political territoriality, and similarly identified police brutality and

urban renewal as extensions of white Western imperialism. Cleaver occasionally shared his

support of Berkeley’s People’s Park to ally with white middle-class hippies and radicals in the

Berkeley area. While The Black Panther devoted little attention to the park’s fencing, the

newspaper featured two articles mentioning support for Berkeley’s People’s Park in the summer

of 1969. One by Cleaver mentioning the park and another anonymous article defended the park

in a broad overview of the park melee.104 As Leerom Medovoi argues in his essay “A Yippie-

Panther Pipe Dream,” Cleaver regularly reached out to middle-class whites within the Black

Panther newspaper as well as speaking events targeted to white people. 105 Cleaver lectured on

the criminalization of black bodies at UC Berkeley and publicized his support for Jerry Rubin of

the Yippies as well as John Sinclair of the White Panthers.

101 “Actors Hired to Pose as Black Panthers,” reprinted in Pomona Progress Bulletin (June 30, 1969): p. 19. 102 Office of the Governor, State of California, “The ‘People’s Park’: A Report on a Confrontation at Berkeley,

California,” (July 1, 1969). 103 Glusman, Personal Interview (September 19, 2017); although efforts were made several times to interview Bobby

Seale about these connections to the park, I received no response. 104 “Berkeley, Ronald Reagan Creats [sic] the Fascist State,” The Black Panther vol. 3, no. 6 (May 31, 1969): p. 7.

This article was most likely reprinted from The Movement. 105 Leerom Medovoi, “A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution,” in

Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, eds. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (University of

Minnesota Press, 1999).

85

In the Berkeley area, hippies, white politicos, and the Black Panthers were forming

strategic alliances in 1969 to push for legal changes. One month prior to the park creation, white

headshop owner Bill Miller and Black Panther Charles Bursey ran on a rainbow coalition ticket

for Berkeley City Council, and used the Barb as a platform to solicit more white votes.106 Just

days before the park was fenced, Bobby Seale spoke to hundreds of white Berkeley-area locals

on Telegraph Avenue at the “Free Huey” rally on May 11, 1969 after the university had already

issued statements threatening to resume control over the park. At that same rally, Stew Albert

addressed the crowd, linking the imprisonment of Newton with the Vietnam War and the fencing

of Berkeley’s People’s Park: “‘The capitalists take the best of our minds and turn our brains into

a cash register and then they take our bodies and crush them in Vietnam and put them in jail like

Huey.’” Albert followed, encouraging attendees to come to the park to “help save it.”107 In his

essay “On Meeting the Needs of the People,” Cleaver compared the People’s Park struggle to the

Free Breakfast Program, arguing that both reacted to the same system of disempowerment.

While acknowledging the stark racial and class contrast between Oakland and Berkeley as “one

of the least oppressed areas,” Cleaver wrote that both fought a “system of oppression and

colonization” in the urban realm:

Here people are fighting for the essentials to survive, fighting for food for children,

fighting for what it takes just to survive. On the other hand, in the least oppressed area,

we see a fight which at a superficial glance can be mistaken for a fight for leisure. But we

must look upon the fight for the People’s Park as an in-road into the system, because it

poses the question of basic rearrangements in the system itself. And this is really the

crucial question in our overall struggle, for in Babylon there is not really a scarcity of

goods, and there is, objectively no real reason why there can’t be people’s parks, because

the land is available and the wherewithal to build such parks is there in abundance.108

106 “Vote April 1st,” Advertisement, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 13 (March 28-April 3, 1969): p. 28. 107 G.K., “May Day for Huey Massive Success,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8): p. 5. 108 Eldridge Cleaver, “On Meeting the Needs of the People,” reprinted in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus

Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L. Van Deburg (New York University Press, 1997): p. 245.

86

The park, he argued, was not about survival so much as the state’s threatened demolition of it

indicated how even white middle-class people had no power.

Rather than simply supporting the park, Cleaver strove to create deep political

connections between the ideologies and methods of park allies and the Black Power Movement.

Revolution as what Cleaver called a “rearrangement of the system” required appropriating land,

natural resources, and means of production to create new institutions that meet all the needs of

the people.109 Fears of police intrusion escalated as warnings circulated that the park would be

fenced. In response, white park creators similarly called for an intensification in their defensive

rhetoric, and looked to the Black Panthers as a model. In his first public appeal published in the

Barb calling on locals to defend People’s Park, Stew Albert quoted Cleaver, arguing that the

park project was a practice of the Black Panthers’ self-determination ideology: “‘You must

develop a territorial imperative,’ Eldridge Cleaver once rapped to the Berkeley left. He believed

the only way we were going to get serious about Revolution was when we had something in the

soil to defend. We have it—the ‘People’s Park.’”110 Anonymous articles called for supporters to

physically defend the park as their turf. After the fencing of the park, forty park organizers met

in an Oakland hotel to create the Berkeley Liberation Program as a set of proclamations

mirroring the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Platform and explicitly allying with the Panthers,

migrant farmworkers, and Third World liberation movements.111

Many white people felt that Berkeley’s People’s Park was a place they felt free to be with

African Americans. The passing of shovels, wine, and sweat from spectators and workers, black

and white, became key material elements in park narratives of racial harmony that evoked a

109 Ibid. 110 Stew Albert, “Getting Serious,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8): p. 3. 111 “The Berkeley Liberation Program,” Flyer, reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings

of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Pilgrim Press, 1970): pp. 512-513.

87

sense of shared participation in the creation and defense of the park as the new capital of this

“imagined community.”112 Their cross-cultural unity that attempted to redefine Americanness as

less monolithic. Yet this inclusivity was, at times, built on the backs of capitalizing on the

marginalized Other, that stylistically contributed to the park’s rough edges. Insurgent park

creations offered opportunities for marginalized groups to engage in urban environmental

activism in ways that now appear more as practices of cultural appropriation and exoticism than

cultural inclusivity. In his broader work on representations of Native Americans in American

popular culture, Philip Deloria has illuminated how many white male activists and hippies

“played Indian” by performing racial stereotypes of primitive savagery to visually and

performatively reject their own whiteness in moments of crisis. Park creators used Native

American imagery in hippie and environmentalist iconography to position People’s Parks as

liberated zones—the new frontier where noble outlaws like “Robin Hood” created parks to fight

against the robber barons of capitalist developers. In this new green world built on top of the old,

white park creators could celebrate Native Americans as more naturally eco-friendly, embodying

their corporeal resistance to colonialization through native dress and campfire performances, as

well as depictions of their work as primal and tribal.113 Many whites found the charade

empowering.

Most famously, Frank Bardacke created the infamous “Who Owns the Park?” poster

featuring the backdrop of a rifle-carrying Geronimo to call into question the university as sole

property owners. The poster defended park creators’ rights to physically defend the land an

expand their territorial reclamation campaign into the broader Berkeley area. Although the

112 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso,

2006). 113 For a broader analysis of the cultural appropriation of Native American discourse in the counterculture, see Philip

Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

88

American Indian Movement (AIM) had been gaining local and national press regarding issues of

space and fishing, Bardacke did not intend to recruit support for their movement; instead,

Geronimo served as semiotic currency to racially politicize the space. Bardacke’s poster used

Geronimo to tell a story of imperialism. Now that the university was seeking to reclaim its

property, park advocates argued that the land had originally been under the guardianship by the

Costanoan Indians before Catholic missionaries assumed control unfairly, “No agreements were

made. No papers were signed.”114 After the Mexican government took the land away from the

Church, the U.S. government assumed control, selling the land to white settlers. Geronimo’s

rightful last stand against white American encroachers became metaphorical cause for defending

the park.115 Geronimo symbolized indigenous rebellion against “the Man” more than an exact

representation of AIM organizing and issues. Essentializing Native Americans as a homogenous

entity, the poster assumed the Costanoan Indians had no concept of private property or

hierarchical land divisions, and, as Paul Glusman noted in my interview with him, park creators

made no effort to return ownership to them. As Sherry Smith writes, “The fight for control of the

property was between non-Indians. Indian imagery and rhetoric was purely symbolic.”116

Highlighting the lot’s transnational and transhistorical roots, Geronimo’s last stand against white

American encroachers became metaphorical cause for defending the park that appeared to justify

the park creators’ own pioneerism in the shadow of histories of white settler colonialism.

114 Frank Bardacke, “Who Owns the Park?” Poster, reprinted in Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (Routledge, 2002): p.

167. 115 The same portrait of Geronimo was used on the cover of The Black Panther newspaper May 25, 1969, on nearly

the same day as the park poster’s release, as part of its coverage on the continued persecution of Indian tribes in

Nevada as a model of modern colonialism. However, Geronimo was Chiricahua Apache—not Costanoan from the

Bay area, nor Shoshone of Western Nevada. See Dogowa, “Rebirth: The Persecution of Nevada Indians,” The Black

Panther vol. 3, no. 5 (May 25, 1969): pp. Cover, 9-10. 116 Sherry Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press, 2014): p. 84.

89

Juxtaposing the imagery of an armed Geronimo, the rhetoric of Mao, the proximity of

black men’s bodies, and written proclamations by park organizers called “Robin Hoods Park

Commissioner” identified People’s Parks as “outlaw territories” or “wild turf” outside the

bounds of the sheriff’s reach.117 Geronimo’s armed portrait along with the authoritative presence

and approval of black men in park materials diversified largely white park creators’ renegade

identities. Revolutionary brown bodies transformed middle-class calls for free space and free

food into radical political proclamations for revolutionary pan-ethnic transhistorical autonomy.

Park creators would continue to reclaim lots by converting them into parks as retribution for the

brutal colonization of the native Ohlone inhabitants of the Bay area by Catholic missionaries.118

These attempts to ally with people who had been victimized by white male oppressors reinforced

Othered identities as more authentic, allowing racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes to hide

behind the façade of neutrality and diversity.

White park creators capitalized on these histories of colonization to radicalize and

historicize their protests, the message of collaborative urban environmental design for the people

resonated with diverse populations far beyond the stereotypical white middle-class hippie. Parks

created by people of color in other cities evidence how the issues of spatial justice and

movements for freedom from law enforcement harassment in the urban realm attracted

marginalized working-class racial and ethnic groups. The creators of San Diego’s Chicano Park

incorporated Aztec, mestizo, and Mexican revolutionary symbols into the material culture and

coverage.119 In the Bay Area, the Black Panthers not only used weapons to assert power in public

117 For a broader analysis of the use of outlaw discourse in the counterculture, see Felicity Scott, Outlaw Territories:

Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York City: Zone Books, 2016); and Hodgdon,

Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius. 118 For more on Ohlone Park, see Compost, People’s Park, p. 166-167; and Greg Castillo’s coverage of Berkeley’s

Ohlone Park in “Hippie Modernism.” Originally called the Mobile Park Annex, Ohlone Park is still in existence as a

city-run park. 119 Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway; Griswold del Castillo, Chicano San Diego.

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space, but metaphorical park creation as well by renaming De Fremery Park Bobby Hutton

Memorial Park after he was killed by Oakland police in an ambush in 1968. After Berkeley’s

People’s Park was fenced in 1969, an estimated dozen other activist-created green spaces

blossomed across the Bay area including one park named for the black college student Samuel

Younge Jr. who was brutally murdered by Klansmen in 1966.120 Some park organizers of color

using territoriality to advocate for radical anti-racism were deemed dangerous before

groundwork began. The day after Billy Brock of the Cleveland Black Panthers announced that

the organization would be soliciting donations to transform a vacant lot into a children’s

playground and “people’s park” on June 30, 1970, for example, police stormed their

headquarters and shot and arrested several members.121

While the voices of the white middle-class drive the narrative of harmony and diversity

surrounding Berkeley’s People’s Park, many working-class park creators of color in Chicago

also shared the excitement of activist placemaking in their own community when they

constructed Chicago’s Poor People’s Park in the fall of 1969. Oral historian and radio show host

Studs Terkel interviewed a range of workers across class, age, race, ethnicity, immigrant status,

and gender who all agreed that their park was a unified reaction against recent city-backed

proposals to develop the lot into a for-profit tennis court. The park was constructed to protest a

massive urban renewal program displacing thousands of largely low-income residents of color in

Lincoln Park. Over the course of the 1960s, gentrification had demolished affordable housing,

leveling entire blocks and creating demolition wastelands where children now dangerously

120 “Chico People’s Farms,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11; Steve Haines, “Black Peoples’

Victory Plots Growing Fast,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11. 121 Cleveland People’s Park cited in Daniel Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in

Cleveland Ohio (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011): p. 179; See “Panthers Tell of Play Lot, Free Breakfast

Programs,” The Plain Dealer, Cleveland (June 30, 1970); Ryan Nissim-Sabat, “Panthers Set up Shop in Cleveland,”

in Comrades: The Local History of the Black Panther Party, ed. Judson Jeffries (Indiana University Press, 2007):

pp. 89-144.

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played. The insurgent park creation attracted locals who wanted to make their community

cleaner, safer, and more fun for kids while demanding that involvement in the dramatic redesign

of their communities was a right of citizenship. Positioning this holding action as a contrast to

other countercultural back-to-the-land movements of “hip people fighting for some greenery,”

the creators of Poor People’s Park argued that their working-class identities shaped their more

authentic relationship to the land.122 Volunteers raked and dug as outreach for a good cause

before sharing home-cooked Puerto Rican food over a fire pit—at times citing their membership

to other allying political organizations like the Latin Eagles or the white Appalachian Young

Patriots who supported the mission of Poor People’s Park to reclaim urban power through

insurgent park developments.

While at the white-dominated Berkeley’s People’s Park racial difference was not a

measure of success for the project, the creators of Poor People’s Park embraced their non-white

and working-class identities as a source of resilience. Despite a severe lack of financial support

for tools and plants, and ongoing police harassment, Chicago park workers agreed that the

diverse multitude of volunteers proved the project was a success. Park workers heralded their

poverty as a form of authenticity and positioned the park as both a means of community-building

and survival. Park workers heralded their poverty as a form of authenticity and positioned the

park as both a means of community-building and survival. Vice Chairman of the Young

Comancheros, “Cisco,” described how they were using his “old jalopy” as a tow truck to remove

debris from the site. Poverty became a point of pride in their manual labor that they argued

connected their bodies to the earth. “When you’re poor you work hard to get the things you

want,” Cisco said. “We put our strength together…even if we have to pick the dirt up with our

122 “People’s Park in Chicago,” Y.L.O. 1, no. 4 (1969): p. 4.

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hands they won’t stop us.” Cisco described what the first showing of workers had felt like,

seeing a couple hundred volunteers remove several tons of stone by forming three lines in a

“bucket brigade.” The cross-cultural coalition of laborers sang the union anthem “Solidarity

Forever” and other songs and chants to keep enthusiasm high. Hippies, Lords, Comancheros,

Wobblies, and Patriots spent two hours passing bricks hand to hand to build a wall. The work

was exhausting and frustrations ran high due to near-constant harassment by police, but Cisco

felt resolved by the solidarity achieved through laboring together. “I had never seen a sense of

community higher.” 123

2.6 Gender, Sexuality, and Work: Women’s “Natural” Labor in People’s Parks

Through communal, spontaneous, and varied forms of work, park creators with different

political identities argued that a new alternative way of urban living could be realized.

Challenging the powerlessness of displacement, park creators found strength through the

spectacle of their work and camaraderie. Yet photographs of Poor People’s Park project still

often focused on men’s bodies. In a photograph of the park printed in Chicago Today, a white

blonde man wields a pick axe high over his head. More than a dozen men and women, adults and

teenagers, work collectively in the background, hunched over shoveling rocks into

wheelbarrows. Business-dressed men stare from the sidewalks while an African American police

officer keeps watch in the distance. Yet the white, tool-wielding man centers the activity,

embodying the spirit of the pioneer.124

123 Studs Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD., ca. 60 min. recording (ca. August 1969), in Studs Terkel Collection,

Chicago History Museum. 124 “People’s Park Rally Falls on Deaf Ears,” Photo, Chicago Today (August 13, 1969): p. 16.

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Coverage of other People’s Parks, even those created by women, often focus on men in

their depictions of gendered distinctions in labor. Similar to coverage at Berkeley’s People’s

Park and Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, men’s laboring bodies in footage of the creation of San

Diego’s Chicano Park and Madison’s Walden Park command vision. Video footage of the first

day of the Chicano Park takeover focuses on dozens of men who pick axe the dry desert soil

underneath the overpass. While women hoe, rake, carry and cook food, while men operate

heavier machinery, pick axe, shovel, and raise the Chicano flag in acts of insurgent nation

building.125 In one photograph of Walden Park, a suited white male professor aims his shovel

toward the dirt while three well-dressed white women circle him, smiling while looking down at

his symbolic groundbreaking.126 Photographs of Michigan Technological University’s (MTU)

Peoples’ Park, created on a white male-dominated campus after the Kent State shootings, focus

on the manual labor of men in military uniforms.127 Subsequent murals recreating the labor of

Berkeley’s People’s Park and San Diego’s Chicano Park, as well as photographic and artistic

depictions of the construction of Chicago’s Poor People’s Park often remember men shoveling or

pick-axing, more than the work of women. When asked about the inundation of shirtless white

men in photographs of Berkeley’s People’s Park, photographer John Jakobson responded that it

was difficult to get shots without them. He remembered photographs of racial minorities were

almost impossible to obtain on the weekends when he visited the park.128

Racial harmony, hard-working men, playful children, and safe motherhood became social

measures of park creators’ successful creation of a new form of authentic labor in the urban

125 KPBS, video footage, (April 22, 1970), archived online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llb4-DrYUVQ. 126 Kenneth Wesley, “A Small Park Represents a Big Effort,” Wisconsin State Journal (September 13, 1972), in

“Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University

Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison. 127 See photographs in Keweenawan Photograph Collection (MTU-077), Archives, J. Robert Van Pelt and John and

Ruanne Opie Library, Michigan Tech University. 128 John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017).

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realm that attracted women like Wendy Schlesinger who felt alienated in mainstream society. At

Berkeley’s People’s Park, this rebellion produced a sexual energy that wafted through the park,

creating opportunities for women like Schlesinger to feel liberated when using the park as a

rendezvous point to meet her lover, Mike Delacour. KRON-TV news footage captured men’s

repetitive penetration of the rocky terrain with phallic acicular pickaxes sexualized the nature of

men’s bodies and work. 129 Embracing the bodily pleasure of nudity and sex added to the park’s

liberating principles of breaking taboos that contrasted with the privacy and modesty of clothes

and spatial enclosure.130 The intimacy of the park’s manual labor along with the seclusion of its

shady groves created space for heterosexual sweethearts to collapse in each other’s arms, and

dance topless around the fire. Harmonious group work became a metaphor for orgy. Describing

how enjoyable her first day of work had been, Schlesinger could not stop grinning and smiling

despite the gritty dust settling on her teeth: “We were all having a collective orgasm.”131 Later in

1970 when gay liberationists joined the picket lines to protest the university’s conversion of

People’s Park into an asphalt-covered parking lot, they did so by holding a “kiss-in”—offering

thirty-second “Kiss a Homo” sessions on the first day of the picket.132 At times groups of gay

activists and women’s liberationists used the park as a publicity platform for their own political

agendas calling for their own liberated spaces.

Within the counterculture nudity was a form of dissent, yet women’s nudity became what

Beth Bailey called a “paradox of liberation,” creating simultaneous experiences of play and

129 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” KRON-TV. 130 Terri Compost reveals in her primary source collection on the post-1969 history of Berkeley’s People’s Park how

women have continued to take part in nudist performances in and in support of the park, such as those by the X-

plicit Players that seek to “cultivate alternative functions of touch, [and] alternative experiences of [the] Body…in

the social realm.” See Compost, People’s Park, pp. 58, 112, 131. For more on nudity within the counterculture, see

Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011): pp. 59-61. 131 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 19. 132 Mother Boats, “To Take Care,” Berkeley Barb vol. 9, no. 26 (January 2-8, 1970): p. 3.

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disempowerment for women.133 In 1969, female nudity was political and spoke to ongoing

debates over nudists’ access to public spaces, such as nude-ins waged at California parks and

beaches by the Sexual Freedom League.134 Like the nude bombshells covering World War II-era

weaponry, women’s nudity in countercultural spaces largely dominated by white males became

part of the show of (white) men’s power against “straight” culture.135 Women’s sexuality and

nudity as weapons against containment became a gendered aesthetics of resistance that embodied

the park’s ideological contradictions over power and passivity. Some white women joined men

in removing their shirts in Berkeley’s People’s Park and at park protests as a show of equality, an

embrace of sexuality, or intentionally calling into question men’s attempts to disrobe as shows of

strength. However, the sexualization of women’s nudity at Berkeley’s People’s Park at times

converted women’s working bodies into the objects of the male gaze. While bare-chested men

were photographed in active positions of tool-wielding extraction, shirtless women were

captured tool-less, usually standing still, and looking away from the camera, rendering them

passive objects of the photographer’s heteronormative gaze.136 Some white women explored

their own sexuality through nude dancing, foreplay, and sunbathing that reflected the “be-in”

133 Beth Bailey, “Sex as a Weapon: Underground Comix and the Paradox of Liberation,” in Imagine Nation: The

American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, eds. Michael William Doyle and Peter Braunstein (New York City:

Routledge, 2002): pp. 305-324. 134 For specifics on concurrent People’s Park/nudist conflicts, see “No Place for Nudes,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no.

19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 6; Les, Letter to the Editor: “From the Lord of the Manor,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19

(May 9-15, 1969): p. 6; for a broader overview of counterculture-era nudist movements, see Brian Hoffman, Naked:

A Cultural History of American Nudism (NYU Press, 2015). 135 For a broader analysis of nudity and sex within the 1960s counterculture, see Miller, The Hippies., pp. 53-70;

Leerom Medovoi, “A Yippie-Panther Pipe Dream: Rethinking Sex, Race, and the Sexual Revolution,” in Swinging

Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, eds. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (University of Minnesota Press,

1999); Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2002); Donna Penn, “The Sexualized Woman:

The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America,” in Not June Cleaver:

Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Temple University Press, 1994): pp.

358-381. 136 For more on women as the objects of the male gaze, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”

reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999): pp. 833-844.

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spirit of the park’s do-it-yourself attitude of in-the-moment self-discovery. At times, women

were topless together; one photograph taken of three topless women in “Haste Park,” a People’s

Park made by covering Haste Street with sod, demonstrated a show of female camaraderie that

asserted demands for women-only spaces within a male-dominated landscape.137 At the same

time, the women were surrounded by smiling, gawking men. Topless women could not embrace

the same freedoms as shirtless men in the park despite its advocacy of equal opportunity to self-

expression.

As fears of police encroachment escalated over the park’s short three-week initial

existence, nudity evoked both bare, primal force and playful innocence. Delacour announced that

the Memorial Day March, organized in protest of Rector’s murder, would have a theme: “Sleep

with a Stranger.”138 Wendy Schlesinger was part of a handful of women that would wear sheer

black bras with clenched fist political buttons that read “Defend the Park” pinned to the nipples

for civil disobedience stunts after the park was fenced. She did so to publicly assert her

sexualized body as a rebellion against the state, and in photos smiled and enjoyed capturing the

attention of both men and women.139 A photo Ruth Rosen took of another woman wearing the

same costume depicts a different angle—the woman smiles looking into the camera while three

men surround her, none making eye contact while they look down at her body.140 The photo

caption, written by Barb editor Max Scheer, reads, “Park People Play.” The following year,

Schlesinger joined two other white women in wearing the same bras with short red cheerleader

skirts with pompoms. In protesting the conversion of the park into a soccer field, the women

137 John Jakobson, “Sod Brothers and Sisters,” Photograph, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p.

5. 138 “People’s Day: The Word is Go!” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1970): p. 3. 139 Lou de la Torre, Photograph, reprinted in People’s Park, eds. Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai (New York City:

Ballantine Books, 1969): p. 96. 140 Ruth Rosen, “Park People Play,” Photograph, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 26 (June 27-July 3, 1969): p. 5.

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used their bodies to distract the 75 soccer players on the field. Waving their arms and jumping up

and down, the women used their bodies to dramatize how the university had turned the park into

a “political football.”141 More often than signifying hard work in the park, women’s bodies

represented sites of play. Through the photographer’s lens and the white male park advocate’s

pen, women’s empowering explorations of their own bodies and sexual autonomy became

reinterpreted—at times, equated with men’s threats of insurrection that backed their territorial

claims.

Women who accepted gendered and sexualized positions could claim power within the

park’s leadership structure. Schlesinger served as the park’s first fundraiser and advocate during

early negotiations with UC Berkeley administrators, often making her the only woman in a room

full of men.142 Schlesinger became involved in the park as a way to spend more time with her

lover Mike Delacour—their tryst made praxis of the park’s democratic ideals of “doing your own

thing.”143 The first meeting was held in the back room of Liane Chu’s Red Square dress shop that

Delacour still had access to after co-creating the store with Chu as her boyfriend years prior. At

the meeting two men suggested that Schlesinger use her sexual prowess to raise money from

nearby business owners to buy sod and equipment. Giving her instructions on how flaunting her

femininity could complement their muscular masculinity, Mike Delacour and Paul Glusman

suggested:

“‘Hmmm, money,’ Michael murmured: ‘How would you like to bop around on Avenue,

Wendy, and try to hustle up some bread from the merchants?’

‘Yeah,’ Paul [Glusman] interrupted, ‘Just swing your hips and bat your eyes. If that

doesn’t work tell them we’ll be back to smash all their glass windows. I’m sure they

won’t be able to resist that hard-soft routine together.’

141 Associated Press, Photograph 2000.1.931 (June 20, 1970), in The Oakland Tribune Collection, the Oakland

Museum of California, reprinted online: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001931. 142 Cash, “People’s Park.” 143 Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (March 15, 2016); Richard Brenneman, “The Bloody Beginnings of

People’s Park,” Berkeley Daily Planet (Tuesday, April 20, 2004): http://bit.ly/2e4ceZ6.

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‘Well, alright, I’ll try,’ I said in a little voice. Inside myself I knew I would never threaten

the shopkeepers with breaking their windows, because I wouldn’t want to see the look on

their faces afterward. It wasn’t my style.” 144

Although she withheld her critiques, Schlesinger understood the crux of her fundraising work as

“coaxing and kissing ass” of the male merchants on Telegraph Avenue whose demeaning sexual

advances and condescension of the park’s socialist stance she had to politely ignore. One shop

owner agreed to donate a bench if it could be branded with an advertisement for his store.

Schlesinger kept her frustrations to herself, appeasing what she called the “paternalistic

conditions” of some quid pro quo cash donations before handing the $300 she had raised over to

Delacour. She was young and beautiful, white and blonde, and her sexuality combined with her

confident persistence attracted male business owners.145 Later, Stew Albert reported that

merchants donated “as modestly as a Midwestern virgin on her first time around”—erasing her

achievements while belittling their hesitancy by comparing them to prudish girls.146

As tensions escalated between park organizers and the university, Schlesinger joined the

team of negotiators to argue on behalf of the park. Her youth, beauty, and gender often

pigeonholed her into the representative “starry-eyed idealist” in contrast to the level-headed

professor or hard-minded male radical that spoke for her.147 In one memory of a group meeting

with Chancellor Heyns in which the men took turns speaking in “an ever-quickening rondo,”

Schlesinger recalled how she felt like “a woman at a theatrical performance.” To combat

university criticisms, park advocates played down the complexity of spontaneous collective

design, as well as disagreements over work or noise, and, in turn, highlighted their roles as

individual leaders. Schlesinger felt that in transforming themselves into “monumental

144 See Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 5. 145 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, pp. 5, 9. 146 Albert, “People’s Park.” 147 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 6, p. 7

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figure[s]…embodying a richly textured societal role,” park negotiators erased the park diversity

as well as the complex give and take of on-the-ground spontaneous park design.148

Despite scholars’ male-centric memories of park creators at Berkeley’s People’s Park,

Schlesinger worked alongside women who were Marxists, feminists, and stay-at-home mothers.

Across the divides of park borders, women shaped this movement of radical urban environmental

placemaking in invaluable ways, revealing activist park creation as a new medium for women’s

political organizing in the late-Cold War era that has been largely overlooked or dismissed in the

historical record.149 Women were key organizers and advocates, landscape and programming

designers, as well as careworkers, adding new dimension to our knowledge of women’s work in

the counterculture as a medium for asserting political identity. Most often women remarked on

consciousness raising it was to see the political impact of their own bodies in male-dominated

urban spaces. Although many women admit to being relegated to the gendered “shit work” of

political organizing across different political movements in the postwar era, women who

participated in Berkeley’s People’s Park have been quick to cite how the project’s leaderless

structure and celebration of creative individualism was empowering.150 Joining with men who

called themselves “Sod Brothers,” women like Schlesinger who participated in the sod-planting

line felt liberated. KRON-TV captured men and women passing heavy sheets of grass down the

snaking line, revealing the wide-grinned women who smiled while they struggled.151

148 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 6, p. 10; for an analysis on how negotiations between park

creators and the universities became reduced down to older white men in positions of power, see Carriere, “Between

Being and Becoming,” pp. 496-505. 149 As historians and spatial studies scholars have increasingly shown, women resisted displacement by reclaiming

private and public urban spaces, from softball fields to bookstores, in the 1960s and 1970s. For examples see

Daphne Spain, Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City (Cornell

University Press, 2016); Enke, Finding the Movement; and Hanhardt, Safe Space. 150 Term taken from Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (New York City:

Free Press, 2004). 151 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” KRON-TV.

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Representations of the park as not only an oasis of natural beauty and racial harmony but an

opportunity for egalitarian gender roles served to paint the experience of work as fun, diverse,

and harmonious to attract new workers, donators, and political allies for the park.

While never using the term “gender neutral,” park creators envisioned the park as shared

work, with men, women, and even children actively taking part in all aspects of the park’s

design, construction, defense, and maintenance. Working arduously alongside men enabled

women to see how traditional ideas of men’s strength and natural ability reinforced gender role

stereotypes that they could challenge in the park. In a moment of self-reflection, a group of

women on the first day of the creation of Berkeley’s People’s Park began comparing callouses

while privately critiquing men’s gardening skills:

“Hey, see those guys over there?” one said, pointing to some obvious gringos who had

never done a day’s labor in their lives. “Yeah, I can work a pick-axe better than them.

Middle class life sure has alienated us from the land. It’s really good, you know, to be

able to do this shit and not feel embarrassed. I really feel sort of equal here. Like, even if

you’re not strong, there’s plenty of stuff to do that helps get the park going.”152

Manual labor not only enabled women to physically and publicly prove (i.e. perform) their

radical politics, but the flexibility of work and the park’s leaderless structure made women feel

they could make immediate autonomous decisions about how they would participate.

Women influenced the design of People’s Parks in different ways that met the needs of

their communities. The democratically insurgent qualities of People’s Parks made women’s

design work at times episodic, as in the case of Sondra du Fosse who designed a walkway with

gathered bricks from a nearby demolished church at Berkeley’s People’s Park.153 In Houghton,

female college students at MTU were photographed planting flowers under the officially carved

152 Schlesinger s, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 20. 153 Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (April 10, 2016).

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park sign of their campus People’s Park.154 Women were key urban designers whose identity

politics as a basis for their political interests shaped the organization and experience of these

spaces as mediums for consciousness raising. In Madison, Wisconsin, Berkeley, and Chicago,

women worked with male landscape architects and architects to petition for these spaces as

experimental community-design projects. At one of several People’s Parks in Madison,

Wisconsin called Walden Park, members of the Zoe Bayliss Sorority worked with the University

of Wisconsin Landscape Architecture Department to convert their vacant lot into a walkable

prairie to test the negative impact of car exhausted on native plants.155 Liz Christy, a Puerto

Rican woman in New York City, coined the term “guerrilla garden” by leading a network of

inner-city vegetable gardeners who converted vacant lots into local food sources.156 While

sometimes women’s work focused on park aesthetics, the political symbolism embedded within

park décor was critical labor. Carol Denney frequently used Berkeley’s People’s Park as a site

for her artwork and music as part of her mission to change negative perceptions of the park. Her

projects, like the placing of fluorescent-painted, poetry-covered fish throughout the park’s

greenery, encouraged park-goers to take home her found art thereby mimicking the movement of

fish in the buried creek under the park.157 Her poetic fish encouraged park goers to playfully

engage with the space in ways that contrasted fears of the park as a “haven for the homeless.”158

In the case of Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, often told from the perspective of activist

leader José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez, women were key organizers and rabble rousers including Pat

154 Lindsey Hiltunen, “People’s Parks: Tracing Radical Environmental Activism from Berkeley to Michigan,”

Michigan Tech Archives (August 15, 2015): https://blogs.mtu.edu/archives/2015/08/04/peoples-parks-tracing-

radical-environmental-activism-from-berkeley-to-michigan/. 155 Whitney Gould, “Park or Parking Lot: UPlanners and Students Argue Value of Each,” Madison Capital Times

(December 3, 1971), Walden Park Subject File, University Archives, University of Madison, Wisconsin. 156 Green Gorillas, “Our History”: http://www.greenguerillas.org/history. 157 Carol Denney, Personal Interview (April 17, 2017). 158 Larry Gordon, “UC to Lease, Not Build on, People’s Park,” LA Times (November 1, 1989), archived online:

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-01/news/mn-86_1_uc-berkeley.

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Devine, a Catholic white affordable housing organizer with roots in the Civil Rights Movement,

and Ida Terkel, a feminist peace advocate and fundraiser for the park yet often and only

remembered wife to Studs Terkel. At San Diego’s Chicano Park and Chicago’s Poor People’s

Park, Laura Rodriguez and Cecil Keegan were chefs who cooked communal meals to honor the

manual labor of the parks’ workers. These women took pride in this culinary carework by

celebrating the ethnic history and anti-colonial culture of their parks’ political messages within

their ethnic communities. While Rodriguez brought tortillas, rice, beans, and tamales to feed the

workers in San Diego, Keegan made a Puerto Rican stew with rice and chicken over an open fire

that smelled so flavorful, it drew workers away from a radio interview with Studs Terkel while

visiting Lincoln Park.159

Women were essential to the transformation of San Diego’s Chicano Park into one of the

world’s largest outdoor mural collections underneath the Coronado Bay Bridge. On the surface,

women’s involvement in the creation and memorialization of Chicano Park is celebrated to a

greater extent than at other People’s Parks—perhaps because most other activist-created green

spaces have suffered from decades of negative press or have been removed altogether. In

contrast, the 39th Anniversary Chicano Park Celebration in April 2009 attempted to make

amends for the displacement of women workers in the park. Herman Baca, one of the park’s

most public leaders as the Chairman of the Committee on Chicano Rights, dedicated the

ceremony to las mujeres, “Adelitas del Parque!” who were presented with certificates when

called up to the central kiosk stage. Although their park experiences with Chicana empowerment

and sexism were not discussed on stage, memories of women’s park labor began to circulate

throughout the crowd. One person remarked, “No matter what demonstration I went to, Irene

159 Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD.

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[Mena] was there first.” Rosa Olga Navarro was remembered as having organized the danzate

dancers that were featured during the anniversary celebrations.160 Norma Cazares who had been

part of the bulldozer blockade on the first day later helped create an archive for more than 138

boxes of material on San Diego’s Chicano movement featuring material on Chicano Park.161

Laura Rodriguez, whose portrait is featured in a park mural, was inducted into the San Diego’s

Women’s Museum in 2010.162

At the same time that insurgent park design opened up new arenas for women’s creativity

and political organizing, traditional gender roles saturating park discourses and leadership

structures constituted presumably more “natural” gender hierarchies. In Daughters of Aquarius,

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo argues that despite their embrace of traditional gender roles, women

in the counterculture revived an older agrarian ideal to assign greater value to female productive

labor.163 These seemingly more “natural” values became the medium through which women

could move countercultural values of local food, shared work, a resistance to “treatment” as an

objectifying scientific mechanism (medicinal or pesticidal), and respect for the environment into

the mainstream. Through material, visual, and performance culture at People’s Parks, women

radically claimed space and engaged with broader discourses of war, police brutality, and urban

renewal as forms of colonialism. Many women understood their work in People’s Parks, be it as

laborers, cleaners, or as visual symbols of purity, as political acts, and embedded their labor

160 “39th Anniversary Chicano Park Celebration, April 2009,” Film Footage, Folder 3, Box 74, Herman Baca Papers,

1964-2013 (MSS 649), Geisel Library, Special Collections and Archives, University of California, San Diego. 161 Laura Castenada and KPBS Public Broadcasting, “Local Man Shares Chicano Movement History,” KPBS.org

(December 26, 2006): http://www.kpbs.org/news/2006/dec/26/local-man-shares-chicano-movement-history/. 162 Maria Garcia, “The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: The Legacy of Laura Rodriguez,” San

Diego Free Press (November 1, 2014): http://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/11/the-history-of-neighborhood-house-in-

logan-heights-the-legacy-of-laura-rodriguez/. 163 Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence:

University of Kansas Press, 2009).

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within the material, visual, and performative culture of People’s Parks to negotiate their power

within these spaces and the broader left.

Rather than serving as an objective replica of their experiences, photographs of women

circulated in the underground press became part of the park’s collective cultural memory that

constructed a gendered and sexualized narrative of People’s Parks.164 As historian Timothy

Hodgdon argues in his analysis of countercultural masculinity, embedded within countercultural

calls for authentic work and communal living was the presumption of a natural return to the

gendered yin and yang of human behavior—a “hip anarchist model of gender” in which men and

women embodied oppositional yet complementary identities.165 Discourse advocating for more

“natural” labor at People’s Park was problematic, at times bringing to the surface patterns of

gender essentialism that shaped how women contributed to these projects as well as the value

assigned to their labor. Gendered and heteronormative scripts undergirding park discourse

reinforced a utopian vision of familial environmental labor. At the center, white men used heavy

machinery and completed major groundwork for the park through hard manual labor. White

women were often portrayed as emotional careworkers, mothers, planters, and aesthetic

designers additive to male-dominated work. Finally, diverse groups of children played as park

users representing the symbolic procreative future of the park—the birthplace for the revolution.

Anecdotes of authentic parenting in parks countered accusations of park goers as untamed sexual

rebels or violent political radicals.

Happy children inundate underground press coverage and recorded footage of People’s

Parks; footage by KRON-TV News at Berkeley’s Mobile People’s Park Annex focused on

gleeful children, while Stud Terkel’s radio interview at Chicago’s Poor’s People’s Park captured

164 Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 7. 165 Hodgdon, Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius, pp. 68, 71.

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dozens of children giggling into the microphone as their parents worked on site.166 In Chicago,

park organizers paired coverage of moms playing with their children in the park with nearby free

breakfast programs led by the Young Lords in which nurturing male chefs served children

sizzling bacon and carefully sliced bananas. Hot breakfasts and homemade sandboxes became

the material culture of domestic homemaking that contributed to a romanticized vision of natural

parenting the park. Representations of mothers like du Fosse in park discourse connoted pure,

maternal love that the park uniquely manifested. In contrast, coverage of fathers like Mike

Delacour, whose three children were active daily in the park, was almost nonexistent. Blurring

borders between womanhood and the land, park creators maternalized nature in calls to protect

“Mother Earth”—envisioned as a return to a more authentic indigenous understanding of the

environment prior to capitalism.167 Within a war zone, maternal metaphors transformed into

discourses of purity. Published in a teach-in pamphlet by the People’s Park Organizing

Committee, poet Book Jones wrote, “The earth is our Mother. / The University put a fence

around / the land—our mother. / The University must stop / fucking with our land. The

University must stop / being a motherfucker.”168 Calls to protect the mother land and her children

contrasted both the police as “the Man” and the Robin Hood-esque park defender.

While labor was active, the nature created by park laborers was feminized, pacified, and

sexualized in ways that rendered it a sensual experience. Depicting the park as having a life of its

own empowered park goers as mothers. As mothers, women also interpreted the proclamations

166 Studs Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD, ca. 60 min. recording, (ca. 1969), Studs Terkel Collection, Chicago History

Museum. 167 “Before I get into the events,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 2, no. 49 (June 12-19, 1970): p. 2. 168 Book Jones, originally printed in a leaflet by the People’s Park Organizing Committee, reprinted in Annette

Kolodny, “Splitting Mother Nature,” in Mother / Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics, ed. Catherine

Roach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): p. 109.

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of the lot as “liberated space” as a harassment-free zone, and at times demanded to be taken

seriously by men. Wendy Schlesinger wrote in her memoir:

We knew from the children’s reaction that the Park was truly “liberated territory.” The

women who brought the children were ecstatic, too. Here was a unique place for all of us;

a place where we wouldn’t allow males to harass us. After all, we shared in the

construction of this place. We were going to defend our right to have a tranquil place to

retreat to from the repetitive, ugly encounters on the street. Men entering the park

immediately realized they better cool it. After all, the women who wielded the garden

tools also sported strong-looking arms.169

While People’s Park was often represented in the media as a male-dominated and male-led zone,

women’s share of manual labor as well as the attraction of mothers to the playground area

created a growing population of women who resisted chauvinism and enjoyed the spectacle of

women leading. Violence against park creators catalyzed a movement of mothers who protested

the tear-gassing of their children’s schools with signs reading, “Don’t shoot our kids!”170

Women negotiated power within a spectrum of sexual and gender play that became both

sources of struggle and empowerment within People’s Parks. Although women have largely been

written out of the narrative of Berkeley’s People’s Park, many who took active leadership roles

in the park’s creation were also in romantic relationships, adding additional forms of unpaid

affective labor to the plates of Wendy Schlesinger, lover to Delacour, Judy Gumbo, partner to

Stew Albert, Nancy Bardacke, married to Frank Bardacke, and Anne Weills, in a relationship

with Dan Siegel. The freedom of the park allowed many women opportunities to play with the

limitations of traditional gender roles by taking on new identities within their collective family.

Shared, varied communal labor enabled women to fluctuate between identities. Some single

mothers like Sondra du Fosse found shared carework liberating. In an appeal for park support

169 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 3. 170 Lynn Adler, Photograph, PeoplesPark.org: http://www.peoplespark.org/69gall12.html.

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published in the Berkeley Barb, du Fosse wrote how working every day in the park made father

figures accessible to her children:

My children have no father. At the park, any time any day, there are five or twenty young

men being fatherly, brotherly, friendly. One is standing with my 6 yr. old son helping him

use a pick. Two more are rough-housing with my 4 yr. old son and he is ecstatic. Another

is comforting my 7 yr. old girl who has twisted her ankle. On a Tuesday morning a swing

breaks and before the child has stopped crying there are two or three young men at the

swing—repairing, caring. The child begins to smile and asks to help. The young men

work with the child and the swing is fixed. The mother—myself—stands with tears in her

eyes.171

Criticizing a reporter that had remarked that the park facilitated a “‘strange alliance of street

people and housewives,” du Fosse defended the “bearded, long-haired alien” who continued to

work with and for her children selflessly in the park. Having young men and women watch over

her children enabled her to take on extensive landscaping projects that put surplus labor to work,

such as the construction of a system of integrated brick-lined pathways.

Du Fosse had organized teams of brick haulers from a nearby church demolition. Du

Fosse’s leadership was inspiring to Schlesinger who watched her carefully, taking note of the

strength in her stance and demeanor. As du Fosse’s team of nearly two dozen worked in “train-

like formation,” scraping off the cement in a “furious burst of activity,” Schlesinger began to see

her as more than a mother: “I saw her directing the steady trickle of people who witnessed the

arrival of the first load of bricks. She stood in the center of the first dirt path, arms akimbo,

assuredly pointing the way. I tried to recall the classical image she embodied...All of her actions

were so precise, neat and accurate. Engineering in the old sense of the word.” Schlesinger

recalled how “she emanated shades of the Roman genius towards ancient road-construction.”172

Du Fosse, however, was never credited with organizing the walkways, only attributed after the

171 Sondra du Fosse, “A Strange Alliance,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 2. 172 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, pp. 9-10.

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fact in Schlesinger’s memoir. Despite du Fosse’s leadership, as a single older mom she became

pigeonholed as the park’s “Madonna and child”—the caption of her portrait in the Barb. A

portrait of her sitting on the ground crouching over a toddler painted her as a protective mother

and the site as sacred ground—her earthly maternity oppositional to the harsh masculinity of law

enforcement.

Gendered iconography in People’s Park coverage capitalized on counterculture tropes of

white women’s innocence and fragility that frequently positioned men as active subjects and

women as passive objects. In a 1967 underground cartoon capturing this gendered dynamic,

white female artist Terry Furchgott depicted two women smiling while kneeling before a white

police officer, handing daisies up to him as a peace offering. The undulation of their wispy curls

and curvy white fabric folds gathering around their thin pale frames contrasted sharply with the

officer’s black uniform with sharply pointed creases—his white phallic nightstick jutting

outward at them from his groin.173 Furchgott created this image in the wake of the Vietnam Day

Mobilization action in 1967 to honor the women she characterized as brave for holding daisies

up to guardsmen’s bayonets.174 Similar imagery appeared in the aftermath of the fencing of

Berkeley’s People’s Park when women modeled their behavior after the earlier women anti-war

activists in Washington D.C. At the People’s Park Memorial Day march protesting the murder of

James Rector, women placed flowers in the barrels of National Guardsmen’s guns and in holes

of the chain-link fence. The flowers’ lifeless, wilting stems paired with the women’s downcast

faces symbolically connected the loss of the park’s life with the vulnerability of the delicate

female form. At the same time, the phallocentrism of the bayonetted rifle “depend[ed] upon the

173 Terry Furchgott, “The Virtues: Charity,” Lithograph, Avatar vol. 1, no. 5 (Boston: August 5, 1967). 174 Terry Furchgott, Personal Interview (May 31, 2017).

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image of the castrated women to give order and meaning” to the chaos of the fencing.175 Within

the park’s concept of complementary gendered forces of innocence and violence, images of

mothers and children metaphorically contrasted the hypermasculinity armed guardsmen’s phallic

weaponry. Holding flowers and looking at the heavily armed male troops occupying the park,

“women gave domestic feminine witness to…manhood” in photographs, and, in doing so,

validated men’s labor in creating and defending their familial territory.176

When asked about sexism in the park, Schlesinger remains quick to cite Delacour’s

equalizing motto, “Everyone gets a blister,” that intended to challenge countercultural ideologies

that focused more on the freedom of giving and taking rather than collective work.177 Schlesinger

argued that “women did their fair share,” and that the park offered women experiences with tools

in an environment encouraging of and demanding their equal participation in manual labor. In

recent interviews, Wendy Schlesinger and Judy Gumbo defend men’s sexism at Berkeley’s

People’s Park as a product of the times—perhaps feeling like dwelling on examples of the

sexism of men who were their partners might invalidate the liberation they felt and the

heterosexual relationships they shared.178 In her own memoir, Schlesinger illuminated how even

in the months between the park creation and finishing her memoir, feminist consciousness

raising began to take hold in Berkeley, making her rethink choices she made in the park. In

particular, she felt frustrated that she had distanced herself from a group of women’s

liberationists in the park. Turning down an invitation from Judy Gumbo to attend a feminist

organizing meeting, Schlesinger criticized herself:

175 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” p. 833. 176 Hodgdon, Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius, p. 68. 177 Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (March 15, 2016). 178 Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (March 15, 2016); Judy Gumbo, Personal Interview (November 23,

2016).

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How banal. Why had I been so quick to refuse? I liked Judy, I was flattered she had asked

me. But I had instinctively pushed away the opportunity to go on to the next step. I’ve

often since reflected on that speedy refusal. It strikes me as ironic that at that period when

I was more open to almost anything, hysterically open, I was hysterically closed to this

one thing which pertained to my sex. I unconsciously assumed that Women’s Liberation

would be an indulgence and a sidetrack from helping the oppressed…I was a victim and a

prisoner of my conditioning.179

It would be nearly eight months before she attended a feminist meeting, and nearly a year before

she published an article in the Berkeley Tribe calling for a mass women’s organization against

sexism.180 By 1970, some women like Robin Morgan were resentful of the displacement and

sexualization they felt working in male-dominated radical organizing, and as the movement of

People’s Parks expanded to include a series of network of more apolitical Earth People’s Parks,

women like Robin Morgan said “Goodbye to All That:”

Goodbye to the New Nation and Earth People’s Park, for that matter, conceived by men,

announced by men, led by men—doomed before its birth by the rotting seeds of male

supremacy which are to be transplanted in fresh soil. Was it my brother who listed human

beings among the objects which would be easily available after the Revolution: ‘Free

grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc.’? Not my brother, no. Not my

revolution.181

As the history of Berkeley’s People’s Park has developed over the past four decades, Schlesinger

remains irked that her voice as a political leader of the park has been drowned out by men.182

Other park participants like Nancy Bardacke still believe in the insurgency of participatory

design and gender neutral manual labor as an embodiment of consciousness raising, yet resist

seeing how the park’s focus on individual choice and exploration masked white middle-class

heterosexual power structures that reinforced sexism, ableism, and racism within the postwar

left. Turning down an interview to talk about women’s work in the design of Berkeley’s People’s

179 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, pp. 13-14. 180 Wendy Schlesinger, “Woman’s Tooth and Claw,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 2, no. 38 (March 27-April 3, 1970): p. 4. 181 Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” reprinted in Ain’t I a Woman? Vol. 1, no. 6 (September 25, 1970): p. 7. 182 Schlesinger, Personal Interview (March 15, 2016).

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Park, Nancy Bardacke instead reaffirms park creators’ romanticization of environmentalism,

communalism, and protest by portraying the park’s creation as a metaphorical birth outside the

bounds of contemporary critical analysis.183

2.7 Conclusion

Looking back on the impacts of Berkeley’s People’s Park immediately after the fencing

in May of 1969, Berkeley’s contingent of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called the

Red Guard Caucus argued that the park’s guiding principle of non-alienated physical labor had

been empowering. Generalizing the majority of the park’s creators as middle class who had

never really been required to perform physical labor, the Red Guard Caucus wrote that gardening

had not only challenged their classist attitudes toward manual laborers, but provided

opportunities for privileged individuals to see how commodified labor corrupted the postwar left:

Building the park…began to convince them that what was wrong with work was not

sweat involved but its capitalist connotation. Selling their labor power, having the value

they created stolen from them, and then seeing their products used to maintain a system

that exploits and oppresses most of the world’s people, this was what students and street

people rebelled against when they said, ‘work’s a drag, let’s turn on and enjoy our

freedom from it.’ As a corollary to this realization, People’s Park had the progressive

effect of convincing many individuals that those who create value through their labor

power deserve our respect and not our contempt.184

Yet the Red Guard Caucus, criticized by some park organizers for their radical Marxist/

Leninism, argued that without a structural critique, non-alienated labor could never be sustained

within the park: “Many of the park’s originators and subsequent supporters believed that they

could substantially change their lives—via parks—without completely changing the

governmental and economic system under which this country suffers.” Utopianism as a form of

183 Nancy Bardacke, Personal communication with author (October 21, 2016). 184 Red Guard Caucus, Berkeley SDS, “The Battle of People’s Park,” (ca. 1969-1970), reprinted online at

Marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sds-park.htm.

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individual empowerment, identity play, and community-building was inherently flawed if it

remained isolated to the lot at Haste and Bowditch because the park’s work structures could not

thrive in a vacuum. By not advocating for a working-class leadership within the park nor

integrating the park’s ideology within the broader Berkeley movement, the park was doomed to

be an “isolated haven where one could escape the hassles of an oppressive system” without

effecting meaningful structural change regarding access to space as a form of power.185

The divide between personal experience, collective effort, and lack of a structural critique

created contradictory experiences for people that were simultaneously both empowering and

hierarchical. At the same time that gender neutral and colorblind rhetoric was key to depicting

the park as a diverse oasis, subtle references to gender, race, and sexuality illuminate how power

structures of People’s Parks combining labor, the body, and nature—consciousness-raising

rhetoric for some yet oppressive for others. The romanticization of “natural” work within

People’s Parks relied on racial, ethnic, gender, and class stereotypes in arguing that insurgent

park creation could facilitate more authentic corporeal connections to the urban environment.

The glorification of motherhood, the exoticism of indigenous or foreign people, the appropriation

of black revolutionary and Chicano slogans and figures, and the sexualization of women became

complicated mediums of political communication. The overlapping use of these tropes in park

creators’ constructions of nature and labor helped catapult People’s Parks into national and

international attention by re-envisioning the pastoral ideal as radical resistance within discourses

of urban renewal and environmental protest. Yet, ultimately, male park creators often used the

bodies of marginalized groups in ideological and visual forms to center themselves as park

leaders. Although the environmental labor of women, the working class, and people of color

185 Red Guard Caucus, Berkeley SDS, “The Battle of People’s Park.”

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have been ignored in the history of the People’s Park movement, identity politics were embedded

within these spaces and the types of labor available that have shaped their historical memories.

While taking into account how these spaces helped to facilitate emotional connections to

social and environmental organizing, experiences within People’s Parks were more complex—at

times simultaneously liberating and oppressing for women. Women’s participation in this

movement both challenged and existed within gender and racial hierarchies: women illegally

created their own parks and led the development of others; mothers and wives served as culinary

care workers by creating and maintaining vegetable gardens for shared public feasts; women

took up the cause of politically negotiating for rights to environmentally and legally preserve

these sites in perpetuity; and the bodies and performances of women in these parks and on

marketing material shaped perceptions of these spaces as politically pure “virgin” territories

amidst the destruction of urban renewal and massive state-backed redevelopment. At the same

time that women of many socio-cultural statuses were leaders and workers within this

movement, women were also sexualized, silenced, and relegated to gendered positions of

carework and servitude. This form of “pink” environmentalism negotiated the boundaries

between women’s liberation, eco-hypermasculinity, and gendered domesticity that at times

rendered women subordinate to men. The collective, emotional, and sensorial forms of natural

work experienced within People’s Parks that encouraged women and other marginalized

identities to claim space publicly within parks also helped disguise hegemonic masculinity

within the movement.

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CHAPTER 3. DESIGNING ANARCHY: MAPS, PLANTS, AND OBJECTS

IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIBERATED ZONES

“‘It’s funny,’ a guy said, ‘the obituary in the paper made it sound like Chuck was a real

square. It told about his graduating from Fremont and Dartmouth and how he was at U.C.

studying biology and environmental design. It didn’t tell how he wanted to make the world

better, how he was a real revolutionary. It didn’t seem like Chuck.’

‘That’s right,’ a girl added, ‘this is more like him,’ she indicated the struggling little

plants in the rocky soil about us. ‘Tell people to bring water and plants—to keep Chuck Herrick

alive.’”

Berkeley Barb, May 19681

3.1 Introduction

On May 3, 1968, UC Berkeley student Chuck Herrick was killed in an auto accident.

Herrick had founded the Ecology Committee of the coalitional Peace and Freedom Party, and

had been an active member in Ecology Action—a Berkeley-area radical conservation and

planning organization fighting against the environmental degradation of urban renewal, the

Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. One month prior to his death, Ecology Action had

campaigned against Mason-McDuffie, one of the largest landlords in the South Campus area.

The company was petitioning Berkeley’s Board of Adjustment for a zoning variance to ease the

height restriction on the lots they owned between Oregon and Russell to build a six-story office

building where Victorian-era homes once stood. Chuck Herrick and Ted Posselt of Ecology

Action spoke out against the development, arguing that the construction of a 43-stall parking lot

for an adjacent office building was part of a larger urban development plan to displace working-

class people. Posselt and Herrick built a coalitional front of both “blacks and beards” against the

1 “At People’s Park Just Water Plants to Keep Chuck Alive,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 19 (May 10-16, 1968): p. 4.

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campaign, and when the board approved the variance by a vote of 4 to 1, a spokesperson from

Ecology Action announced to the crowd that their activism against urban renewal would expand:

“‘The flouting of the public interest by Berkeley’s Land Barons must end…Now they are

preparing a new round of exploitation of the public. We will resist them with all means—

including direct action.’”2 The group began planning creative resistance strategies like insurgent

parks he called “plant-ins” on vacant lots to protest urban renewal and demonstrate alternative

uses for vacant land.

According to his friends, Herrick liked to refer to Ecology Action as the “Amateur Park

Rangers Association,” due to members’ shared interest in land reclamation. At the time of his

death, Herrick had been designing aspects of one park they planned to build at the corner of

Dwight and Telegraph—the same block on which Berkeley’s People’s Park, would be built one

year later. In designing material culture that could integrate with the park’s vegetation, “‘little

signs that would become part of the trees as they grew,’” Herrick wanted to transform lots into

interactive landscapes that would encourage people to use and appreciate the environment rather

than simply build on it for profit. Cliff Humphrey recalled, “‘I remember the [sign] for the pear

tree. It was to say: Fruits for Your Children’s Happiness.’”3 The Board of Adjustment vote

followed by Herrick’s death pushed the group to begin building one of the first known People’s

Parks, Herrick Peace and Freedom Park in May of 1968. The group invited supporters to bring

garden tools, plants, musical instruments, and art materials to the lot. According to reports in the

Berkeley Barb that followed the park activity for weeks, ten to fifteen people worked on the park

one warm afternoon: “By four o’clock the trees and flowers of the ‘Herrick Peace and Freedom

2 “Land Barons are Alive and Thriving in Berkeley,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 16 (April 19-25, 1968): p. 5. 3 See JAS, “Berkeleyans Busy Behind the ‘Dozers,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 19 (May 10-18, 1968): p. 9; “At

People’s Park Just Water Plants to Keep Chuck Alive,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6, no. 19 (May 10-16, 1968): p. 4.

116

Park’ stood like a tiny oasis among the brick businesses of the Avenue.” Plant matter, art,

sculpture, and people became a vibrant materiality that ameliorated the loss of Herrick.

The small green triangle amounted to little more than perhaps 900 square feet, with most

of the lot covered in foundation and demolition debris. On the first day of construction, workers

covered the “Now Leasing” placard with a sign for Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, and used a

wheelbarrow to remove construction remnants. Young oak trees were planted and small chunks

of concrete foundation were raked and gathered to form circle borders around trees, as well as a

central walkway leading to the street intersection. A bulletin board was constructed at the center

of the park where the sign and a petition gathering names to keep the lot were posted. Misshapen

benches and odd structures were placed around the park. The grassroots cleanup effort surprised

business owners and residents. One photograph taken from across Telegraph Avenue reveals at

least a half-dozen onlookers staring at the park construction site from the sidewalk, while other

closeups show spectators smiling as they watched shoveling from several feet away. Photographs

taken of the park two weeks later reveal a potluck—a small gathering of citizens, black and

white, women and men, parents and children, huddling informally around a handmade wooden

picnic table covered in pots, plates, and bowls of food. A woman in a stylish bohemian chic

frock, most likely Liane Chu who lived on the block, leaned over the table of food. A long-haired

shoeless man resembling Michael Delacour who lived with Chu at their Red Square dress shop,

ate from a bowl.4

Herrick Peace and Freedom Park planted seeds in Berkeley’s South Campus area to resist

displacement by reclaiming territory through insurgent park creation. In neighborhoods impacted

4 Photographs (ca. May 1968), Folder Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, Box 3, Ecology Action Records, Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley. In addition, Chu and Delacour signed a petition created by Ecology

Action to keep Herrick Peace and Freedom Park. You can see their signatures in the same folder.

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by urban renewal, marginalized citizens began forming parks and gardens on vacant lots in the

late Cold War era.5 This chapter examines how, within this movement, park materialities

functioned as a system of representation that not only communicated meanings about labor, art,

ecology, and colonialism but also constituted knowledge as power.6 Maps, plant matter, art, and

architecture became tools for representing identity and building communities in People’s Parks.

Putting dozens of People’s Parks in conversation with one another reveals how parks as living

collages contained many attributes that resemble Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, including

spaces for eating and children’s play, art and architecture, and gardens that ordered life within

these spaces and, in doing so, organized the communities that created them. The conditions of

the lots themselves shaped the design of parks while the various types of park work brought new

meanings through creative re-use. Park landscapes as visual, material, and political discourses

not only resisted the city as an apparatus by which power hierarchies were institutionalized and

made concrete, but simultaneously worked with and harnessed the power of state infrastructure

and the media to form a community of resistance.7

5 For more see, Russell Rickford, “‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism,

and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of American History vol. 103, no. 4 (March

2017): pp. 956-980; Steven Conn, “Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and Antiurban Pastoralism at

the End of the Sixties,” Journal of Urban History vol. 3, no. 6 (2010): pp. 831-848; Galen Cranz, The Politics of

Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT Press, 1982); Karl Linn, Building Commons and

Community (New Village Press, 2007); Suleiman Osman, “‘We’re Doing it Ourselves’: The Unexpected Origins of

New York City’s Public-Private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Planning History vol. 16, no. 2

(2017): pp. 162-174. 6 I use anthropologist Daniel Miller’s definition of materiality here as a framework for blurring the borders between

material culture and immaterial culture. Moving beyond object accumulation as artifacts (of an event or site, in the

case of People’s Parks) to a “theory of things” offers a new lens in interrogating more holistically how park

materialities were a fluid medium of experience—passing through and beyond objects in such a way as to make the

borders of the material objects similarly as porous as the meanings of the matter. As Sherry Turkle has argued, “We

think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.” Within the context of countercultural

consciousness-raising, park materialities became not only a material medium but a landscape within which park

goers could counter mainstream culture through experimentation. See Daniel Miller, Materiality (Duke University

Press, 2005); Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (MIT Press, 2007). 7 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (Tavistock Publications,

1972); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon

(Harvester Press, 1980); Stuart Hall, “Foucault: Power, Knowledge, and Discourse,” in Discourse Theory and

Practice: A Reader, eds. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, Simeon Yates (Sage Publications, 2001): pp. 72-81.

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The insurgency with which parks were created transformed material culture into what

political ecologist Jane Bennett calls “vital materiality” blurring borders between life and matter,

human and nonhuman, in ways that became a form of embodied consciousness raising.8 Park

creators imagined vacant lots as dead wastelands—empty, lifeless, and dangerous. The objects

they brought to and created within parks were not only for utility, communication, and

decoration, but served as “vibrant matter” that enlivened lots and by extension the communities

displaced by demolitions. In this way, the objects placed within parks not only created a

politicized landscape entrenched in urban environmental utopianism, but were imbued with their

own “thing power” that allowed park goers to imagine their territorial placemaking as

procreative.9 The vitality of park materialities allowed park goers to imagine themselves as

biologically and emotionally connected with their liberated landscapes in ways that have shaped

the historical memory of these political placemaking projects as childlike play spaces and sacred

grounds.

Imbued with symbolic political power, park material cultures heightened parks’ sensory

experiences that facilitated seemingly more authentic experiences with objects and each other in

the urban environment. Park creators who used visual and material culture to help build

communities of resistance also privileged the objects, labor, and performances of certain bodies

within these spaces. While some white park creators used aesthetic and horticultural discourses

to create racially exotic zones within parks as forms of cross-cultural unity, immigrants and

people of color also used parks to claim public space for representations of their own lived

experiences. In doing so, park creations mobilized beyond the boundaries of vacant lots into

surrounding communities and other cities, into art and media, and ultimately into the digital

8 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010). 9 Ibid.

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world. At the same time, states used the threat of demolition to stem park creation as a political

organizing tactic that shaped the historical memories of these places.

3.2 Mapping Berkeley’s People’s Park

With only three weeks of work prior to the fencing, Berkeley’s People’s Park was in its

early stages of development and use when it was cordoned off and occupied by law enforcement

on May 15, 1969. Few maps of People’s Parks survive, leaving visual footage, memoirs, and

published reporting as the principal remaining sources of information about the arrangement of

the parks. One primary source map of Berkeley’s People’s Park (See Figure 3.2) was drawn on

the day of the fencing to capture what the project looked like prior to its reclamation by the

state.10 Unlike most photographs taken on the days immediately preceding the fencing, the map

depicts the park as a human-less landscape. The benches, swing sets, and sculptures placed

within the park visually communicate its use as a measure of success rather than the different

groups who creatively used these objects. Like a flag positioned in the soil of a new frontier—or

in the case of Berkeley’s People’s Park, a United States flag and a red People’s Revolutionary

flag attached to the top of a telephone pole—the symbols drawn on the map marked the territory

as occupied. The map’s oblique aerial view centers the park within existing urban infrastructure,

including sidewalks, nearby businesses, and property boundaries.11 Lines are drawn straight,

angles are

10 Unknown, “People’s Park Is, as of May 15, 1969,” Map (ca. 1969), in Berkeley Free Church Collection (GTU

049), Contributor Richard York, Graduate Theological Union, University of California, Berkeley, reprinted online:

http://imgzoom.cdlib.org/Fullscreen.ics?ark=ark:/13030/kt9g5039t0/z1&&brand=oac4. 11 Although the artist is unknown, the map was most likely drawn by someone in the field of urban planning—

perhaps a student in the University of California, Berkeley’s Environmental Design program that was involved in

the park.

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Figure 3.2, “People’s Park IS”: Unknown Artist “People’s Park Is, as of May 15, 1969,” Map (ca. 1969), Public

Domain, Courtesy of the Berkeley Free Church Collection, Contributed by Richard York, Graduate Theological

Union, University of California, Berkeley.12

12 Unknown, “People’s Park Is.”

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precise, and the objects placed within the park are drawn in nearly their exact location and to

scale. In doing so, the artist intended not only to capture a moment in time, but to prove its worth

with pinpoint accuracy within capitalist-development structures.

Constructed as an objective representation of the park, the anonymous map reveals how

patterns of work and placemaking developed as a form of politicized material culture on the lot.

The sketch illustrates disparate zones across the site, with various areas like the playground or

gardens serving the needs of different communities and their interests. Many of these objects and

spaces were mentioned by park goers in the underground press and by scholars in subsequent

histories of People’s Park in ways that read like lists—their variety of objects and spaces a

metaphor for the diversity of people the park attracted. The original park callout offered the

parcel as a blank slate, one article proposed programming to attract interested workers: “We

could have a child care clinic or a crafts commune which would communicate its wares by

having medieval style fairs, a baseball diamond, a rock concert, or a place to think and sleep in

the sun.”13 When underground reporters (initially park organizers) described the park as it was

being built, they did so by listing an inventory of objects, people, and activities the park

manifested: “Flower and vegetable gardens were planted…Nursery swings and a sliding board

appeared…old benches and newly-made ones were fine for sitting down and being amazed at

what was happening.”14 Wildflower and vegetable gardens as well as new trees, shrubs, and

flowers were concentrated in the far west and peripheral edges of the park. Park participants

appear to have randomly scattered wooden benches and small scaffolds whose rustic look and

feel countered the smooth surfaces of the “cheap mass ‘plastic’ accoutrements of suburban

13 “Robin Hoods Park Commissioner (Stew Albert), “Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17: p. 2. 14 Stew Albert, “People’s Park: Free for All,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5.

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life.”15 Park goers found unique meaning in park objects perhaps never intended by whoever

placed the object there, such as Alice Blandy who remembered how the park’s maypole was

“topped with the American Indian yarn symbol of eternity” that attracted a joyous circle of

dancers around it—a small design detail unaccounted for in any other source.16 Seating areas,

platforms, and interactive sculptural elements emerged like stalagmites in a sea of dusty gravel-

speckled dirt in the far southeast corner. Other elements like a stained-glass mobile and signs

described in accounts yet not drawn on the map reflect how the park was a canvas for

collaborative folk art, with users contributing their own artifacts to the landscape that were

subsequently moved and reimagined by park goers. These lists of park objects seemingly

scattered on the landscape have become evidence to demonstrate the park’s ethos of equal

opportunity in design that attracted and unified diverse users.

Although park recruitment materials characterized the lot as a frontier of endless

opportunity, the map reveals how many elements of the park were ordered in ways that challenge

descriptions of the park as a cultural wilderness. Park goers, at times with the aid of professional

designers and architects, took on the role of landscape architect in organizing the space and its

programming. Prior to the informal construction between late-April and mid-May, the 2.8-acre

lot at the corner of Haste and Bowditch had been covered with parked cars, mud ruts,

construction debris, and foundation from older developments that had to be removed with bucket

brigades and heavy equipment. The first days of park construction focused on developing the

15 See Sim Van der Ryn for more discussion on how the park’s aesthetics countered mainstream suburban modern

America. Sim Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus: Current Issues in Higher

Education, ed. G. Kerry Smith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1970): pp. 54-71. 16 See Gordon Sullivan, “Visions of People’s Park,” The Berkeley Monthly (1985): p. 25, in Folder 13, Carton 4,

Eric Dibner Papers (BANC MSS 99/186 c), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Carol Denney

later remarked how the park’s maypole signified how revolutionary the park creation was in comparison to today,

because such a tight political grip on public spatial use prevents people from being able to construct and use one.

Carol Denney, Personal Interview (April 17, 2017).

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area to the far east side of the block opposite several shops and commercial spaces, including

The Forum café and Caffe Mediterraneum, that stretched along Telegraph Avenue to the west,

paralleling the eastern Bowditch border. Photographs and memoirs depict how the first wave of

labor culminated in the planting of sod, plants, and a small garden—all constructed at the same

grade with focus on designing the lot from eye-level. As participants continued to add objects to

the park’s surface, such as art, signs, and playground equipment, park goers also simultaneously

deliberated how the park’s landscape could be changed below grade as well as at the lot’s

boundaries.

In park descriptions, park goers straddled a fine line between passive and active voice,

individual experience and collective creation. Many organizers felt that rather than designing a

park, they were liberating a territory from capitalist development so that a more authentic social

ecology could naturally emerge. Hundreds of workers, some arriving occasionally, others daily

chiseling at long-term projects, helped construct the park. Despite the multitude of workers and

varieties of work that designed the space, accounts often depicted the materiality of the park as

slowly revealing itself—coming into existence as a revelation rather than being consciously

designed through individual and collective choices. By removing layers of development, park

creators believed they were allowing the “landscape’s emergent and temporal nature” to manifest

in ways that allowed for “a social fluidity of individual and collaborative relationships with the

land that is too often overlooked in design practice.”17 This characterization of the park

enlivened the park, representing their work as part of a revolutionary birth, while at the same

time downplaying the responsibility park creators had in shaping this landscape.

17 Julia Czerniak, “Looking Back at Landscape Urbanism: Speculations on Site,” in The Landscape Urbanism

Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006): p. 120.

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Mimicking the passive language and structure of hippie “happenings,” participants

characterized donations of food, plants, and tools as spontaneously emerging “without

announcement or boast.”18 Despite serving as a key park organizer, Stew Albert, who covered

the park in the local Berkeley Barb, strategically balanced passive and active voice that both

distanced himself from responsibility of leadership while also intimately connecting him with the

bodily act of shaping the land. Challenging mainstream and underground press coverage of

political organizing, Albert instead reflected on how beauty, knowledge, and love naturally

appeared as hard work progressed. Once three hundred yards of sod had been planted, he

remarked that “it [had] seemed eternally natural like it was always been there.” Donated trees

were planted “on the optimistic intuition that we and our children would take shade from them

grown to their fullest height and embrace.”19 Personal pronouns, active verbs, a formal plan, and

a focus on the smallness and singularity of seedlings had the power to discredit their vision that

they were trying to make an alternate reality. Embracing the chaos and envisioning the project as

a success required seeing one’s work as part of a whole. When photographs and descriptions of

group work were paired with fantasies imagining seedlings and squares of sod as both a current

and future park, they became evidence of the park’s success in attracting and maintaining

enthusiastic momentum.

The map also reveals how the insurgency of creation encouraged park goers to expand

their vision of the park beyond its surface to tap into the city’s infrastructure and build vertically.

At the same time that park goers began to construct a pond-turned-amphitheater beneath grade,

they built a stage and tall sculptures, climbing a telephone pole to place flags and signs at its

18 Stew Albert, “People’s Park: Free for All,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5. 19 Albert, “People’s Park.”

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crest.20 An ominously labeled square on the map on the west end of the park, “TOILETS,”

signified how park goers were in the process of rigging their own public bathrooms by digging a

tunnel to connect to the city’s sewer system.21 Park goers felt that a capitalist society that

prevented non-consumers access to privately-owned bathrooms including those on the campus of

the University of California, Berkeley, made those in need of a toilet feel like a criminal.22 This

eagerness to expand beyond sod and playground equipment and into deeper and wider layers also

reflected efforts of park creators to think more broadly about what other needs a liberated zone

could meet. Moving through layers of the earth in this process became what felt like an insurgent

archaeological dig revealing hidden histories of the lot. Wendy Schlesinger characterized the

chunks of concrete and bricks they removed as part of the carcass of past brown shingle houses

demolished the year prior.23 When building the well, they discovered that two creeks, Derby and

Strawberry, had been buried to develop the lot.24 “‘It’s good water,’” one long-term resident

exclaimed in hopes that the well would make the park self-sufficient.25 By expanding the design,

the park’s imagined life force grew beyond the park’s surface and borders.

Each item included on the map represented different social spaces that formed around

each object, reflecting what types of communities used the park as well as the utopian ideologies

they sought to manifest through these material forms. Recorded footage demonstrates how some

users brought chairs, car seats, and sleeping bags to both Berkeley’s People’s Park and People’s

20 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, pp. 6-7. 21 Ibid.; Although not accounted for on the map, footage by KRON-TV shows at least a twenty-foot long trench

being dug for this purpose. See “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News, Young

Broadcasting of San Francisco, Inc. (Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, May 1969), San Francisco Bay Area

Television Archive, http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe. 22 Ibid. 23 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 18. 24 Lisa Owens-Viani, “Our Lady of the Creeks,” Estuary Newsletter (December 1997), reprinted at Sustainability

City: http://sustainablecity.org/articles/creeks.htm. 25 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 7.

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Park #6, yet otherwise the space had minimal seating.26 Others likely believed that clothing,

walls, and chairs as single-use objects might distance park users from creating closer connections

with each other, the earth, and the park’s symbolic materiality. Instead, flexible spaces and

objects created opportunities for work, rest, and play could happen spontaneously—allowing

park goers to explore their own ideas and identities through the materiality. Sculptures, stages,

and swings became seats and play areas, opportunities for self-reflection and socialization.

Someone dragged four large three-dimensional orange letters spelling “KNOW” to the Southeast

corner of the park, that became the “favorite hang-out of the micro-mini-teenyboppers” who

greeted everyone who approached with the middle finger.27

The BBQ pit, picnic tables, red wooden benches, and other seating arrangements created

communal spaces for food consumption and social gatherings. A multicolored wooden stage

with pergola offered a platform for rock musicians and activist groups alike to share their politics

publicly, while the parking area offered a glimpse of how non-local park users navigated to the

site a daily basis. Footage reveals how, with lines between work and play blurred, adult

socialization became integrated with areas for child play. At the same time that groups of adults

clustered around the swings and sandbox, parents felt safe letting children play alongside adults

socializing. With hours spent removing gravel and no plans to pour concrete, children felt safe to

run around without incurring injuries. Although some park goers like Mike Delacour and Wendy

Schlesinger made efforts to remove dangerous items like broken bottles, the characterization of

26 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News, Young Broadcasting of San

Francisco, Inc. (Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, May 1969), San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive:

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/208853; “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-

TV News. 27 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 7.

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the lot as wild frontier meant that rough, rusty, and sharp objects signified a more authentic

experience that park users initially embraced.

Many park users still resist characterizations that the park had been planned, perhaps

feeling that the concept of modernist design that activists were rejecting could not speak to the

project as “more process than a product, and thus more a direction or a motion than a

movement.”28 I argue that, perhaps unintentionally, the map hides how the park experience was

ordered and designed in ways that made individual liberation a constructed experience. While

park creators have argued that top-down urban design displaced local residents, participants

designed this space with a “hippie modernist” aesthetic that ultimately normalized certain

behaviors that shaped the park’s power structures. As Pierre Bélanger reminds readers in his

Foucauldian critique of urban design, “However neutral [design] appears,” he argues, “buried in

its banal repetition, infrastructure is instrumental as a ‘tool and technique of power’….”29 The

map reveals how park organizers sought to tap into the power of existing urban infrastructure by

using paved roads to bring in plants and equipment and relying on the city’s waste management

system. At the same time, park goers created their own infrastructure to sort out spaces,

processes of labor, and objects. When a truckload of sod was delivered, bulldozers and rototillers

were rented, worker assembly lines were configured that helped order work and the park’s

design. Park organizers used tools, labor, and objects to reconfigure the materiality of the lot to

demonstrate their own power over the terrain tunneling toward the city sewer system to expand

their own infrastructure. In addition, park goers placed a bulldozer alarm at the center of the park

28 Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Introduction,” Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of

the 1960’s and 70’s (Routledge, 213): p. 10. 29 Pierre Bélanger, “Is Landscape Infrastructure?” in Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, eds.

Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (Routledge, 2016): p. 195.

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and designed a phone tree to notify hundreds within minutes if the police descended upon the lot

to fence it. In sorting the space, park creators ordered life within this community.

At nearly three weeks in, thousands of workers and hundreds of hours of park labor into

the park’s creation, notable absences on the map beg questions as to how the park functioned on

a daily basis, regulating labor, aesthetics, and behavior in ways that designed the park. For

example, while the map situates the park within capitalist and political urban frameworks, such

as property borders and planned transportation routes, the map reveals little about waste

management. Although earlier park accounts published in the Berkeley Barb were written by

park organizers such as Stew Albert who intentionally portrayed the project as collaborative and

fun, where were dump zones or areas of waste in the park? Who took on responsibilities to

remove waste, and how did the park use existing city infrastructures to deposit waste? On

weekends when the park became a meeting spot for hundreds of park workers, waste likely piled

in different areas that shaped how users negotiated power and behaved in the park. How did

different types of pungent waste, from human and dog excrement to the skeleton of a hog roast,

get organized and removed? Because of the park’s proximity to nearby businesses and homes,

who complained about late-night noise and how did park leaders shape behavior over the course

of the day? From whom and from where did other objects originate? Alternatively, what objects

within the park attracted the most participants and how did that contribute to park hierarchies?

Park users reported undercover cops and informants in the park that shaped behavior within the

park as a form of design; Where might critics or police have surveilled the park and at what

times of day would they make their presence most felt and why? Although the map represents

the park as an ordered collection of objects, the processes by which the park came to exist in this

way reflect intersecting forces of power in play.

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While witness testimonies like Wendy Schlesinger’s memoir or Stew Albert’s Berkeley

Barb articles offer the greatest insight into the sensory experiences of different park zones, their

individual perspectives fail to account for how people of color as racial minorities, physically

handicapped persons who might have struggled to navigate the space, or other group identities

negotiated the park in different ways and therefore experienced these designs aspects more

intimately. The way men interacted with the park’s materiality differently from most women

shaped the park’s design and feel. While men fought drunkenly around the campfire at night, did

women feel safe, and did these concerns limit women’s participation in the park? Descriptions of

anti-police hog roasts in park coverage intended to attract more hypermasculine political radicals

shaped how women experienced the park. What dangerous, frustrating, boring, or tedious aspects

of the park were withheld from testimonies to support the park’s message of individual liberation

through shared resources? And how did the violence enacted against park materialities

reorganize these spaces in park goers’ memories, reimagining them as more gender-neutral, more

racially harmonious, and more ecologically-attuned than they actually were? These questions do

not simply speak to gaps in our knowledge about what the park looked like. Their absence in

media reporting and primary source accounts reflects how park creators actively constructed a

vision of the park as urban environmental utopianism, using the park’s materiality to highlight its

innovative collectivity, spontaneity, and authenticity while simultaneously turning a blind eye to

how the park’s materiality constituted power.

Understanding how the park was accessed and maintained, including how areas for tools,

trash, and hoses developed, as well as processes for using city water spigots and serving meals,

would offer greater insight into the park’s own hierarchies. The absent elements reveal how

maps not only reflect differences in experiences and relationships to space, but indicate social

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hierarchies that the mapmaker negotiated.30 With their focus on singular objects and scenes, the

map and witness testimonies often miss how the park was embedded within the surrounding

community, city, and climate that might have offered greater insight into how the park was or

was not always a “liberated zone” in praxis as park organizers imagined it to be. While some

patches of grass or weeds remained from the previous development, photographs by Clay

Geerdes reveal how newly sodded areas were roped or blocked off with stakes at knee-high level

to prevent foot traffic until the lawn could support human weight within a few weeks. In what

ways did borders, fences, or social norms limit access to certain spaces within the park? In what

ways did the laying of sod discourage intrusion as a symbol of claimed landscape, while

randomly placed trees and sculptures succumbed to the whims of insurgent park users? While we

know that some park design meetings took place within the sunken amphitheater, what decisions

were made regarding the park’s design outside its borders, and who had access to those

meetings? Knowing that the sod had not fully taken root by the time park users began to lounge

on it, how did park design as a process adapt to insurgent use; or, simultaneously, how did park

users who did not engage in landscape architecture design the park in their own ways?

3.3 Sod, Gardens, and Trees: Plant Matter in the Reclamation and Regulation of a

Gendered Native Wilderness

The addition of plant matter differentiated insurgent park creations from street and

parking lot takeovers like Ann Arbor’s South University block party and Madison, Wisconsin’s

Mifflin Street Block Party in the summer in 1969. At Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969, sod

30 See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban

Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995); also see Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (2nd Edition)

(University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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became the first major growth planted in the lot that became the culmination of the first day’s

work. Park organizers decided at the original planning meeting to choose sod to produce

immediate results.31 The sod now blanketing the debris-scattered lot symbolically created a new

frontier. This first act of park design embraced the “exacting regime of turf management”

defining suburban straight middle-class America—now “our turf.”32 Although park creators

sought to reject the plasticized and contained American lifestyle as, in the words of Sim Van der

Ryn, “increasingly dedicated to ticky-tacky and asphalt,” sod as the foundation for the

quintessential middle-class backyard became a measure of the success of People’s Park—what

Wendy Schlesinger defined as “the first instant lawn of our post-linear generation.”33

To participants, the sod-planting line became a visual measure of the park’s success in

facilitating collective labor without a defined leader. The green stretches that spiraled outward

like a fertile ring around the park’s tree grove mimicked the rolling lawns of Golden Gate Park,

Provo Park, Speedway Meadows, and other local parks host to hippie be-ins and love-ins. Park

creators envisioned the lawn as the basis for an open field and a platform for free speech rallies

or concerts. The addition of sod also mimicked broader patterns of pastoral urbanism in park

design calling for open green spaces in the 1960s—wide open lawns considered “natural sites for

preservation and, by extension, for not tampering with people or things at all….” This blank

slate, “anything goes,” approach encouraged minimal park development to ensure flexible use

that invited hippies in search of space for countercultural happenings.34 Corporate architecture

also echoed these trends in postwar urban pastoralism. Businesses designed their campuses and

31 Paul Glusman, Personal Interview, (September 19, 2017). 32 Alexander Wilson, “Nature at Home,” in The Cultural Geography Reader, eds. Timothy Oakes and Patricia Price

(Routledge, 2008): p. 228; Albert, “People’s Park.” 33 “Faculty Probe Asked,” The Fresno Bee: The Republican (Fresno, May 24, 1969): p. 2; Schlesinger, “The

Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 18. 34 See Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (MIT Press, 1982): pp. 135-

154.

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office parks around rolling lawns to evoke “identity, status, and right-mindedness” as a form of

capitalist power on display.35 Sod visually reproduced aspects of safe backyard suburbia that

many displaced residents in Berkeley’s South Campus area longed for. Sod also quickly masked

histories of development and demolition as well as unnavigable mud, creating a verdant blank

slate for their new society while simultaneously claiming power to control the monocultural

landscape as a new frontier. Park creators made sod a stage for human performance as a

metaphorical act of saving identity and culture in a state of crisis.36

In many ways, sod contradicted the park’s principles of laissez-faire liberation and anti-

capitalism. Sod is expensive. At seven cents per square foot and 5850 square feet planted the first

day, with expectations to add more, the price of sod was around $400.37 The lawn required

special tools, fertilizer, excessive watering, and little intimate human contact after planting—

problematic for a site tentatively controlled by itinerant property users committed to free space in

a semiarid climate. To plant sod, they had to “technologize” the urban garden with machines to

break down and level the earth, keep the sod watered, and reduce weeds.38 Landscaping

equipment enabled participants to perform power over the landscape, therefore constituting the

relationship between organizers and the parks they created. Park creators initially paid little

35 Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (MIT Press, 2014): p. 43. 36 Giovanna Di Chiro offers a good critique of this concept of the existence of the Anthropocene, or the idea that

human-dominated earth accounts for climate change as caused by humans. Her complains about this framework

being universalist, and cynical are born within this historical moment in which park creators similar began to use

state violence against park creators as a storytelling device to hold “the Man” responsible for urban political,

ecological, and social destruction. This binary, good guy/bad guy narrative, thwarted critique through deterministic,

colorblind language. See Giovanna Di Chiro, “Environmental Justice and the Anthropocene Meme,” in The Oxford

Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, eds. Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John Meyer, and David

Schlosberg. 37 This is equivalent to roughly $2500 in 2017 when accounting for prices now 500% more than in 1969. For prices

of sod, see Paul Glusman, “Anarchy Reigns,” reprinted from the Good Times, The Rag vol. 3, no. 14 (May 12,

1969): p. 12. 38 This is a phrase used by Alexander Wilson to describe how suburban backyards required that technology mediate

the relationship between middle-class, home-owning men and their turf. See Alexander Wilson, “Nature at Home,”

p. 228.

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attention to how the site was embedded within an ecological system. Sod, therefore, became a

tool of territorial expansion. After agreeing to pay a neighbor twenty dollars per month for water,

laborers figuratively struck gold when they discovered a buried stream underneath the “people’s

swimming pool” and began the process of digging their own well to quench the thirsts of

workers while satisfying the demands of their urban pasture. 39

The planting of sod on the first day put in motion a series of design elements to protect

and decorate this park feature that organized the lot along lines of program and circulation.

Expansive sheets of sod were fitted together, forming small islands that Wendy Schlesinger

predicted would become “ideal meditation spot[s]” once their roots had taken hold.40 Stone-lined

brick pathways curving around the sod helped guide park users off newly planted seedlings and

created an atmosphere of carefree wandering throughout the park. Meeting in the center around a

small circular flower bed, these walkways reused remnants of urban renewal to construct a folk

adaptation of Frederick Law Olmsted’s pastoral park design while the vast lawn evoked

tranquility in a chaotic space.41 This pastoralism required regulation, a series of small ankle-high

fences and park organizers regulating behavior, to ensure that the sod would remain as new park

users began to add their own ideas. Walkways, small signs, and small fences that blocked off

sodded areas ordered the landscape and the behavior of park users by channeling the circulation

of people to “corridors of power.” 42 Protecting some new aspects of the park’s design

empowered those who dictated what areas and in what ways spaces could be accessed.

39 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 6. 40 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 22. 41 For more on this, see Cranz, The Politics of Park Design; James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the

Symbolic Landscape of America (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 42 Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems,” Science

in Context vol. 6, no. 2 (1993): pp. 377-403.

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Sod represented the paradoxes of middle-class postwar pastoralism: a maintenance-

intensive escape from the demands of work, a highly-controlled form of sprawl, and the

management of a turf both homogenous and lush. Lawns evoked middle-class normality,

masculinity, technology, and heteronormativity, yet within the context of Berkeley’s People’s

Park, sod served as a stage for play and consciousness raising that challenged its symbolism of

suburban containment. Park creators gave sod new meaning. KRON-TV footage of Berkeley’s

People’s Park reveals couples napping and cuddling in the tree-shaded grass patches. Later when

the park was fenced, park allies protested by laying sheets of sod in the streets to form insurgent

parks that disrupted the flow of automobile-centered transportation.43 The political theatrical

performance of laying sod on asphalt visually signified the creation of a new frontier where there

was none. Yet in many ways, the addition of sod reflected some of the park’s ideological

contradictions. Sod planted on a road had no chance of survival. Insurgent parks created in the

streets were never intended to last. Sheets of turf baked in the hot sun before being forcefully

ripped up by police. Sod visually enabled park advocates to claim territory by demanding access

to “the lawn” as a privilege of property ownership. Sod did not rethink the urban landscape in

terms of how urban dwellers engaged with the environment, yet to park creators it visually

indicated a liberated zone.

Although park creators described the sod chain line as the pinnacle of cooperative labor,

the apparatus of sod regulated work and the park’s design. Sod purchases were impersonal when

acquired by the truckload from a turf farm in Vallejo, that challenged creators’ efforts to create

more authentic spaces and relationships to the land. Quoted in Schlesinger’s memoir, Delacour

described every aspect of the automated purchase with amazement. “You can’t imagine if you

43 For one example see Kathy Williams, “The Green Grass Grows All Around,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May

30-June 5, 2017): p. 5.

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haven’t seen it. There’s nothing but miles and miles of perfect lawns growing out in the desert,”

Delacour stated. “The grass is watered by monstrous fully automatic sprinkler systems. You go

to a small office in the center of all the lawn and order the sod by the square yard. They have a

machine something like an automatic dolly, which picks up the sod from underneath and rolls it

up.”44 The farm required migrant laborers, yet Delacour made note how he and the rest of the

park organizers retrieving the sod packed the truck themselves, adding to the park’s mythological

narrative of cross-cultural unity and authenticity through performative embodiment. With the aid

of money, machinery, migrant labor, and big agriculture, the sod factory was a spectacle—a

visual power their park could absorb. After the park workers had used a rototiller, bulldozer, and

other tools to loosen the soil and remove debris, the sod truck appeared out of nowhere with

young men tossing out “forty-pound rolls of sod even before there was anybody below to catch

them.” Although the sod was hoisted upon them, Schlesinger described it as a climactic moment:

“As if one, the sod-chain affected a hundred and eighty degree turn away from the truck to face

our handi-work [sic]. Standing in the shade of the red sun, we saw what we had created. And it

was good.”45 Looking around proudly at the sod they had planted, the lawn became a new

frontier.

The remaining areas of the park featured individualized plant matter, including trees,

bushes, and flowers, as well as the emergence of small pocket vegetable and herb gardens. Many

of these plants allowed for gardeners to connect personally with the space through particular

material objects that became a manifestation of their fused political and personal identities.

Planting flowers, trees, and sod was an act of maternal creation for park participants who often

described gardening as fusing the orgasmic delight of natural conception and the labor of birth.

44 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 16. 45 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 21.

136

These metaphors enabled the park to take on a metaphorical life of its own. Schlesinger

described working in the sod chain line as handling “sod-babies” that were hoisted into the arms

of someone else with the aid of one’s whole body.46 Constructing park elements as “vibrant

matter” gave the workers energy, hope, and power.47 Looking out onto the massive assembly line

of sod bundles, Schlesinger remarked, “LIFE…they were alive, we were the connectors.”48

These emotional experiences working in the park influenced park goers to imagine their bodies

as intimately connected to the land.

Plant-based birth and sex metaphors within Berkeley’s People’s Park became a medium

through which park participants could envision racial harmony, gender neutrality, women’s

empowerment, and heteronormative paternalism as coexistent. These tropes grounded the

romanticization of nature in Berkeley’s People’s Park, as the project’s largely white straight male

leaders played with and at times reinforced gender and ethnic stereotypes in their political

challenges to state authority and cultural norms in visual media. Women’s embrace of nudity and

sexuality within People’s Parks at times became equated with the feminization and pacification

of the frontier rather than enactments of feminine strength and confidence. Using an early

ecofeminist lens, American Studies scholar Annette Kolodny argued that through posters, press

coverage, and performances intended to gain support for People’s Parks and build political

alliances, activists often constructed green space as a passive and fertile woman—“the lay of the

land”—in need of saving from the rape of white corporate masculine bulldozers.49 Women’s

46 Ibid. 47 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010). 48 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 21. 49 Annette Kolodny, Lay of the Land: Metaphor as History and Experience in American Life and Letters (The

University of North Carolina Press, 1975): pp. 3, 4, 145, 159; for examples of references to the rape of the earth, see

“Save Our Species,” The Rag vol. 3, no. 18 (Austin, June, 19, 1969): p. 4; and “Big Thicket,” The Rag vol. 3, no. 28

(Austin, August, 25, 1969): p. 13; Wick, “A Tree Grew in Berkeley,” The Rag vol. 3, no. 20 (July 3, 1969): 2;

Additionally, the Barb reported that shortly after the park’s fencing, several pro-park events featured the film “Park

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laboring bodies not only helped create these spaces and activist coalitions, but became visual

metaphors for the park as both a victim of “the Man” and womb for resistance to which white

men and white women alike clung.

In contrast to sod, other racialized plant matter allowed park users to imagine the park as

transcending U.S. borders. Names like the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” transformed rock-lined brick

pathways with benches and flowerpots into a metaphorical war zone that nodded to the strategic

resistance efforts of the Vietcong who moved supplies for the war effort throughout the region

under cover in a hidden transit infrastructure. Within Berkeley’s People’s Park, the Ho Chi Minh

Trail directed users to smaller vegetable and flower gardens like the “Native Wild Flower

Garden” and the “People’s Revolutionary Corn Patch” that proclaimed nominal solidarity with

Vietnamese, Native Americans, and Chinese decolonization movements that sought to reclaim

and rename land lost to white settler colonialism.50 A writer for the Berkeley Barb described

finding “a miniature Mexican garden with a grass plaza and shaded walkways among the

geraniums and sweetpeas” at the park.51 While the map of Berkeley’s People’s Park included an

area in the southeast corner labeled, “People’s Revolutionary Corn Patch, Don’t Tread on Me,”

other witness testimonies never mention it, or alternatively cite the existence of “a rock garden

with Buddha statue” or a “miniature Mexican garden” not included on the map.52

Rape” by Jon Backjord for a community screening. The film would be shown at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival the

following year. See “Here’s How You Can Help,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p. 5. 50 Michael Carriere, “The Lessons of People’s Park for the Occupy Movement,” History News Network/News

Analysis, June 6, 2012, reprinted in Truth-out.org, http://truth-out.org/news/item/9634-the-lessons-of-peoples-park-

for-the-occupy-movement (Accessed October 18, 2015). 51 Steve Haines, “A New Kind of Rest: Work in People’s Park,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 4. 52 Unknown, “People’s Park Is.” When recently asked of the existence of these gardens, Wendy Schlesinger, who

had been one of the original key park creators, had no recollection. Schlesinger qualified her statement, adding that

Marxist Socialists who worked in the park were most likely responsible for the naming of the corn patch because

participants were committed to realizing different political or social agendas. Wendy Schlesinger, Personal

Interview (April 10, 2016).

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Planting exoticized plants can also be interpreted as a form of horticultural cultural

appropriation.53 Within the context of the Vietnam War and cross-cultural anti-racist activism at

home, in naming, gardening, and eating plants re-imagined as foreign, park users could identify

with activists who traveled to Hanoi and returned to share details of their authentic interaction

with the North Vietnamese. Similar to these trips abroad, ethnic gardens within parks became

opportunities to “produce a profound, and potentially transformative, disorientation” in contrast

to reports by the U.S. government and the mainstream press denigrating the Vietcong

resistance.54 International spaces within parks allowed park creators to produce similar sites of

political tourism within local urban environments. Racialized plant matter became tools to

engage in political discussions of colonialism and war in an effort to build coalitions committed

to reclaiming land from “the Man.”

These ethnic references became “imperfect analogies” that reinforced strategic

essentialism of ethnic minorities through forms of horticultural and aesthetic play.55 The material

culture of foreign plants, flags, art, and food in People’s Parks transformed performances within

these spaces, such as manual labor and food consumption into primitive narratives that became

exotic lenses through which to experience the park as more “authentic” than modern America.

The arrangement of materials within the park allowed park creators to see their bodies, their

environments, and their politics as more diverse in imaginative ways. Upon seeing the park for

the first time, Wendy Schlesinger compared the panorama of workers to a medieval village.

53 A fascinating article on this horticultural debate over native versus invasive species and how it is laden with racial

discourses, see Suzana Sawyer and Arun Agrawal, “Environmental Orientalisms,” Cultural Critique, no. 45 (Spring

2000), pp. 71-108. 54 Franny Nudelman, “Trip to Hanoi: Anti-War Travel and Transnational Consciousness,” in New World Coming:

The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, eds. Karen Dubinsky and Ian McKay (Palgrave Macmillan,

2009): p. 241. 55 Brian Norman, "Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays," Women's

Studies 35, no. 3 (2006): pp. 241–64.

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Later that day laborers hosing down the dusty soil in preparation for planting sod invoked the

landscape of a South Asian rice field: “All the women rolled up their jeans, took off their shoes

and sloshed in the mud. It reminded me of what it must be like in much of Asia. It would have

been out of sight to see two water buffalo come strolling up.”56 For participants like John Simon,

food, drink, and drugs were instrumental in fueling continuous work in the park that he imagined

came easy to hardworking Asians: “I worked steadily for 20 minutes, then wandered through the

diligent crowd. ‘Now I see how the Chinese build dams.’ No idle tools, and some dude in a

cowboy hat was grading the bumps and hollows on a rented bulldozer. Wine bottles passed,

lemonade, and joints from hand to hand.”57 Embodying Chinese dedication to hard work—what

many participants of Berkeley’s People’s Park described as foreign in their educated,

domesticated, middle-class lives—became a point of pride that could be remembered through

park material culture.

At other People’s Parks, vegetable gardens served as public statements of anti-colonial

political resistance, allowing for racial and ethnic political groups to merge the political issues of

land and cultural reclamation as a form of power. Days after Berkeley’s People’s Park was

fenced May 15, 1969, a series of people’s victory gardens are created by the group “Friends of

Sammy Younge,” named as a memorial foundation to African American student and veteran

Samuel Younge Jr. who was brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for using a white-only

bathroom in Tuscaloosa, 1966. As part of the Samuel L. Younge Jr. Memorial Foundation, the

mixed-race group began developing parks and gardens on vacant lots in the summer of 1969 to

reclaim the land for African Americans in Northern California, including two “people’s gardens”

in Berkeley featuring corn, beans, tomatoes, green peppers, and peas. According to white

56 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 20. 57 John Simon, People’s Park: Just the Beginning,” Liberation Magazine (July 1969).

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Reverend Scott Smith of Universal Life Church, the group’s first park creation attracted a

diverse crowd: “blacks, chicanos [sic], yellows and whites—not just the radicals—but all kinds

of views.” Smith cited that while allying with Berkeley’s People’s Park, the gardens were

explicitly racialized as a form of inclusivity, with signs that read, “‘Black Victory Garden,’

‘Chicano American Victory Garden,’ and ‘White Victory Garden,’” dedicating different projects

to different ethnic groups. The group planned to unite the gardens at harvest time when they

would deliver the crops to the Berkeley Welfare Office to distribute. The group partnered with

Fred Cody’s bookstore to sell copies of James Forman’s biography of Younge to raise money to

expand the project to include “chickens, goats, pigs, and even dairy cattle.” 58 Although the

police and the conservative Berkeley Gazette had tried to pit Black Victory Gardens against

(white-dominated) People’s Parks, the article quoted park advocate Calvin Brigsby as arguing

that land as a form of power was a coalitional political issue: “When the black people have their

own gardens to defend…they’re going to see an attack on any People’s Land as an attack on

them, so they’ll defend the park, too.”59 Racialized vegetation became tools for whites to ally

with marginalized groups while these groups simultaneously used plants to claim autonomy

within the white-dominated urban realm.

Students from then-Chico State College participated in these Berkeley-area park

creations, where they had insurgently taken over forty acres of the campus to garden as a protest

against Butte County’s refusal to approve a food stamp program. Park creators argued that

despite evidence that more than twenty percent of the population suffered from malnutrition,

students of color at Chico State College (an estimated 100 out of a student population of 8500)

58 Steve Haines, “Black Peoples’ Victory Plots Growing Fast,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p.

11. 59 Mike Schechtman, “People’s Park, Garden United,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11.

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faced Jim Crow discrimination by white locals who threw them out of barbershops and

restaurants, and harassed African Americans and hippies by pelting them with vegetables. This

discrimination also segregated Butte County’s farmworker population working at Gridley Farm

Labor Camp managed by the Department of Agriculture.60 In response, Ty Hilgers wrote to the

Barb requesting readers donate seeds, livestock, and money to the Chico People’s Farm.61 These

demands for free and autonomous agriculture were part of a growing land reclamation movement

in the late 1960s and 1970s.62 While community gardens offered sovereignty in the control of

social space, natural resources, and means of production to marginalized communities of color,

gardens infused with racial and ethnic discourses made park creation a form of both survival and

play.

At other People’s Parks, white park creators embedded anticolonial discourses within

plant matter, arguing that native plants should be reinstated in urban landscapes as forms of

horticultural decolonization.63 Wisconsin’s Walden Park, for example, was created on a vacant

60 According to the Gridley Herald, John Steinbeck lived in Gridley while writing “Grapes of Wrath,” and used

anecdotes from Gridley Labor Camp as inspiration for his novel. See “A Little Potpourri of Gridley History from the

Gridley Museum,” Gridley Herald (July 1, 2016):

http://www.gridleyherald.com/article/20160701/NEWS/160639954. 61 “Chico People’s Farms,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11. 62 Russell Rickford, “‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black

Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of American History vol. 103, no. 4 (March 2017): pp.

956-980; for work putting Black Power land reclamation discourse in conversation with hippie communalism, see

Steven Conn, “Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and Antiurban Pastoralism at the End of the

Sixties,” Journal of Urban History vol. 3, no. 6 (2010): pp. 831-848. 63 This effort to remove non-native and at times invasive species of plants added with urban development is

sometimes referred to as botanical decolonization or native plant advocacy. In their fascinating problematization of

this concept, Tomaz Mastnak, Julia Elyachar, and Tom Boellstorff link histories of settler colonialism with new

plants used in big agriculture and urban development, arguing, “The colonial landscape was sustained by, and fed

into, an intense traffic in people, plants, animals, and germs between the metropolis and plantations, and between

plantations in the East and West.” By the late Cold War era, often white male environmentalists argued on behalf of

returning to more “native” flora. See Tomaz Mastnak, Julia Elyachar, and Tom Boellstorff, “Botanical

Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 32, no. 2 (2014):

pp. 363-380. For more on how other scholars have situated this biological debate within larger discussions of

immigration and colonialism, and how this has amounted to what some have called an “ecological anxiety disorder,”

see Daniel Simberloff, “Confronting Introduced Species: A Form of Xenophobia?” Biological Invasions vol. 5, no. 3

(September 2003): pp. 179-192; Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore, “Ecological Anxiety Disorder: Diagnosing the

Politics of the Anthropocene,” Cultural Geographies vol. 20, no. 1 (2013): pp. 3-19.

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lot as an Earth Day project in April of 1970 by women in the Zoey Bayliss Housing Cooperative

at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison. At first the students planted vegetables, yet when

campus planners began targeting the lot for the construction of a new parking area, park

organizer and law student Sue Wiesner began working with UW Professor of Landscape

Architecture Darrel Morrison to petition the university to keep their park. After Wiesner and

other women helped raise $6000 and collected more than 3000 petition signatures, the UW

Campus Planning Committee approved the project and in 1972 the People’s Park was officially

designated as Walden Park, named for Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The park’s sign

quoted Thoreau, stating, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”64

Park discourses of nature and wilderness often used plant matter to metaphorically

“correct” histories of colonialism, using colorblind rhetoric to equate urban renewal and

pollution with the displacement of indigenous peoples. Morrison argued that native plants could

offer respite from modern technological America while also serving as instruments to measure

human damage to the environment in the Anthropocene. He proposed that the park be converted

into a micro-arboretum as a class project, to provide an opportunity “‘for people in town to see

native plants, a relief from the traffic and hard surfaces.’” As a horticultural laboratory, the plan

developed by a half-dozen students in UW’s Planting Design program in the Department of

Landscape Architecture included a variety of wildflowers and prairie grasses that, when arranged

by different distances from the road, could test the impact of air pollution as well as demonstrate

how native plants adapt to urban conditions. Morrison argued that the arboretum would “‘bring

64 Ann Beckman, “University and Walden Park are at Odds,” Madison Capitol Times (August 18, 1972), in Folder

“Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University

Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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some of the character of wild nature into the city’” by serving as a highly controlled and

professionally designed test site under his department’s leadership.65

In 1973, Morrison published an essay on the park in the New York Times, arguing that the

park’s design was a nostalgic return to the wild pastoral play places of the pre-urban renewal era.

With the urban environment now “sterilized and homogenized,” he argued that the landscape

architect’s limited plant palette resulted in the domination of heartier plants like bluegrass,

thornless Honey Locusts, and Pfitzer juniper shrubs that did not attract butterflies, bumblebees,

and indigenous fauna. Throughout his editorial, Morrison uses racialized rhetoric amounting to a

horticultural white savior complex, lauding the park’s effort to preserve “pure” ecosystems that

are “prime natural areas…remote from population centers.” As part of a larger landscape

restoration movement, the goal was to protect “young and sometimes delicate native seedling[s]”

from more aggressive plants invasive in Wisconsin’s deciduous forests. The plan for Walden

Park included such flowers as Prairie smoke, purple coneflower, and sunflowers to attract insects

and create a fall spectacle, while trembling aspen, sumac, and American plum trees could serve

as the buffer between cars and the park, offering a private oasis to consume the benefits of a

native wilderness.66

Coded in colonial horticultural language that sought to prove that native species could be

adapted to urban environments, the park as a celebration of “diversity and everchanging subtlety

of wild places” became an aesthetically rich escape from the urban realm—a stark contrast to

parks constructed by African Americans for survival or Chicanos for territorial reclamation.67 As

65 Whitney Gould, “Park or Parking Lot: U Planner and Students Argue Value of Each,” Madison Capitol Times

(December 3, 1971), in Folder “Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs Historical File

(Accession 1995/071), University Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison. 66 Darrel Morrison, “Bring Back the Butterflies,” New York Times (September 9, 1973), Folder “Walden Park

Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University Archives,

University of Wisconsin, Madison. 67 Ibid.

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Simon Sadler argues in his comparison of the environmental consciousness of Stewart Brand’s

and the Black Panthers, their racial and class backgrounds framed their opposing calls for

holistic thinking. While hippies like Brand framed survival as primarily ecological and planetary,

and therefore socially unifying across race and class, the Black Power movement called for a

socially and economically holistic analysis of spatial discrimination that stripped land rights and

nutrition from African Americans. While the environmental movement’s emphasis on returning

to native horticultural habitats was a colorblind effort to facilitate “natural” equality through the

reconstruction of native horticultural preserves, the Black Panthers’ framework of racial self-

determination shed light on the how structural inequalities were rendered “natural” through the

environment—displacing working-class people of color from safe and healthy environments as a

form of self-determination.68 When Morrison stated, “We’ve destroyed so much that there’s a

desire to get some of it back,” he used ecological colorblind discourse to re-envision and reclaim

the native land as the new frontier for professional horticultural preservationists.69 With little

connection to the colonization of the Menominee, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk peoples

that originally inhabited this region, the park’s preservationist discourses erased indigenous

peoples as part of native ecologies. Framing the park as “a pleasant interlude to passing motorists

and pedestrians,” Morrison positioned the park as one that could be produced for modern

consumers.”70 In contrast to the once-insurgent and female-controlled park creation in 1970, by

1973 Morrison’s frequently printed articles on the park included no mention of Wiesner and the

Zoey Bayliss Cooperative that continued to maintain the park throughout the 1980s to guarantee

the university would not bulldoze it.

68 Simon Sadler, Lecture: “Hippie Modernism Opening Day Talk,” Walker Art Center (ca. November 3, 2015):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqPXOwog75M. 69 Joan Judd, “Area Gardeners Going Native,” The State Journal (August 22, 1974): p. 47. 70 “Before and After,” The Capital Times (September 27, 1974): p. 10.

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Similar calls to return to native horticulture in People’s Parks can be seen in Berkeley in

the 1980s when members of the People’s Park Planning Committee attempted to tap into

university funding sources to redesign the park. During this time, advocates created more than a

half-dozen maps for their design proposals seeking approval and funds to convert part of the park

into a nature preserve. While most maps were hand-drawn, one computer-generated map divided

the park into thirds, including a central grove, an “Old Garden,” and new raised gardens.

Gardens on both sides used trees and herbs to create a discourse of global diversity, with

“Mediterranean island scrub” and an “Italian Bed,” along with a “Japanese Garden” and “Native

Trees.”71 Reflecting new interest in improving the park’s accessibility and cross-cultural appeal,

the design included a wheelchair-accessible bed, a bicycle path, and compost bins, as well as a

wheelchair-accessible bathroom with shower were proposed as well.72 With both a “Desert

Oasis” and “Riparian” wetland, fruit trees and the “People’s Stage,” the park attempted to create

space for every material as a metaphor for everyone. Revisions to the design reveal how the

university’s demands for recreational facilities along with other park advocates’ desire for both

daylight and a handrail-accessible Derby Creek resulted in a plan for highly controlled chaos

with a bike path running through the volleyball court and basketball courts built on top of the

stage.73 This seemingly more natural plan required a minimum of $80,000 and regulated labor

from volunteers who would have to acquiesce to bureaucratic hierarchies rather than contributing

to the project in their own insurgent way.

71 David Axelrod, Untitled Map of Revised Berkeley’s People’s Park (ca. 1980s), Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric Dibner

Papers (BANC MSS 99/186 c), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 72 Winesap Design, “Floor Plan Design, People’s Park Bathroom” (January 19, 1985), Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric

Dibner Papers (BANC MSS 99/186 c), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 73 David Axelrod, Untitled Map of Revised Berkeley’s People’s Park (January 21, 1985), Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric

Dibner Papers (BANC MSS 99/186 c), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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3.4 Making Sense of Randomness in the Search for Authenticity

Within this moment of countercultural consciousness-raising, park material culture

became integrated with the search for authenticity.74 This search for wholeness became a

“widespread occupation” after World War II in which middle-class youths felt trapped in a Cold

War-era existential crisis. More than merely a search for personal meaning, historian Doug

Rossinow argues this quest was an effort to return to or construct new modes of thinking and

acting through fashion, architecture, and art, that felt natural rather than prescribed.75 When

urban developers destroyed more affordable Victorian-era homes in Berkeley, Lincoln Park, and

the Lower East Side, young leftists argued that this demolition of architectural authenticity was

not only a cultural loss but a political maneuver. Residents began to question how new

nationalist discourses of progressive urbanism “revitalized” cities with concrete aesthetics at the

expense of the poor. Rejecting wide-sweeping urban renewal as a form of modernism, park

creators used visual and material discourses to redefine authenticity as more culturally powerful

than corporate-backed urban development. Park designs relied on mixed-media performances,

folk art, geometric architecture, and ecological design became methods to advocate for new

systems connecting the body and performance, playful experimentation, and dynamic flows of

energy.76 As an amalgamation of these techniques and principles, park landscapes became a

voice of organizers’ advocacy for ecological awareness, the democratization of tools and

technologies, and communal survival.77

74 As sociologist Sharon Zukin argues, “Claiming authenticity becomes prevalent at a time when identities are

unstable and people are judged by their performance rather than by their history or innate character. Under these

conditions, authenticity differentiates a person, a product, or a group from its competitors; it confers an aura of

moral superiority, a strategic advantage that each can use to its own benefit.” Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death

and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford University Press, 2010): p. xii. 75 Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (Columbia

University Press, 1998): p. 4. 76 Andrew Blauvelt and Ross Effline, eds., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015). 77 Ibid.

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Photos and videos reveal how the park was far less polished than the May 15, 1969 map

indicates, facilitating a blend of old and new, purchased and handmade structures, as well as

processed foods and potluck stews that contributed to animated ethos of egalitarianism. Lorraine

Wild defined this new style “hippie modernist” architecture a “utopian dream of design working

for the public good, with form being secondary to process.”78 Architectural historian Greg

Castillo argues that Berkeley’s People’s Park was part of a larger hippie modernist movement

“galvanized by the mission of blending the aspirations of progressive architecture with new

imperatives of environmental responsibility.”79 The park was palimpsestic in a way that at times

produced visual chaos. “Hippie bricoleurs” in the park repurposed objects and materials from

mainstream culture in a variety of ways, including a creating a rugged seesaw “carved from a

rough-hewn log.” A “master welder” came to the park every day to add new pieces to the park’s

homemade geodesic children’ jungle gym made of jumbled metal pipe. A carved redwood

bulletin board erected in the park became its own pastiche, with posters, maps, flyers, and other

art tacked to it.80 Sim Van der Ryn felt the park’s egalitarian ethos encouraged a better use of

materials than top-down modernist urban design: “After all our modern ‘improvements’

…looking around the park, I realized how its forms were more natural, more functional and

comfortable than the usual fixtures of the public park….” Using descriptors like “weathered,”

“rounded,” “irregular,” and “worn,” a park that was seemingly created out of thin air was more

comfortably designed than a prescribed and programmed city-owned park.81 This design ethos

made one person’s contribution to design another person’s trash—and vice versa.

78 Lorraine Wild, “Transgression and Delight: Graphic Design at Cranbrook,” in The New Cranbrook Design

Discourse, ed. Hugh Aldersey-Williams (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 31. 79 Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet,” Places Journal

(October 2015): https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-modernism/. 80 Ibid.; See Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” Ph.D. Dissertation (State University of New York at Stony

Brook, 1984). 81 Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus, p. 61.

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As part of the additive nature of utopia, park callouts encouraged people to bring objects

from home to foster independent emotional or material connections within the park to create a

more authentic space, resulting in randomly placed dining room chairs or kids’ toys in the park.

For Schlesinger, arriving at the park every morning to find more than a dozen flats of flowers, a

couple of trees, new shovels or food donations signified that the park’s message of additive

utopia was growing.82 Built structures like stage-like scaffolds or wooden poles continued to take

shape after they were placed in the ground, with signs, clocks, objects, and art continually added

to them to form sculptural folk-art collages. Other elements, like a larger papier-mâché Sunkist

orange split in two took on new life in the park as a seat in which adults rolled, sat, and slept.

While unaccounted for on the map, scattered objects, like random tires, cinder blocks, metal

trashcans, and cardboard boxes, were not separate from the process of collective design and use,

but part of it with the park in a constant state of change. Old church pews and cobbles lined

walkable areas, blending materials from near and far in various organic and manufactured

states.83 As a contrast to hard materials intrinsic to city park design, their creative reuse of natural

materials created a “backwoods effect” of “looseness” favoring texture over order.84

Piles of things—wood, bottles, or plant clippings—revealed how for some objects

waiting to be given meaning through reuse revealed a lack of a system of waste removal for

others. Random objects placed in the park as spiritual offerings created some frustrations for

park leaders like Schlesinger who took on the responsibility of cleaning. Schlesinger described in

her memoir how “eager contributors were a bit over-zealous” in dumping their excess materials

on site: “They began leaving halves of Volkswagens, abandoned car seats, broken down dog

82 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 3. 83 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News; “People’s Park (Berkeley),”

Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News. 84 Cranz, The Politics of Park Design, p. 149.

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houses, piles of rags. They always magically appeared overnight. Just as discreetly, we hauled

away these things to the dump as they usually presented a health hazard to the kids.” Materially,

repurposed objects and handmade structures did not always evoke the same respect from all park

participants. At the end of the first night of work, Schlesinger walked home about midnight,

“leaving Michael there. He was walking around with a big rake in his hand, subtly making sure

that no one chopped up the hand-made benches,” made of slabs of worn and hollowed redwood,

“and threw them in the fire for warmth.”85 Rather than rejecting rules and regulations altogether,

park creators like Delacour argued that the park as a liberated zone should be self-policed and

function independently from state law enforcement to create an autonomous society.

This creative reuse was a whole-body sensory experience that created different

appearances, noises, textures, aromas, and tastes that heightened one’s senses that contributed to

the park’s authenticity. The barbecue pit was constructed with materials from a nearby

demolition with steel beams lying parallel over a small smoldering fire with chunks of concrete

were piled around the base.86 Park dwellers not only brewed coffee and roasted meats, but threw

paper, plant clippings, and even trash into the flames, creating different smoky odors that

billowed throughout the park. While the park attracted both professional musicians like the band

Joy of Cooking as well as LSD-tripping vocalists, the vacant lot as a park also took on new

sounds of its own. Homemade stained-glass mobiles or small bells roped together dangled from

tree branches to “catch the song of the breezes.”87 Gardening tools clinked as they struck the

earth and adults cheered as children giggled. Reclaimed wood platforms, gravel, or chunks of

85 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 24. 86 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News. 87 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 3.

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wood missing from the climbable KNOW sculpture scratched the soles of your hands and bare

feet.

Each object, each planting, each walkway signified work, a commitment, and part of a

process of becoming something new that represented what Sara Ahmed calls a “social hope,” or

what park creators called a “functional mirage,” for the future of the park as a resistant identity.88

As Albert described, “Nursery swings and a sliding board appeared and so did children to play

on them…Two cats showed up and planted a Corn Patch, a few new trees sprung up and we sat

on new benches and it was still beyond our belief.”89 Looking out at objects and spaces radiating

goodness in the park, park goers felt “really happy,” victorious, powerful, and hopeful.90 For

Schlesinger, touching, playing with, and placing objects within the park evoked a range of

emotions; unpacking and planting sod facilitated community while penetrating the soil or playing

in the sprinkler at times brought to the surface enjoyable sexual tensions.91 For many the project

was a type of ideological frontier offering spatial opportunities for people alienated from

mainstream culture to manifest an alternate materiality of goodness on their own terms. With

shared experiences, these objects claimed territory through their emotive properties. On the map,

each pole, scaffold, and small flower patch became coated with what Sara Ahmed calls “sticky”

affect—a marker of positive human experience “preserv[ing] the connection between ideas,

values, and objects” that had been fostered during construction and maintenance.92 Like tiny

national flags, these objects and zones marked the landscape as “good,” imagining a community

in an area perceived by park creators as previously void of existence.

88 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Duke

University Press, 2010): pp. 29-51. 89 Albert, “People’s Park.” 90 Ibid. 91 For greater insight into this, see Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4 and 5. 92 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” p. 29.

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These lists of coded good objects in the park often juxtaposed brief descriptions of the lot

as exceptionally muddy and treacherous—proof that the park created a more functional, sociable,

and constructive use of the space. In her memoir, Schlesinger described the lot as a wasteland

from a gentrification horror film prior to the park’s construction:

A million pieces of junk mouldered alongside old tree cuttings unceremoniously dumped

there by private home owners from the hills. There were countless snares and hidden

swampy hollows. Once I’d ventured across the mire. I was doing OK, wading through the

mud. Suddenly I put my foot down for the next step and it sunk in up to my knee as if it

had been quicksand. I pulled out my foot, but it came out bare. The swamp had sucked in

my boot…I’m surprised no little kids have drowned, there.93

Park creators often lamented how the vacant lot had been an eyesore created by greedy

developers who had replaced a row of beautiful housing. Stories circulated that the university, in

an act of particular cruelty, had evicted the student occupants during finals week, demolishing

“forty brownshingle [sic] and stucco” townhouses despite the intention not to develop the lot for

years. Park creators argued that the demolition of housing had led to misuse or ugliness of the

site. According to park narratives, the lot then stood unused, creating a new circle of

gentrification purgatory. Some took advantage of the demolition, using the lot as free accessible

parking near popular stores and cafes on Telegraph Avenue. Yet mud became an indicator of the

lot’s failure to serve a useful purpose to nearby residents.

According to Stew Albert, the lot was “a swamp with automobiles on it” while in a recent

interview Paul Glusman remarked, “It was just a fucking swamp.”94 A variety of factors

contributed to the swamp, including the shortage of nearby green patches for stormwater

filtration and soil compaction due to parked cars prevented pioneer plants from growing. These

factors magnified Berkeley’s already semiarid climate transformed dust storms into deluges

93 Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 1. 94 Albert, “People’s Park;” Paul Glusman, Personal Interview (September 19, 2017).

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during occasional downpours. Park creators did not envision the muddy lot as a natural

ecosystem that might have attracted mud puppies, turtles, or other amphibians as demolition and

construction increasingly stalled. Park creators perceived of their project, the spaces and objects

they manifested, as “good.” Within the People’s Park movement, gendered and racialized

countercultural imagery of vacant lots as frontiers for self-making dared fantasies of the earth as

both virgin land and a natural maternal realm to which women and Native Americans were

depicted as being authentically tuned. Within the capitalist system of state-backed eminent

domain that park creators positioned as the true enemy to leftist political organizing rather than

property ownership, vacant lots were bona vacantia or ownerless goods. Examining vacant lots

through a colonial framework, park creators characterized lots as ugly, “vacant” or “fallow”—

yonic, empty, waiting to be filled or beautified by park creators that would become the same

language of corrective aesthetics developers would use to reclaim these spaces once parks were

constructed.95

This transformation of a swamp into land became a measure of the value of their work.

When participants listed the “ugly” things they removed from the lot or the objects they added to

the park, these objects became markers of how their good experiences working outside, with

their hands in nature, both independently and collectively, were transformative. As Mike

Delacour explained to Stanley Glick, “In one Sunday afternoon, we leveled off a ‘huge mud

puddle.’ By doing, we learned in an emotional way what radicals have said intellectually, that it

doesn’t take technology and a pressurized atmosphere to get something done. We realized

through our bodies that by acting together we can change history; we felt it emotionally and

95 While “vacant” is used by park creators and allies frequently, in particular Sim Van der Ryn uses “fallow” to

describe the lot; see Sim Van der Ryn, “People’s Park: An Experiment in Collaborative Design,” in Design for Life:

The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (Gibbs-Smith 2005): p. 151.

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spiritually. It was beautiful.”96 Park goers argued that the removal of coded “bad” objects and the

addition of new perceived “good” ones changed the perception about the space and the street

people that occupied it. Panning on the map from a “mosquito farm” and “dust bowl” in the

westernmost undeveloped areas of the lot to the east with “new lawn, new trees,” that the

additive nature of the park was corrective and further insurgent development of the “blank

space” marked on the map would escalate this goodness.97

Although park organizers theoretically began the project with no formal blueprint, Sim

Van der Ryn explains in his memoir that the park became a landscape for the creation of a new

culture—“a culture devoted to celebrating intrinsic traditional values of honest work, the sanctity

of life, a harmony with nature, and the reality of the present in contrast to a preoccupation with

past and future.” Work regardless of outcome was rewarded. This new culture allowed for the

advocacy and practice of seemingly oppositional motivations that allowed for multiple and even

conflicting meanings: “The new culture, while often attaching itself to primitivism and Eastern

philosophies, sees the liberating potential of much of new technology: the mobility of new

electronic and visual media, of new materials for building and for the creation of living space.”98

The park’s design embodied the paradoxes of its creators. Its landscaping could incorporate both

wide swaths of suburban sod as well as the politicization of revolutionary corn and cacti. A

barbecue pit sufficed park goers’ atavistic urge to camp yet was lined with cement to ensure a

hotter fire. Park creators could lament gentrification by disparaging the bulldozer as a weapon of

urban war while simultaneously reveling in its power when using the tool to clean vacant lots. At

96Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” p. 65. 97 Unknown, “People’s Park Is.” 98 Van der Ryn, "Building a People's Park," in The Troubled Campus, p. 68.

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the same time park design could encourage equal participation of workers and users while

privileging the voices of certain leaders.

3.5 Representations of Women and Artistic Autonomy

Women’s involvement in the design of People’s Parks reveals how some women

challenged the façade of equal opportunity that relegated them to a subordinate status by

negotiating park design power structures. Park playgrounds freed women up to take part in

manual labor, barbecues, and planting design, or even leave children in the park altogether. Other

mothers worked to make parks safer, such as a group of women who successfully campaigned to

have the people’s pool changed into sunken amphitheater for decision making at Berkeley’s

People’s Park.99 Although lauded by some as a testament to democracy, Judy Gumbo has since

argued that park creators were not especially sympathetic to mothers of young children at

Berkeley’s People’s Park. While many young mothers heavily utilized the parks’ playgrounds,

women over thirty-five were displaced within this largely young single white male movement. It

did not occur to them, “or to me at least—to empathize with the mothers of those teenagers we

so warmly welcomed in People’s Park.”100

In some cases, women were intentionally displaced from design, such as in San Diego’s

Chicano Park. The idea for the lot takeover emerged when the city abandoned its effort to

construct a park for Mexican American citizens displaced by segregation, the military, and urban

renewal.101 In June of 1969, the San Diego city council officially approved the construction of a

99 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Film, KRON-TV, San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe;

Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 6. 100 See Gumbo, “Peoples’ Park and our Sixties Legacy,” Judy Gumbo Personal Website (April 29, 2009):

http://yippiegirl.com/articles-park.html. 101 For work on Chicano Park, see Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City

(University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 161-172; Eva Cockcraft, “The Story of Chicano Park,” Aztlán vol. 15, no. 1

(Spring 1984): pp. 79-103; Ella Maria Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a

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park for Barrio Logan, but took no action to implement the decision for the next year. On April

22, 1970, when construction workers began building a state patrol office on the site instead of a

park, activists took over the lot. They planted nopales, magueys, and flowers. Raising the flag of

Aztlán on a telephone pole, the activists symbolically called the land Chicano Park, “La Tierra

Mia”—as a historic reclamation of their lost Aztecan homeland.102 That day women and children

encircled bulldozers operated by state construction workers, making human chains to stop the

creation of a new state patrol station under the bridge.103 This moment was transformative for

Laura Rodriguez, who began to say after that, “‘I never went home,’ much to the chagrin of Mr.

Rodriguez.” Although Rodriguez had not participated in a sit-in prior to Chicano Park, the park

takeover transformed her into an invaluable activist for Barrio Logan. In the fall of 1970,

Rodriguez chained herself to a door as part of a takeover of San Diego’s Neighborhood House to

protest state control of social services for Chicanos.104

Rather than ripping out the new concrete pillars that overshadowed their once-vibrant

community, the park creators embraced them—using them as canvases for vivid portraits of

largely male revolutionary leaders. On Earth Day 1971, the park officially opened as Barrio

Logan’s Chicano Park with murals painted on the cement pillars depicting Chicano history and

struggles over the course of imperialism.105 Representations of women in the mark’s expansive

Chicano/a Art History (University of Texas Press, 2017); Martin Rosen and James Fisher, “Chicano Park and the

Chicano Park Murals: Barrio Logan, City of San Diego, California,” The Public Historian vol. 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001):

pp. 91-111; Kevin Delgado, "A Turning Point: The Conception and Realization of Chicano Park," Journal of San

Diego History 44, no. 1 (1998): pp. 48-61. 102 Marco Anguiano, “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Chicano Park Steering

Committee, Chicano-Park.org. 103 Marco Anguiano, “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Chicano Park Steering

Committee Website: http://www.chicano-park.com/cpscbattleof.html. 104 Mario Torero, Brent Beltran, and Bill Adams, “Barrio Logan vs Stadium: Why It Matters,” San Diego

UrbDeZine (October 29, 2016): http://sandiego.urbdezine.com/2016/10/29/barrio-logan-vs-stadium-matters/. 105 In 1980, these murals became the basis for a petition to the Historical Resources Board to designate Chicano Park

as a local landmark; in 2007 the site was added to the National Register of historic places before becoming

recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 2017. City of San Diego, City Planning and Community Investment,

“Barrio Logan Historical Resources Survey,” Unpublished document (February 1, 2001):

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mural collection, however, have often positioned women as subordinate to men. Although

Rodriguez’s involvement in Chicano Park was honored with a park mural after her death in

1994, her portrait painted by Mario Torero features her passively smiling, looking off into the

distance rather than as a radical activist claiming space. In a mural depicting the Chicano Park

takeover, women are peripheral and passive while men’s muscles are flexed or their bodies in

striking poses.106 Women at the edges of the painting direct their attention to men, clapping or

clasping their arms while focusing inward on the active men who visually center the mural.

Women’s bodies became secondary visually despite how integral they were to the park takeover,

complementing Chicano men’s show of leadership and physical strength rather than actively

reclaiming their own space.

Many women grew frustrated with the way in which male muralists claimed absolute

power in representing women, yet felt trapped within the park’s regime. Murals required

donations and/or sponsorships for supplies, including scaffolding, paint, and tools, as well as

group approval that was dominated by men. In a 1988 interview, Yolanda Lopez reflected back

on her struggles with sexism at the park: “When I approached the male artists, they didn’t know

quite what to make out of me. Here was a confident, trained, verbal artist who was a woman and

yet would not relate to them like the typical male/female relationship, so most of my role was as

a support person. I was never invited to paint a mural with them and didn’t really push it myself

as well.”107 Carlotta Hernandez Terry has argued that because men dominated mural production

http://www.sandiego.gov/planning/programs/historical/pdf/2013/201304blhistoricsurvey.pdf; Erik Anderson,

“Chicano Park Designated as a National Historic Landmark,” KPBS (January 11, 2017):

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/jan/11/chicano-park-designated-as-a-national-historic/. 106 Roger Lucero Castenada, “Chicano Park Takeover,” Mural, Chicano Park, San Diego, California, (1978),

renovated by Guillermo Rosete, Felipe Adame, Octavio Gonzalez, Vidal Aguirre (1991), reprinted at Chicano Park

History: Murals: http://www.chicanoparksandiego.com/murals/takeover.html. 107 Marilyn Mulford, Dir., Chicano Park, Film (Cinema Guild, 1988).

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Figure 3.5, “Tourists in San Diego’s Chicano Park”: The image depicts how murals of largely male revolutionary

leaders were painted onto the pylons holding up the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge overpass that became the

aesthetic foundation for San Diego’s Chicano Park. Over the past decade, Chicano Park’s notoriety as one the

world’s largest outdoor mural collections has attracted domestic and international tourists. Photo titled, “Koreans

visiting Chicano Park” (April 11, 2008), Public Domain via Creative Commons.108

at Chicano Park, men shaped how women could contribute to the park’s visual and material

culture.109 In the 1970s, the park mostly contained murals of men as reflected in the park’s

108 Photo, “Koreans Visiting Chicano Park,” (April 11, 2008), available via Creative Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koreans_@_Chicano_Park.JPG. 109 Unknown, “VHS – Paintings: Charlotte in Chicano Park,” Film, in Folder 2, Box 2, Carlotta Hernandez Terry

Collection, 1951-2006 (MS-0457), Special Collections and Archives, San Diego State University.

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“Historical Mural” featuring a collage of a dozen revolutionary men of color painted by a group

of male muralists. The portraits of Cesar Chavez, Ruben Salazar, Miguel Hidalgo, Fidel Castro,

Benito Juarez, and Zapata Pancho Villa tower over park goers, visually granting them larger-

than-life status as heroes. These murals were important in teaching the long, transnational history

of resistance to colonialism that connected the plight of farmworkers with that of the

indigenous.110 The visual repetition of men’s bodies reinforced images of specific masculine

fighters who defended anonymous women.

While women’s work was always fundamental to the creation and defense of Chicano

Park, representations of women in Chicano Park expanded through the 1970s, as Chicana

feminists took part in the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, visited

Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade, and began pressing for an intersectional analysis of the

Chicano experience through demonstrations and consciousness raising.111 Many of these women

formed their own coalitions to advocate for women artists in the park, as well as their own

women contingents in male-dominated artist groups like the Royal Chicano Air Force

(RCAF).112 One mural, “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” named for Mao Tse-Tung’s Confucian

proverb, celebrates women across the world through a diverse racial spectrum who stand tall at

the base of a concrete pylon holding up the Coronado Bay Bridge overpass. They raise their arms

above their heads to hold up the sky—their strength supporting the bridge above—while other

female figures nude and clothed embrace children, play instruments, or gesture openly toward

the sun and stars. In contrast to the ways men represented women, female artists portrayed

110 Raúl Homero Villa calls this alternative epistemology “barrio-logos” in its negotiation of transcultural spaces.

See Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (University of Texas Press,

2000). 111 See María Ochoa, Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community (University of New Mexico

Press, 2003). 112 See Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force.

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women in these murals as brown-skinned, full-figured, and detailed, figuratively radiating a

cosmic maternal energy outward onto the world. Their self-representations embraced their

transnational and historical Mestizo heritage that sought to reclaim power by celebrating their

bodies as spiritually culturally, and biologically connecting them with the Earth as a form of

“natural” beauty.

The mural was conceptualized around Celia Herrera Rodriguez’s dining room table, and

reflected a variety of political, social, and cultural influences including being involved in

organizations outside Chicano activism like the Free Angela Davis Committee.113 A photograph

of the women’s contingent of RCAF in the process of painting “Women Hold Up Half The Sky”

that captures artists Celia Rodriguez, Rosalinda Palacios, Antonia Mendoza, Irma Lerma

Barbosa, and Barbara Desmangles with wide grins on top of a two-story scaffold communicating

pride in the manual labor of their work. Rodriguez and Barbosa hold up their paintbrushes while

the others lean into the railing to look down at the camera below: their jeans and overalls are

covered in paint, their hardhats in place, with paint-covered gloves hanging over the railing to

indicate professional work in progress. Looking down on the viewer, their higher position on the

scaffold renders them powerful.114

Marilyn Mulford’s documentary Chicano Park reveals how men like José Montoya as

RCAF’s “Air Force Commander” perceived of these female muralists as taking space without

permission. Indicative of the machismo within the movement, Montoya argued that the women

“messed up by jumping the gun” before permission from the park’s male leadership structure

could be granted. He argued that the action warranted a “court martial.”115 Despite the

113 Gail Pérez, “Women Muralists Return to Chicano Park,” La Prensa-San Diego (2012):

http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/women-muralists-return-to-chicano-park.php. 114 See photo in Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force, p. 127. 115 Marilyn Mulford, Dir., Chicano Park, Film (Cinema Guild, 1988).

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importance of the mural, an interview by Gail Pérez with the women muralists reveals how men

continue to be hostile to women’s artistry and depictions of womanhood, insinuating that the

artists “better put some chonies (panties) on that girl.” Palacios argues that her “brother artists”

were allowed to paint female nudity but disregarded the artistic representations of womanhood

by female artists.116 Terry, who largely identified as a writer and performer of acoustic protest

songs and was known as “the Chicana Bob Dylan,” wanted to represent her own political identity

as a revolutionary musician, and painted two Chicana women strumming guitars at Chicano

Park. In a later video interview, Terry revealed how painting the mural was an ongoing battle

between her and the male muralists that made it an active process of painting: she would return

to the park to find the two guitar-strumming women now holding shotguns in the style of the

iconic revolutionary Mexican women. After some time painting guitars back over the weaponry,

she finally acquiesced.117

Yolanda Lopez describes how her first experience working with a team of young teenage

Chicanas inspired her to take a greater role in advocating for women’s leadership in murals as a

medium for their political self-representation. She stated, “This young woman and her high

school friends wanted to paint a mural and they showed me a drawing of themselves coming out

of these corn stalks, so they saw themselves as little plants, tender little sprouts.” The students

had been interested in connecting other high school girls with their ancestral heritage and

celebrating Chicana women’s bodies without focusing on thin, nude, lighter-skinned bodies. The

project resonated with Lopez who was thrilled to work with young women as their technical

116 Pérez, Women Muralists Return to Chicano Park.” After this dispute, Irma Yerma Barbosa who had been an

original member of the Sacramento Brown Berets and a member of RCAF, founded CoMadres Artistas that

maintains a website celebrating and archiving the work of women artists. See Comadres Artistas:

http://comadresartistas.com/. 117 Unknown, “VHS – Paintings: Charlotte in Chicano Park.”

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advisor. “We didn’t have any money, we didn’t have a sponsor. They told me later that they had

approached some male artist and they had been turned down or ignored. Our enthusiasm for each

other was really contagious.” In contrast to male artists who used their murals to make a name

for themselves, Lopez saw herself more as a technical advisor to young artists themselves who

wanted to express their perspective as young Chicana teenagers. The final mural they designed

depicted a spectrum of girls growing out from maize stalks outside a prison-like school, with a

backdrop of an Aztec eagle and ancestral figures towering overhead. A Chicana woman raises

her paintbrush and pencil high, mirroring the defiant gesture of an indigenous woman raising an

ear of corn.118 Food, the environment, their bodies, and ethnic heritage connect young Chicanas

to their transnational and indigenous past as a form of cultural empowerment.119

Women connected emotionally to representations of revolutionary womanhood. A video

of Carlotta Hernandez Terry walking around Chicano Park commenting on and posing with

murals of women largely painted by men reflects the extent to which women connected

personally with this art despite machismo shaping their access to shaping space. In front of the

“Woman with Flag” mural to honor the international United Farm Workers’ huelga against racial

discrimination, Terry mimics the painted subject by similarly raising her clenched fist in a show

of Chicana power. Dressed in a blazer, she poses in front of them for her own portraits—her

body not only demanding to be recognized as a professional, but becoming part of the image as if

to claim them as part of her own.120

118 Yolanda Lopez and Mujeres Muralists de San Diego: Julietta A. Garcia-Torres, Cecillia de la Torre, Rosa de la

Torre, Eva C. Craig, “Chicanas/Escuelas,” Mural, Chicano Park, San Diego, California (1978). 119 Historians have analyzed how murals by these women across California demonstrated broader movements of

Chicana feminists claiming space through the public visualization of their intersectional and indigenous identities.

See Guisela Latorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (University of Texas Press,

2008); Carlos Francisco Jackson, Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte (University of Arizona Press, 2009); Laura

Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007). 120 Unknown, “VHS – Paintings: Charlotte in Chicano Park.”

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Although murals have been replaced over the past few decades, works by such women as

Carlotta Hernandez Terry, Norma Montoya, Celia Rodriguez, Irma Lerma Barbosa, Antonia

Mendoza, Rosalina Balaciosos, Barbara Desmangles, Glory Galindo Sanchez, Vera Sanchez,

Yolanda Lopez, Julietta Garcia-Torres, Cecilia de la Torre, and Eva Craig have remained vital to

the park’s recently successful bid to be designated as a National Historic Landmark.121 Yet over

the years, murals have been edited in ways that have erased the histories of women as artists and

subjects, as well as the gendered negotiations of power that have shaped the design of Chicano

Park. Pylons as canvases for art functioned like palimpsests at Chicano Park, with layers of

different murals replacing or adding to original works as paint depreciates due to intentional

whitewashing for new murals, tagging, weathering, or leaks from the bridge overhead. By the

1980s, a mural restoration project led by a handful of original male muralists raised funds to

preserve certain murals as part of a larger process to help the site gain historic and cultural status.

Having interviewed original artists and mural restorers at Chicano park, Gail Pérez described the

restoration project as a “ritual repainting and reaffirmation of that commitment” that adds new

depth to original paintings rather than replacing them.122

The restoration resulted in mixed treatment of representations of women. In some cases,

women’s bodies were the target of redesign efforts in order to offer more nuanced

representations of Chicana lives, while in others the project simultaneously erased aspects of

women’s sexuality, motherhood, and femininity. For example, Esteban Villa’s mural “Mujer

Cósmica” featuring a white woman was repainted with browner skin, yet her now her nude body

121 Gary Warth, “Chicano Park Named National Historic Landmark,” The San Diego Union-Tribune (January 11,

2017): http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/sd-me-chicano-historic-20170111-story.html. 122 Gail Pérez and David Avalos, “Revitalization not Restoration: A People’s Park,” La Prensa- San Diego (July 15,

2011): http://laprensa-sandiego.org/featured/revitalization-not-restoration-a-people%E2%80%99s-art/.

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became adorned with tattoos and Aztec jewelry covering her once-bare chest.123 In the mural

“Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” several aspects were changed, including the transformation of

two female figures to men, and the replacement of the two nude female musicians with a young

teenage Mexican American man carrying a jug of water.124 In one mural that represented a

coalition with the civil rights activists and women’s liberationists, RCAF painted a portrait of

Joan Little, a black woman who was acquitted for killing her sexually abusive white jailer in an

act of self-defense. Rosalinda Palacios heard about Little’s trial while involved with the Free

Angela Davis Committee and proposed to the group that they paint her portrait in the park.

Little’s dark black skin reflected a growing interest in representing darkened tones in the skin

color spectrum in the 1970s. This style “gestured to an aesthetic Afro-Chicanidad” to form

alliances between Chicano and African American oppression and resistance.125 However, these

connections that were integral for cross-cultural coalition building early in the movement have

been erased. While Little’s poem “I Am Somebody” that was lettered by male muralist Sal

Barajas remains on the pylon, Little’s portrait painted by women does not.126 The black skin

color of the mother cradling her child has been lightened to caramel.127

123 Esteban Villa, “Mujer Cósmica/Cosmic Woman,” Mural, Chicano Park, San Diego, California (1975), Royal

Chicano Air Force Archives (CEMA 8), Special Collections, UC Santa Barbara:

http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb496nb4xw/?layout=metadata; Angela Carone, “Chicano Park Murals Get

Facelift,” Fronteras Desk (January 13, 2012): http://www.fronterasdesk.org/content/chicano-park-murals-get-

faceliftout=metadata. 124 Chicano Park Steering Committee, “Chicano Park Mural Map,” ChicanoPark.org: http://www.chicano-

park.com/cpmap.html. 125 Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force, p. 126. 126 See a photo of “Female Inteligencia,” at The History of Chicano Park:

http://www.chicanoparksandiego.com/murals/intel.html. 127 Chicano Park Steering Committee, “Chicano Park Mural Map,” ChicanoPark.org: http://www.chicano-

park.com/cpmap.html.

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3.6 Conclusion

Only a few weeks into the park’s construction, a bulldozer arrived one morning to

demolish Herrick Peace and Freedom Park. Photographs represent the demolition as a traumatic

event, what park creators described as a double loss of life of both Herrick and the park. What

had once been a spatial choreography of benches and wooden sculptures now piled up on the lot,

with tattered remains of fledgling trees snapped in two. In one photo, the bulldozer heads toward

a folk-art mannequin with a body made of old cans and wood lounging on a twin mattress in the

park. Dust clouds the bulldozer’s bucket ripper teeth. In another photo, a sign hanging in the

background reads, “He Who Kills a Tree Kills Himself.”128 The group continued to press the

Berkeley City Council to convert that stretch of misshapen land into a park, and two months later

Ecology Action led another park creation on Willow Street in San Francisco. While Cliff

Humphrey, his wife Mary Humphrey, and Ecology Action members Ted Posselt and Charlie

Devlin planted flowers and trees, a mixed-race group of white, African American, and Latino

children played with large triangular wooden structures arranged as crawl tunnels and hiding

spaces. Painted on a short wall leftover from the previous development read, “Solstice Park”—

metaphorically mirroring the intensity of the sun as a source of renewal and potential for

rebirth.129

When states attempted to reclaim parks, they frequently did so by removing, destroying

or replacing objects, like the free box or people’s stage, with a visual and material culture of

defense. To displace park workers, states fenced lots, posting notices warning against trespassing

and the abandonment of property before constructing see-through chain-link fences with a

128 Ibid. 129 Photographs (ca. July 1968), Folder San Francisco – A People’s Park – July 1968, Box 3, Ecology Action

Records, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

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barbed wire cornice. In contrast to a wooden barricade that could have obstructed the view, the

chain-link fence taunted park creators. The see-through cyclone fence functioned like the glass

walls of an aquarium—keeping them at a distance while maintaining their gaze as disabled

activists. Peering through the fence, park advocates could see how the items they imbued with

political, social, and ecological symbolism could be manipulated, reorganized, and destroyed. At

Berkeley’s People’s Park, photographer Stephen Shames captured the police occupiers relaxing

on benches and playground equipment, as well as snapping blooms in two.130 In another

photograph, park advocates peered into the park through the chain-link holes, watching the giant

bulldozer dwarf the knee-high shrubbery.131 They could see the slow death of their thirsty plants

and the breakage and movement of playground equipment and art yet could not control their

movement or meaning.

To the creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park, fencing the park after two weeks of material

accrual and work felt purposefully cruel—what many likened to a rape of Mother Earth. National

Guardsmen, highway patrolmen, and police officers often became the second line of visuality in

state spatial reclamations, who used militarized gear to transform playful parks and communities

into battlegrounds. Finally, cities brought in bulldozers to level parks to make way for new

parking lot, intramural fields, and housing. The occupied park, the bayonetted National

Guardsmen, and the circling helicopters reminded park organizers of the impending threat of

death that pushed locals to fight against one another rather than toward their common enemy.

Metaphors of plant birth and life helped park participants process the trauma of the park’s

fencing as a form of corporeal violence rather than property destruction. In the aftermath of the

130 See Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai, eds., People’s Park (New York City: Ballantine Books, 1969): p. 39. 131 Jim Edelen, Photograph (2000.1.841), (July 8, 1969), The Oakland Tribune Collection, Oakland Museum of

California, reprinted online: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001841.

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park’s fencing, park allies spoke of the park as an extension of their bodies—using their own

corporeality as a metaphor to regenerate the experience the power of creation and the terror of

destruction on their bodies. Poet Julia Vinograd wrote that her heart was buried in the park’s

soil.132 As time passed and their stories of celebration and struggle of laboring in the park were

erased, Vinograd still felt a bodily connection to the park as the roses grew “blood red,” while

the vines remained “tangled with our nerves.” Decades later, Vinograd grew frustrated that new

spectators could not envision the park as alive in a way that acknowledged her work as life-

giving, remarking lyrically, “When people come to Berkeley/ they always ask to see People’s

Park/ and when I show it to them/ they don’t see it./ Next time/ I’m not going to walk them a few

blocks,/ watch their faces and try to explain./ Instead I’ll show them my hands./ ‘Here’s People’s

Park,’ I’ll say./ ‘Here.’”133 Imagining the park as not only alive but an extension of their bodies

legitimized the pain of their loss as well as the sensual joy of their work.

Even when parks “survived” materially, park organizers have struggled to control

representations of these spaces as political contexts have shifted. In September 2017, a small

white supremacist group met at Chicano Park for a regular outing they called Patriotic Picnics.

After eating pizza in the park, the group planned to take a tour of the park’s murals to gather

information as part of a campaign to have what they defined as anti-American anti-police murals

removed. Hundreds of park advocates led a counter demonstration they called a Solidarity

Gathering, featuring dozens of speakers who argued that these murals needed to be

contextualized within histories of violence, oppression, and resistance. Many argued that the

park created space for a cross-border identity, allowing Chicanos and Latinos the ability to

132 Julia Vinograd, “People’s Park, We Will Defend This Place,” PeoplesPark.org:

http://www.peoplespark.org/Julia.html. 133 Julia Vinograd, “People’s Park, This is People’s Park,” from Julia Vinograd’s Blues for the Berkeley Inn,

reprinted at PeoplesPark.org: http://www.peoplespark.org/Julia.html.

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celebrate their heritage of ethnic anti-colonial resistance on colonized land. Arguing that these

murals embodied their cross-cultural American heritage, Tania Marquez gestured to the

surrounding portraits, stating, “This is who we are as Latinos.”134 The bodies of gun-toting

indigenous and Mexican revolutionaries as celebratory representations of multi-ethnic resistance

claimed space in ways that, nearly five decades after the park’s creation, oppressed people of

color still could not. In 1970, park creators raised the flag of Aztlán in the park featuring the

three-faced mestizo centered a red and green Mexican flag. Now, in 2017, the murals blend with

music, poetry, dance, and “lowriders” on Chicano Park Day, celebrating creativity and

resistance, indigeneity and modern technology as non-Chicano tourists embrace the park as a

historical American landmark.135

While historical narratives often focus on identifying the beginning and/or end of

insurgent park creations to determine their success or establish their connections to urban

political organizing, analyzing the material cultures of these liberated zones illuminates how the

process of politicized placemaking became a medium for articulating one’s identity and building

community coalitions within power structures. Park creators imagined their use of parks as more

productive than vacancies caused by stalled developments. This new collaborative, insurgent

park design method inspired locals to use team building to solve problems, to care about the

urban commons as a space, and to clean and repair their communities that challenged the urban

renewal ethos of demolishing blight. Building their own community made urban dwellers realize

how they could be more connected to the urban environment. These emotive processes of park

134 Lyndsay Winkley, “Brief but explosive shouting match erupts at Chicano Park demonstration,” San Diego

Union-Tribune (September 3, 2017): http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me-chicano-

park-20170903-story.html. 135 For a brief description of the park’s most recent anniversary celebration, see John Wilkens, “Annual Chicano

Park Day Honors ‘Chunky’ Sanchez,” San Diego Union-Tribune (April 22, 2017):

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/sd-me-chicano-park-20170422-story.html.

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design have shaped how park participants continue to defend these projects as spontaneous and

egalitarian. Activists designed parks to convey political messages of racial self-determination,

women’s empowerment, and ethnic exoticism, yet each insurgent park creation spoke to the

political agendas of its organizers whose issues were embedded within politicized dynamics of

urban design, access to space, resistance to state violence, global discourses of anti-colonialism,

and environmental degradation. Park materialities shaped the experience of these placemaking

projects through narratives of construction and destruction, unity and individualism, symphony

and discord. Although park advocates used playful, multi-textured, and internationally ethnic

discourses to defend parks as authentic, park critics played on contentions over materiality as

indicative of fractured grassroots movements. Taken together, the visual and material culture of

parks transformed empty lots into neighborhood centers, and in doing so, helped turn ephemeral

occupations into more symbolically lasting reclamations of space.

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CHAPTER 4. CONSUMING REBELLION: FOOD AND THE POLITICAL

THEATRICALITY OF INSURGENT CULINARY PLACEMAKING

“[People’s Park] is a living collage. Beer, wine, lemonade, soda pop, and cider always

seemed to appear when you were thirsty. Bandaids [sic] and gloves were passed around for

blisters. Bread and cheese were handed out, if you were hungry. Where did it all come from?

Fuck it. Nobody knew, nobody asked. We were grooving on the sun and working with each

other.”

Steve Haines, Berkeley Barb, 19691

4.1 Introduction

As radio host and historian Studs Terkel discovered when he arrived at Chicago’s

activist-created Poor People’s Park at the corner of Halsted and Armitage one fall evening in

1969, food served as a symbolic form of cultural and territorial reclamation. Created

spontaneously by a diversity of activists just days prior, the park was the most recent spatial

occupation of community members in Lincoln Park who had been protesting the racist and

classist policies of urban renewal transforming Chicago in the postwar era. Walking into the

vacant lot with a microphone recording in hand, Terkel heard the crunch of shovels and rakes

hitting the rocky dirt. He spoke with children, teenagers, mothers, and young adult men, asking

them three main questions focused on connecting activism with a sense of place and commitment

to community-based design: What brought you here today? What was this lot before it was a

park? And, what would you like this lot to become? A group of children huddled around his

microphone as he trailed through the park, giggling and squirming between high-pitched shouts

of “Power to the People!” The recording captured their enthusiasm for the park and their

1 Steve Haines, “A New Kind of Rest: Work in People’s Park,” Berkeley Barb vol. 18, no. 194 (May 2-8, 1969): p.

4.

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frustration with gentrification splintering their community, yet the smell of simmering Puerto

Rican chicken stew continued to draw their attention away from his.2

When asked by Terkel why she came out to cook a meal for park workers, Ceil Keegan

explained that it was a service to honor the Puerto Rican Young Lords leading the park’s

construction: “It’s a Puerto Rican dish. I’m trying to fix them a nice dinner because they’ve

worked all day. They really need it.” Amidst fears of starvation and eviction, the Young Lords

had helped buy her groceries after her husband recently died, leaving her with the financial

hardship of feeding her baby. Her calm and earnest tone conveyed her pride in cooking for these

activists as a form of emotional caretaking, encouraging denigrated members in her community

to be proud of their culture. Her maternal presence also softened the harsh edges of the Young

Lords’ youthful masculine defensiveness. Together they resisted displacement through insurgent

placemaking. Creating a hot meal not only nurtured several dozen workers at the park as well as

their children who served as assistants and cheerleaders for the project, but in making a public

display of cooking a delicious, slow-stewing vat of chicken stew, the meal was a powerful

statement of support for Puerto Rican pride. Within Poor People’s Park, food was a medium for

asserting power and reclaiming space that became a foundation for building cross-cultural

alliances across boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, and class in the Lincoln Park

neighborhood.3

Situating the People’s Park movement within the broader postwar left, this chapter

analyzes how cooking and eating within these activist-created territories helped transform

identity exploration into political theater and anti-capitalist cross-culturalism into a “digestible

2 Studs Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD, ca. 60 min. recording, (ca. August 1969), Studs Terkel Collection, Chicago

History Museum. 3 Ibid.

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ideology.”4 Free food giveaways, barbecue pits, and shared campfire meals became key elements

of People’s Parks that reveal a discordant patchwork of identity politics within discourses of

spatial citizenship in urban protests. While art, performances, and the underground press have

been analyzed as mediums for countercultural and leftist political expression, food was also a

critical component of the resistant aesthetics within the politics of community-based urban

design as a radical protest movement in postwar social justice organizing.5 Putting this park in

conversation with other anarchist-created green spaces adds new depth to our understanding of

how urban design and access to space shaped food as a marker of revolutionary consumerism in

the late Cold War era. Although the field of food studies has been largely historiographically

divided, I argue that within activist-created green spaces, food culture was a medium for

claiming power, allowing overlaps of often contradictory political meanings that facilitated

cross-cultural coalitions. By examining how food is created and shared within People’s Parks,

we can not only understand how these parks functioned day-to-day, but can gain greater insight

into how activists envisioned the environment, bodies, objects, and performances as connected

symbolically.

Within the field of postwar U.S. food studies, select works have illuminated how food

injustices became the fuel for protest for the Black Panthers and their Free Breakfast Program,

the United Farm Workers and the international Grape Boycott, and culinary civil disobedience

by the Diggers, as well as the inspiration for the creation of alternative economies like food

4 Term taken from Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 5 For just a few examples of the importance of food politics to art, performances, and the underground press in this

era, see Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Countercultural Experiment in America,

1965-1977 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Bradford Martin, The Theater is in the Street:

Politics and Public Performance in 1960s America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); and Abe

Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York City: Citadel, 1991).

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coops and communes within the whole grain revolution.6 Work in the growing field of African

American food studies has evidenced the significance of soul food and the politics of hunger

within organizing for self-determination in the Black Liberation Movement.7 While scholars like

Warren Belasco have cited Berkeley’s People’s Park in helping to ignite an ecologically-driven,

“countercuisine” movement critiquing the hegemonic American food system, the significance of

food as an ingredient of political theater has been largely ignored. As Michael Wise and Jennifer

Jensen Wallach argue in their edited collection on the “state of the field” of food studies,

examining food culture opens an interdisciplinary window onto the past in ways that traditional

historical sources and methods cannot: “Food crosses the abstract boundaries of culture due to

the corporeal certainty associated with the act of consumption, grounding our communities in the

6 See Raj Patel, “Survival Pending Revolution: What the Black Panthers Can Teach the US Food Movement,” in

Food Movements Unite!... Strategies to Transform our Food Systems, ed. Eric Holt-Giménez (Oakland: Food First

Books, 2011) 115-136; Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the

Farm Worker Movement (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007); Heidi Tinsman, Buying into the Regime:

Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Lauren

Araiza, To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Martin Deppe, Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights

in Chicago, 1966-1971 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Mary Potorti, Food for Freedom: The Black

Freedom Struggle and the Politics of Food (Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 2005); Margaret Rose, “From the

Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965-1975,” essay in No Middle Ground: Women and

Radical Protest, ed. Kathleen Blee (New York City: New York University, 1998): 225-250; Margaret Rose,

“Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union,” (PhD

Dissertation, UCLA, 1990); Rosemary C.R. Taylor and John Case, eds., Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives:

Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York City: Pantheon Books, 1979); Maria McGrath,

“Food for Dissent: A History of Natural Foods and Dietary Health Politics and Culture since the 1960s,” (PhD

Dissertation, Lehigh University, 2005); Mary Rizzo, “Revolution in a Can: Food, Class, and Radicalism in the

Minneapolis Co-op Wars of the 1970s,” in Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias, eds. Martha Finch and Etta

Madden (University of Nebraska Press, 2008): 220-238; Anne Knupfer, Food Co-ops in America: Communities,

Consumption, and Economic Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2013); Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to

Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press, 2017); Etta Madden and

Martha Finch, eds., Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (University of Nebraska Press, 2008; Stephanie

Hartman "The Political Palate: Reading Commune Cookbooks," Gastronomica (Spring 2003); Although not

principally focused on food, additionally, Ellisa Auther and Adam Lerner’s edited collection West of Center offers

insight into how activist/artist collectives like the Diggers, the Droppers, and the Harrisons made food political in

the postwar U.S. Left through performance art. See Author and Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the

Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 7 Jennifer Wallach, ed., Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery

to Obama (Chicago: University of Arkansas Press, 2015); Frederick Opie, Hog and Harmony: Soul Food from

Africa to America (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2008); Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and

America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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material worlds around us, revealing the limitations of traditional modes of historical research

focused narrowly on the archival exegesis of manuscript sources.”8 Discourses linking food,

identity, and space were critical in the postwar era: protests over segregated dining spaces in

white homes and restaurants helped launch the Civil Rights Movement; a back-to-the-earth

whole food movement transformed hippie communalism into popular capital enterprises; and

women-centered kitchens, restaurants, and bars served as feminist tools to create safe spaces for

women while enabling women to reclaim radical domesticity as a form of revolutionary group

identity empowerment.9

Transnational, cross-cultural, and anti-capitalist discourses rooted within “free food” in

these spaces mobilized coalitions of social justice advocates across lines of race, ethnicity, age,

and class. As a tool for politically symbolic play, food offered park creators opportunities to

embed their insurgent urban design projects within cross-cultural histories of social justice

activism: food boycotts as a labor organizing issue for food industry workers, strike kitchens to

keep labor actions fueled, free shared meals as a critique of racist capitalism that reinforced

poverty and malnutrition in communities of color, and movements for “agrarian nationalism.”10

Within anarchist-created green spaces, food became a medium for building political communities

across activist divisions. Ethnic foods and imaginatively exotic concoctions became semiotic

tools to illuminate the intersectional issues of displacement that linked capitalism, colonialism,

and consumption. Warm meals transformed work sites and actions into homes that sustained

8 Michael D. Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach, eds., “Introduction,” The Routledge History of American Foodways

(Routledge, 2016): p. 2. 9 For examples see Finn Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2007); Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the

California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Kathleen

Blee, ed., No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York City: NYU Press, 1997). 10 Russell Rickford, “‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black

Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s,” The Journal of American History (March 2017): pp. 956-980.

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workers while also reclaiming domesticity for working-class women and people of color

displaced by postwar urban renewal. Within People’s Parks, food became a way for a wide range

of activists to produce and consume rebellion—a currency with which to perform and exchange

political discourses that helped fuse consciousness-raising body politics with the materiality of

the liberated landscape. Yet within the mixed-race coalitions that created People’s Parks, ethnic

foods blurred the borders between celebrating colonial resistance and appropriating the cultures

of people of color. Shared meals proposed gender-neutral systems of culinary carework while

simultaneously celebrating the traditional gender roles men and women brought to meal

creations at parks. Racialized and gendered culinary discourses within these actions were both

empowering and problematic, providing a medium of political fluidity within which park goers

could play with and redefine their identities anew.

4.2 “Deciphering a Meal”: People’s Stews as a Lens into Identity Politics at People’s

Parks

Following the framework of Mary Douglas, understanding food culture at People’s Parks

requires “deciphering a meal,” analyzing what types of cooking techniques and ingredients were

utilized, as well as when and by whom these meals were shared within the park as a medium for

interrogating social relations hidden within.11 Food culture at People’s Parks at times functioned

discordantly—largely dependent upon the culinary and horticultural leadership of individuals

who donated goods, cooked meals, and planted vegetable gardens on and off site as their

contribution to the project. Film footage of several parks, including Berkeley’s People’s Park and

Berkeley’s Mobile Park Annex, reveals how two main styles of food offerings created different

11 Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 1, Special Issue: Myth, Symbol, and Culture

(Winter 1972): pp. 61-81.

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moods in these spaces over the course of the day and week, including planned dinners and

foraged mid-day snacks that fluctuated as park labor waxed and waned. Workers as both spatial

creators and territorial protectors were nearly always present yet the largest concentration of

laborers arrived on the weekends when food was more widely available, making weekend food

consumption more spectacle and celebration than mere sustenance. Announcements of festive,

collectively-shared meals frequently held at nights or on the weekends also attracted park goers

whose presence politicized the informal be-in as an occupying force.

During the day, food culture helped shape the park’s life cycle. Video footage captured

how hungover pre-lunch park goers lounged quietly around a brewing coffee percolator on the

campfire. In the background, a patch of fledgling sweet pea, tomato, and bean plants were

growing in the west end of the park; by mid-day, park workers were on site to water and expand

vegetable patches taking shape in the park’s first weeks as well as set up apparatuses for roasts

and stews cooking over the course of the day. Throughout the early afternoon park attendees

took advantage of randomly donated consumables, from ready-made sandwiches to do-it-

yourself concoctions that domesticated the space. While some park goers that lived nearby like

Wendy Schlesinger would walk home for breaks and meals on long work days, other weekend

parkgoers by afternoon waited in wafting smoke for untamed evening campfires and barbecues

to celebrate the continued liberation of the territory. After children left by nightfall, adults

huddled around the campfire to roast wieners and melt marshmallows for s’mores. After 10 PM,

firefighters and police officers frequently arrived to extinguish campfires or respond to noise

complaints. By 6 AM the following morning, park managers like Mike Delacour arrived to pick

up the broken Coke bottles, empty jugs of Red Mountain wine, and trash left behind by twilight

revelers before new workers would arrive, the cycle beginning anew. Taken together, food at

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Berkeley’s People’s Parks was a form of energy, work, celebration, and performance. Across the

array of activist-created parks, free shared community meals frequently kept these spaces

occupied and, in turn, imbued these territories with symbolic political powers. Growing

seedlings, happy eaters, and caregiving chefs became a metaphor for the park’s success.

Most often lists of food offerings at People’s Parks read discordantly, with focus on the

haphazard array of ingredients and the public consumption of alcohol and marijuana as

indicators of legally liberated space. At Berkeley’s People’s Park, mixed-race groups of men and

women passed glass jugs of red wine from mouth to mouth while eating crumbly chunks of

baguettes and fresh carrots.12 According to University of California, Santa Cruz’s coverage of

the park, “Watermelons, oranges, wine, and marijuana [were] communally shared by the

workers, freaks, revolutionary intellectuals, little old ladies, and children.”13 The random

diversity of shared food consumption became a metaphor for celebrating how spatial protests

like People’s Parks attracted a wide range of participants. On the first day of work at Chicago’s

Poor People’s Park, workers similarly shared watermelons, doughnuts and soda while bandaging

blistered fingers.14 Within this space of transient political symbolism, processed foods, purchased

ingredients, stolen meats, and leftovers all offered opportunities for new beginnings that

imagined the park project as facilitating a cross-cultural coalition beyond the political borders of

one political organization. Similar to commune cooking that Stephanie Hartman has argued was

often “diverse and unorthodox,” with purchases of wholesale cans of Chicken of the Sea lining

the kitchen pantry, parks embraced both slow-roasted meals and store-purchased snacks as

12 “People’s Park (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News, Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, Inc.

(Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, May 1969), San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive,

http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe. 13 “Doing the Thing: People’s Park,” in “This Week’s Issue” (Informal Student Publication, Merrill College,

University of California, Santa Cruz) May 16, 1969: p 1, McHenry Library, Special Collections, University of

California, Santa Cruz: http://bit.ly/2dvmGrz. 14 Ron Powers, “Develop ‘People’s Park’ as a Protest,” Chicago Sun-Times (Tuesday, August 5, 1969): p. 3.

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political metaphors.15 Participants gardened for vegetables and pined for stew from scratch, and

yet at park picnic tables men and women laughed while making peanut butter and jelly

sandwiches from prepackaged white breads. By preparing stew from grocery store donations in a

galvanized metal trash can, food culture in People’s Parks harnessed the privileges of modernity

while also simultaneously critiquing it as inauthentic.

Beyond scavenging for mid-day snacks or campfire circles, two of the most common

foods produced within People’s Parks were people’s stews and hog roasts that functioned like

rituals, using culinary metaphors to politicize the space as anti-capitalist and anti-Establishment.

People’s stews were collectively-produced potages, made from scavenged ingredients that, when

cooked together in bonfires, symbolized a cross-cultural unity of resistors to “the Man.” At

Berkeley’s People’s Park, people’s stews were held every Saturday and Sunday at noon during

the first few weeks of work. Video footage of a potluck preparation at People’s Park No. 6 in

Berkeley panned across cardboard boxes of corn, strong beans, onions, and celery among other

vegetables in prep for that day’s people’s stew.16 Stews large enough to feed hundreds often

required collective management and assembly in coordinating an outdoor kitchen that added to

the park’s aesthetic. In her memoir, Wendy Schlesinger described the first people’s stew held at

Berkeley’s People’s Park as a fundraising challenge for the park’s organizers: “They bought the

biggest metal trash can possible. They scoured the backs of all the supermarkets, searching for

funky left-overs. Some stores contributed many types of soup bones and bits of meat. We bought

thousands of paper plates”—and subsequently as many trashcans as they could afford.17 As a

15 Stephanie Hartman, “The Political Palate: Reading Commune Cookbooks,” Gastronomica: The Journal of

Critical Food Studies vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring 2003): p. 29-40. 16 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News, Young Broadcasting of San

Francisco, Inc. (Young Broadcasting of San Francisco, May 1969), San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive,

http://bit.ly/2d1wlDe. 17 Wendy Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park (and other political events)—a love story from a Leader’s

point of view,” Unpublished Manuscript: Chapter 5, p. 4.

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celebration of the make-do ingenuity of “peasant food,” stews made of scraps were more rustic

and fit for a crowd, with little focus on presentation—a potluck-style reenactment of a stone soup

made from leftover ingredients without a specific recipe. Ingredients were boiled over the course

of the work day in a metal trashcan, stirred with a large wooden stick or shovel. Lennie Lipton’s

video footage of the park reveals a man stirring a waist-high trashcan full of rice and tomato-

based stew while another man off to the side tears a handful of basil leaves, tossing them into the

mixture.18 While grains were less expensive sustenance, the varied plant-based ingredients,

including vegetables, grains, beans, reflected a broader hippie countercultural effort to live more

intimately with the environment.

Within participants’ cultural memories of these direct actions, the sensorial experience of

stews, from the smell of the smoky bonfire to the sticky residue coating your hands after eating

with your fingers, has transformed these spatial occupations into important performances of

utopian community building. Smoke and steam billowed from the top of the can, preventing the

spectator from seeing the ingredients below, yet crowds swarmed with arms outstretched to taste

the experiment. One photograph of a people’s stew at Berkeley’s People’s Park captures the

curiosity of the meal, revealing a crowd of men circled around, squinting quizzically into a

steaming cauldron while the girl being served holds her paper plate outstretched, biting her lip in

anticipation.19 Unlike thinner soups that required spoons for sipping, these stews were thick and

meant to be eaten from mismatched containers or paper plates with hands.20 People’s stews made

sense of the inherent ideological contradictions within People’s Parks.

18 Lennie Lipton, Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, Film, 16 mm (1969), in the Pacific Film Archive Film and Video

Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, archived online:

https://archive.org/details/cbpf_00002. 19 Stephen Shames, Photo of Stew, reprinted in People’s Park: Still Blooming 1969-2009 and on…, ed. Terri

Compost (Berkeley, CA: Slingshot Collective, 2009): p. 96. 20 While this is demonstrated in photographs of people’s stews, another fictionalized narrative discussing a

counterattack on a fenced park the month following the closure of Berkeley’s People’s Park also includes a scene of

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As part of People’s Parks practice of “do your own thing,” potluck stews were a key

programming element that synthesized individualism and collectivity into a form of community-

based placemaking. Callouts for one people’s stew in the Berkeley Barb encouraged everyone to

“bring vegetables, spices, whatever’s your thing,” while more expensive proteins were

specifically requested: “Chefs say meat is hardest to get. Bring meat. Then EAT IT!”21 Because

individual donations changed from day to day, the stew became a new mysterious version each

time that celebrated the authenticity of spontaneity. Inspired by free food giveaways called feed-

ins by the Diggers, placemaking potlucks attempted to creatively reuse culinary remnants in

playful ways, finding new symbolic meaning in a seemingly more authentic mismatched chaos.

For the Diggers, the meal was a performance. As he described in the Berkeley Barb, George

Metevsky first saw the group’s “Yellow Submarine” under a eucalyptus tree where a group of

“freaks” were standing and shouting “Food as Medium!” while distributing “shopping bags filled

with day-old bread, wooden crates of tossed green salad, a ten-gallon milk container streaming

hot with turkey stew, and apples all over the ground.” Drivers dropped by to pass out “a cake,

sometimes fruit, sometimes a bushel of radishes…a box of tomatoes”—to which the Diggers

responded, “‘If you have to buy it, the Diggers don’t want it!”22 People’s Parks as celebrations of

diverse contributions offered opportunities to women and men, young and old, skilled and

unskilled, to become makers and consumers together. People’s stews served during long work

days in these territories juxtaposed misshapen and sporadically donated ingredients that put

varying tastes, textures, and colors in metaphorically racial harmony with one another. With little

a people’s stew. Told in the voice of an exotic Hindu narrative, the story begins with a discussion led by a godly

male leader named Benya “eating People’s Stew…with his fingers, as was his custom, [who] reached across the

stew pot and grabbed the Deputy’s glass, in one gulp draining it of wine” before smoking a joint. Benya goes on to

lead a discussion with his forces and God debating the merits of taking back “the soil of our native land” from the

“pig power structure.” See Lenny Lipton, “At the Flick,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 16. 21 “PEOPLES STEW,” Berkeley Barb Vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 2. 22 George Metevsky, “Delving the Diggers,” Berkeley Barb (October 21, 1966): p. 3.

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guarantee that food would taste good, the experience of people’s stews focused on the

symbolism of their collective production and consumption. Eating with your fingers and tasting

how your donations complemented your neighbor’s ingredients created intimacy that

personalized the project.

The name “people’s stew” like People’s Park connoted a range of anti-capitalist

influences that merged communalist rhetoric of anti-colonial political strands across the world.

The term “people’s” had a complex history by the postwar era, having been frequently used in

European movements for nineteenth century populism seeking to create spaces of civic uplift—

rus in urbe or open green spaces for natural public leisure. As Karen Jones argues in Civilizing

Nature, state-run “people’s parks,” volksgarten, or folkpark were created in industrializing cities

in Europe and Russia as respite from the factory and civic uplift. These parks were highly

sculpted and socially regulated, with selective entrance rules specific to race and class as well as

deportment as a tool of social reform.23 These parks were often coupled with “people’s palaces”

or “people’s houses” that served as community centers to raise the morale of the working class

by developing programs on language, history, and culture.24 Yet in European colonies like

eastern China, urban green spaces and leisure areas were segregated; public parks and gardens in

Shanghai prohibited Chinese, Japanese, and Indian citizens as well as dogs and bicycles.25

According to urban historian Leo Ou-Fan Lee, when these regulations were lifted in 1927

opening these urban green spaces to the Chinese the same as rich white foreigners, park

attendance nearly doubled.

23 Karen Jones, “Unpacking Yellowstone: The American National park in a Global Perspective,” Civilizing Nature:

National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernhard Gissibl Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New

York City: Berghahn Books, 2012): p. 35. 24 See Christoph Grafe, People’s Palaces: Architecture, Culture and Democracy in Postwar Western Europe

(Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, November 5, 2014). 25Lee Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Boston:

Harvard University Press, 1999): p. 29.

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Within the mid-twentieth century, “people’s” took on new meanings that signified

territorial reclamation as part of an anti-colonial revolution. By the creation of the People’s

Republic of China in 1949, the descriptor “people’s” redefined the Republic of China as a new

nation now focused on the needs of the peasant populace rather than the colonial oligarchy.

Critiquing colonizers’ use of the word to describe civic-minded yet segregated parks, in the

revolution places like the Shanghai Race Club were renamed “People’s Parks.” Mao Tse-Tung’s

new government argued that cooperatives like “people’s communes” and “people’s parks”

educated and trained the proletariat in exchange for communal production.26 This use of the term

migrated to the United States as media coverage of the Vietnam War and anti-colonial

movements captured headlines. 27 By 1968, when the Oakland Black Panthers who sold Mao’s

“little red book” of quotations circulated through the Bay area as an arms fundraiser, “people’s”

became part of larger cross-cultural political discourse rejecting American imperialism. The use

of the term “people’s” within occupied territories challenged the construction of America as a

nation made for the people, as one now insurgently re-made by the people. From People’s Parks

and People’s Pad to people’s stews, “people’s” came to describe a variety of political

movements, groups, and actions oppositional to American nationalism by the late-1960s.28 The

descriptor embedded the stew at People’s Parks within transhistorical and transnational

discourses of both civic uplift and power reclamation, while offering participants the ability to

make and consume revolution.

People’s stews made from donations recreated the metaphorical American melting pot.

Stews as cross-cultural culinary fantasies became a practice of what Stephanie Hartman has

26 Chang-tai Hung, “A Political Park: The Working People’s Cultural Palace in Beijing,” Journal of Contemporary

History vol. 38, no 3 (July 2013): p. 556-577. 27 Chalmers Johnson, Autopsy on People’s War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973): p. 23. 28 Ibid.

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called “appreciative inclusiveness.29 In an attempt to create a racially harmonious “political

palate,” hippie food culture encouraged playful culinary exoticism that while making little effort

to research and share foreign food culture, made heterogeneity comfortable. This culinary

exoticism also became written onto anti-capitalist narratives within the park, including the

creative re-use of wilted vegetables and food scraps for stews, watering cans for beverage

pitchers, and metal trashcans for soup cauldrons. Gentrification remnants, like stones, ceramic

tiles, and steel beams used to line and decorate bonfires and barbecue pits for cooking became a

materiality with which park creators constructed their politics and identities as environmentally

beneficial amidst intersecting narratives of pollution and waste of white, western modernism.

Many white park creators in 1969 defended their projects by using non-white and working-class

narratives of self-sufficiency. Like the Navajo storytelling of the efficiently-dismantled buffalo

on the Western plains, potluck stews and exoticized recycled park landscapes created a political

theater of racialized sustainability for middle-class hippies who appeared to “‘nourish themselves

on disaster’” like the struggling farmers in Vietnam.30 Food culture within People’s Parks

reflects the politically ideological paradoxes of its organizers. Although park creators solicited

donations and offered free meals as a political statement, in reality free foods within People’s

Parks never existed outside of capitalism, and were only metaphorically “liberated.” By

preparing stew from grocery store donations in a galvanized metal trash can, food culture in

29 Hartman has argued in her analysis of hippie food culture how 1960’s and 1970s-era commune cookbooks

included internationally-inspired recipes like “China Stew, Tamale Pie, [and] Oriental Liver” that imagined

international connections. See Hartman, “The Political Palate,” p. 36. 30 This is a phrase that Franny Nudelman uses to describe how white middle-class radicals described their trips to

Vietnam during the war, in which they could use food and clothing to “play” the Other through “imperial eyes.” See

Franny Nudelman, “Trip to Hanoi: Anti-War Travel and Transnational Consciousness,” in New World Coming: The

Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, eds. Karen Dubinsky and Ian McKay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009:

p. 243; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge 1992).

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People’s Parks harnessed the privileges of modernity while also simultaneously critiquing it as

inauthentic.

At Berkeley’s People’s Park, largely created by white students and street people of

middle-class backgrounds, food played with these economic and technological contradictions by

becoming a tool to ally with marginalized communities of color. Food, work, and the creation of

alternative, insurgent landscapes became mediums for participants to enact transnational,

transhistorical, and cross-cultural fantasies of racial harmony through a framework of

“orientalism.” 31 By imagining themselves as foreigners from past and present, park participants

used food to cross borders that they could not.32 Through foreign ways of seeing, processed and

purchased foods became seemingly more authentic within the park. People’s stews that connoted

racial harmony served as a form of cultural comfort for Americans wrestling with their own

privileges within the context of imperialism at home and abroad. At the same time, shared savory

stews made the park project more enterprising, their meals more intimate and collective, their

labor more productive, and their landscapes more natural and wild that, in turn, sanitized how

this culinary tourism functioned as a form of cultural appropriation.33

In contrast, parks created by racially marginalized groups used food to resist white

western imperialism. Puerto Rican and Chicano park creators envisioned their parks as ethnic

31 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York City: Vintage Books, 1st Vintage Books edition, October 12, 1979). 32 Concept adapted from Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (Jan. 1988), pp. 3–24. 33 For discourse on interrogating the search for culinary authenticity, see Perales, “The Food Historian’s Dilemma;”

Amy Bentley, “From Culinary Other to Mainstream America: Meanings and Uses of Southwestern Cuisine,” in

Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington, Ky., 2010), pp. 209–225; Meredith E. Abarca, “Authentic or Not,

It’s Original,” Food and Foodways, 12 (no. 1, 2004), pp. 1–25; Allan S. Weiss, “Authenticity,” Gastronomica, 11

(Winter 2011), pp. 74–77; Rachel Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast,

Processed Food,” Gastronomica, 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 36–44; Gavin Benke, “Authenticity: The Search for the Real

Thing,” in Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket, by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (Austin, 2009), pp. 90–

95; Lavanya Ramanathan, “Why Everyone Should Stop Calling Immigrant Food ‘Ethnic,’” Washington Post, Aug.

21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/why-everyone-should-stop-calling-immigrant -food-

ethnic/2015/07/20/07927100-266f-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html.

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resistance.34 Photographs by Garry Tyler of Plaza Caribe, a People’s Park built by squatters at

the corner of 112th Street and Broadway in New York City’s Loisaida, show crowds of Puerto

Ricans, African Americans, and Polish Americans gathered on the occupied lot. Several murals

have been painted on the brick exterior of tenement buildings lining the park, layering phrases

like “Plaza Caribe” and “Liberación” with images of armed revolutionaries. Off to the side,

several women stand at a table with their hands in large metal pots preparing for a shared stew.35

Rather than new borderlands to explore, immigrants displaced by colonization, racism, and urban

renewal made multicultural and transnational park narratives extensions of their lived

experiences of oppression not validated by United States institutions. Ethnic foods served in

parks became a language with which to confront ethnic stereotypes, articulate racial and ethnic

self-determination, and sustain the labor of park occupiers as part of the revolution. Public

racialized culinary play allowed immigrants to metaphorically expand their pinpointed parks,

feed-ins, and tent-ins on vacant lots into a larger “territorial imperative.”36

4.3 Going “Whole Hog”: Masculine Performances on Fire at People’s Parks

Afternoon people’s stews often functioned as a complement to hog roasts, with

vegetables boiled into collective creations as the peaceful yin to the violent yang of the sacrificial

swine. Hog roasts were late-afternoon to evening meals in which whole pigs were cooked either

in a buried pit in the park or on a spit above a campfire to celebrate the culmination of a work

day. Logistically, hog roasts required knowledge, planning, and leadership, and were announced

34 Haines, “A New Kind of Rest.” 35 Garry Tyler, Photographs, “People’s Park Built by Squatters” (July 25, 1971), in Shoot 710173, Box 17a, Daily

Worker and Daily World Negatives Collection (PHOTOS.223.001), Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives,

New York University. 36 Michael Carriere, “Lessons of People’s Park for the Occupy Movement,” History News Network, reprinted in

Truthout (June 6, 2012): http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/9634-the-lessons-of-peoples-park-for-the-occupy-

movement.

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in underground newspapers like the Berkeley Barb to encourage spectatorship. The construction

of an eight-feed wide, four-feet deep barbecue pit was often a lengthy process that became a

spectacle within the park.37 Large pits required teamwork to dig into the ungiving clay, as the

hole needed a minimum of a three feet depth and a width and length at nearly twice the size of

the hog itself. All-day hog roasts were events for adults and children alike. Video footage from

KRON-TV of People’s Park No. 6 reveals how barefoot children playfully joined in shoveling

the excavation during the day.38 The manual labor hog roasts required in heavy lifting and

shoveling hot coals transformed bonfires into male-dominated zones, with men often standing

around waiting to assist.

Underground roasts required careful layering, with the pit lined with large stones and

scavenged bricks and covered in a foot of burning coals. The hog was sliced down the middle

with hot coals shoveled into its open abdomen setting the carcass aflame. Lennie Lipton’s

documentary Let a Thousand Parks Bloom captures this process at Berkeley’s People’s Park,

showing three men working together to tightly wrap the smoky hog in a white sheet to create a

boundary between the flesh and coals.39 The mouth is wedged open with an apple to keep air

circulating. Finally, two men carry the pig to the pit and cover it immediately with coals to keep

a low and even cooking temperature over the course of the day. Alternatively, smaller hogs

roasted on a spit, as shown in a photo from a Berkeley Bastille Day celebration in protest of the

park’s fencing, offered a much shorter cooking time—anywhere from four to twelve hours that

made it the denouement for the day.40 While a buried pit was visually out of sight, a spitfire roast

37 Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 23. 38 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News. 39 Lennie Lipton, Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, Film, 16 mm (1969), in the Pacific Film Archive Film and Video

Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, archived online:

https://archive.org/details/cbpf_00002. 40 Photograph, Berkeley Barb, vol. 9, no. 3 (July 16-24, 1969): p. 3.

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created a spectacle that was encircled by a dozen spectators waiting for an opportunity to assist

through touch and taste.

While soups and stews signified efforts to make do with what you had over the course of

a few hours, going “whole hog” reflected an effort to do something completely and thoroughly

beyond the minimal requirement. A pit roast took all day, averaging from eight to sixteen hours

depending on the weight of the hog(s) that created a cloudy backdrop for the park’s activities that

signaled to nearby community members that a feast would take place.41 Waiting for the unveiling

served a double function in building up gastronomic suspense for the hog’s eventual

consumption while creating an opportunity for building camaraderie. Without shelter and the aid

of indoor kitchen appliances, rustic cooking techniques like hog roasts and spitfires rejected

domesticity by putting participants in closer proximity to volatile earthly elements. Roasts

enabled them to control and consume fire, to excavate and singe sections of the park’s landscape

like a frontier, and to honor their work with a corporeal sacrifice. These roasts facilitated by a

handful of men could be experienced by all as a shared masculine performance of resistance.

As culinary performances, campfires became spaces within the park for “playing Indian”

as a method of ceremonial rebellion in which largely white middle-class park goers could reject

their modern identities.42 Participant Steve Haines recounted the day spent at Berkeley’s

People’s Park, blurring the borders of food, drugs, drinking, and manual labor yet once dusk

arrives work ends and a dancing/drum circle begins: “A drum beat begins… sticks, bottle, beer

cans—everything becomes an instrument—the beat calls the tired workers together—tools are

stacked and a circle forms—someone lights a joint—the[n] another—it’s fine grass—bodies

pulse to the throbbing beat—people dance—it’s tribal—communal—it’s a festival and it’s a

41 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News. 42 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

187

feast.”43 Consumption, bodies in uncontained sway, creative re-use of the material culture and

built environment, and the raw landscape focused on fire fused to create an anti-modern

experience for Haines. Sim Van der Ryn argued that campfires at Berkeley’s People’s Park were

liberating. Park users’ “atavistic urge to share a campfire, to share memories and feelings while

staring into the flames” became a form of consciousness raising that transformed cooking and

eating into seemingly more primitive and therefore more authentic urban experiences.44

These depictions of fire dancing carried subtle racial and class undertones of escapism

from white middle-class puritanical domestic containment. As Philip Deloria has argued in his

book Playing Indian, white men used the visual and material culture of racialized performances

of Native Americans as a political tool throughout American history, harnessing the imagined

freedom of playing the stereotypical “savage Indian” to oppose and liberate the “civilized

national Self” during moments of personal and national identity crises.45 Looking at the “New

Age” Indians in the hippie subculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, Deloria demonstrates how

white hippies coopted Native American images and vocabulary on psychedelic posters as well as

beaded and feathered headbands to express liberation. The appropriation and essentialism of

stereotypically “Indian” words and rituals in visual, material, and performative culture, from the

popularization of “tribe” to beaded and feathered headbands, helped hippies to wrestle with their

whiteness and affluent backgrounds, in playing Indian hippies could performatively linking

hands with oppressed cultures for a common goal of societal uplift without regard to the political

organizing of the American Indian Movement.

43 Haines, “A New Kind of Rest.” 44 Sim Van der Ryn, “Building a People’s Park, Berkeley, CA, 1969,” in Culture, Architecture, and Nature: An

Ecological Design Retrospective, ed. Richard Olson (New York City: Routledge, 2014): p. 145. 45 Deloria, Playing Indian.

188

The ethnic exoticism of the seemingly foreign landscape and labor permeated culinary

discourses creating mythological “borderlands” in which activists and community members

could embody overlapping and even contradictory identities of imaginative racial play.46 In an

attempt to give the “history” of hog roasting, one article in the Berkeley Barb described the

cooking process as old as the Chinese civilization, yet adapted new techniques in the current

political climate stating: “The Chinese discovered a pig in the chared [sic] ruins of a burned

down house, perhaps due to a successful eviction during a tenant’s rent strike; way back when,

and the practice of roasting pigs was started among civilized men.”47 Food, work, and the

creation of alternative, insurgent landscapes became mediums for participants to enact

transnational, transhistorical, and cross-cultural fantasies of racial harmony through a framework

of “orientalism.” 48 By imagining themselves as foreigners from past and present, park

participants used food to cross borders that they could not.49 Through foreign ways of seeing that

offered more “authentic” foods, the park project became more enterprising, their meals more

intimate and collective, their labor more productive, and their landscapes more natural and wild

that, in turn, sanitized how this culinary tourism functioned as a form of cultural appropriation.50

46 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2007). 47 Asnen, Untitled, East Village Other. 48 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York City: Vintage Books, 1st Vintage Books edition, October 12, 1979). 49 Concept adapted from Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (Jan. 1988), pp. 3–24. 50 For discourse on interrogating the search for culinary authenticity, see Monica Perales, “The Food Historian’s

Dilemma: Reconsidering the Role of Authenticity in Food Scholarship,” The Journal of American History

(December 2016): pp. 690-693; Amy Bentley, “From Culinary Other to Mainstream America: Meanings and Uses

of Southwestern Cuisine,” in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy M. Long (Lexington, Ky., 2010), pp. 209–225; Meredith

E. Abarca, “Authentic or Not, It’s Original,” Food and Foodways, 12 (no. 1, 2004), pp. 1–25; Allan S. Weiss,

“Authenticity,” Gastronomica, 11 (Winter 2011), 74–77; Rachel Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why

We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food,” Gastronomica, 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 36–44; Gavin Benke,

“Authenticity: The Search for the Real Thing,” in Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket, by Elizabeth S.

D. Engelhardt (Austin, 2009), pp. 90–95; Lavanya Ramanathan, “Why Everyone Should Stop Calling Immigrant

Food ‘Ethnic,’” Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/why-everyone-

should-stop-calling-immigrant -food-ethnic/2015/07/20/07927100-266f-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html.

189

Within Berkeley’s People’s Park, racial play helped park goers make sense of the

contradictory ambiguity of their ideas and actions shaping the park’s principles. Small dance

raves, drum circles, and campfire drinking became forms of playful primitivism as an escape

from the policing of modern identity, yet were paired with processed foods like Fanta sodas,

Wonder Bread, and Red Mountain wine made from scab grapes. By nightfall, park goers

embraced the roguish danger of fire, as hog roasts taunted societal norms and fire codes, yet park

goers also returned home after flames were extinguished to continue their modern lives. Park

goers did not dwell on these contradictions. For Wendy Schlesinger who had gone home to eat

dinner before returning to the park’s late-night hog roast, the campfire against the celestial

backdrop with Joy of Cooking performing off to the side became a form of sensory liberation

that created a moment of deep contemplation. Despite the chaos of a spontaneous community-

design project that made meaning out of randomly donated objects, the roast as a tangible edible

culmination of the day’s work brought “order without hierarchy” to communal

experimentation.51

Although Berkeley’s People’s Park advocated for equality in shared labor with slogans

like “Everybody Gets a Blister,” hog roasts and campfires as the domain of men also

simultaneously facilitated gendered hierarchies that enabled hypermasculinity, competition, and

greed. In contrast to stews as concoctions of many different donations of low-cost vegetables or

scraps, hog roasts consolidated knowledge and power into the hands of a pit master and most

likely his team who handled a single ingredient. Roasts required skills to create a perfect

chemistry of water, oxygen, and space to ensure the hog would be completed in time for the

night’s celebration, while spitfires demanded knowledge to correctly truss the hog to prevent the

51 Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 23.

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meat from slipping, as well as a sturdy apparatus for flipping the potentially 60-200 lb. pig.

Logistically, both processes demanded several heavy lifters to get the hog(s) into place that

became the purview of men. While stews could be ladled out evenly, there was inherently no

equal portion of the pig; its body offered different tastes, textures, and values that teased drinking

onlookers. Crowds that huddled around mid-afternoon meals helped attract curious spectators to

the park’s concept of food in exchange for labor, yet by nightfall when work ceased for the day,

food sharing became less cooperative and more individually opportunistic. Schlesinger wrote

that rather than wait in the park for the hog roast, she had gone home for roast beef—shuffling

around the house trying to shake the fatigue of a full day of manual labor. Re-energized for the

celebratory roast, she returned at 10:30 that night to find “a slightly different crowd” from the

park laborers she had been working with all day: “Hordes of transient…males had come in,

smelling the charred, dug-up roast pig. They had selfishly gouged out gigantic hunks even before

the pigs were thoroughly cooked. They were accustomed to free food, so they thought of nothing

of depriving these who had worked a full day’s labor.”52 In response, Schlesinger and Delacour

contemplated organizing a community-based policing agency for the park that would keep order

at night as the population dwindled to largely loud, drunk single men who angered nearby

neighbors by fighting, shouting, and breaking bottles.

Hog roasts and campfires became a way to reclaim masculinity in politicized territory

during an era in which young male American youths rebelled against state control. Scholars have

argued that the postwar era’s effort to return to normalcy through domestic containment resulted

in a doubling down on gender roles and identities in American culture despite resistance from

52 Ibid.

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men and women challenging these gendered expectations.53 The quest to be a white-collar

conformist within the postwar context of containment, competition, and crowding created a

contemporary crisis of masculinity. In an era when the “culture of abundance” intersected with

the “Jungian Age” of symbolism, food became part of a performance of identity.54 People’s

Parks as celebrations of “performance—dancing, singing, costume design, and craftsmanship—

became the basis upon which one might judge the identities they sought to build around

Indianness” in this broader national search for raw masculinity.55 This performative masculine

rebellion manifested in a variety of cultural forms that intersected with food and embodiment in

mainstream American culture; at the same time that father/son pairs were camping out as

weekend warriors and hobbyist Indians, cookbooks began constructing backyard barbecues as

the masculine culinary domain.56 Jessamyn Neuhaus argues in Manly Meals and Mom’s Home

Coming that postwar cookbooks used biological determinism and Neanderthal euphemisms to

argue that men were “naturally” drawn to meat because of their innate superiority at controlling

fire. Cookbooks encouraged men to make “hearty, filling, ‘man-sized’ portions of meat” the fuel

for their all-male gatherings.57 By the 1960s, “the masculine mystique—that impossible synthetic

of a sober responsible breadwinner, imperviously stoic master of his fate and swashbuckling

53 See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War era (Basic Books, 2008); Joanne

Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Temple University Press,

1994); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books,

1993); Nancy Walker, Women’s Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (Bedford Books/St.

Martin’s, 1998). 54 Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Pantheon

Books, 1973); Douglas Tallack, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (Taylor and

Francis, 1992). 55 Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 151. 56 Deloria, Playing Indian, pp. 128-153, Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks

and Gender in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 57 Neuhaus, Manly Meals, p. 213.

192

hero—was finally exposed as a fraud,” leaving young men in search of more authentic

representations of masculinity.58

For young men who were street people and activists within this historical moment, police

violence and forced conscription added to pervasive feelings of masculine displacement and

alienation. Countercultural hog roasts played on the folksy familiarity of small-town barbeques

and fish and chicken fries that had often been used as fundraisers for organizations and civil

servant departments while simultaneously asserting masculine authority as civic leaders.59

Within the context of people’s parks, barbecues as the male-led, meat-only pinnacle of work

days became a metaphorical way for young men to similarly claim authority and “talk back” to

the state—the police, military, business owners, and politicians—as their oppressor through

projective metaphorical violence against pigs as a representative of “the Man.” While

descriptions of hog roasts never dictated men’s domination over the cooking process, the

approval of white political celebrities in the Yippies and Black Panthers often drove coverage of

hog roasts.

Although their expense and skill made them rare, hog roasts became more popular

through the late-1960s and 1970s as a protest and community-building tactic because they

threatened violence through semiotic play. Unlike chickens and cows often characterized as

dumb or weak, pigs as “fat” animals had been longstanding metaphors for bourgeois affluence,

softness, and corruption. Similarly, their prohibition in religious texts as “unclean” animals made

their celebratory consumption rebellious or shameful. The postwar pig insult paradoxically

constructed defenders of the military industrial complex, from white racist police officers to

58 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): pp. 173-

191. 59 See Pat Williard, America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA – the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin

Feats that Define Real American Food (New York City: Bloomsbury, 2009).

193

university officials, as disgustingly corrupt and weak. By 1968, the Black Panther Party had

helped make “pigs” synonymous with police officers. When the Yippies elected Pigasus the

swine president of the Chicago Democratic National Convention, sending Chicago police

officers chasing after the hog and arresting its recalcitrant handlers, “pig” became a cross-

cultural symbol of “the Man.” Hundreds of rowdy attendees joined President Pigasus in a street

parade carrying placards reading “Pig Power” and “Live High on the Hog.” As a pig, the

president was a gluttonous barbarian with lard-greased palms as well as a docile and controllable

farm animal—livestock to be slaughtered and turned into breakfast. 60 Characterizing Pigasus as

meal of the Yippies and a form of power to the people constructed young activists as the yeoman

(pig) farmer—the decider of life and death on the family homestead on the American frontier. By

publicly announcing activists’ symbolic meat-eating virility, the action signified a comical

attempt to reassert leftist power over the state in visually theatrical ways.61 The action’s

international notoriety propelled rallies and protests against the police and military throughout

the country that centered on communal pig roasts, attracting attendees and viewers across group

identity distinctions. Even after Berkeley’s People’s Park was fenced, live pigs still made

appearances at anti-police protests. Once the university fenced the park in May of 1969, for

example, students stood outside on Telegraph and Bancroft avenues and demonstrated by

heckling police with a live pig.62 Yet cooking and eating pork at People’s Parks was much more

common than using live pigs as theatrical props because hog roasts simultaneously fed workers

and rallied political support.

60 “Chicago Cops Squelch Piggy Nominations,” The Montreal Gazette (August 23, 1968): p. 2. 61 For more on this see David Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1994): p. 167. 62 “People’s Park Disorder,” Photo Negatives (May 23, 1969), Sleeve 14904_06, Box 1525, Fang Family San

Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive Negative Files, circa 1930-2000 Collection, Bancroft Library, University

of California, Berkeley.

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Due to their expense and because digging pits or setting up campfires on university or

city property was illegal, barbequing whole hogs was more infrequent than generic free food

giveaways in direct actions, which added to their exoticism. Roasts as ephemeral, consumable

guerrilla street theater helped reinforce the mythology of these civil disobedience tactics. For

groups like SDS, who constructed a charcoal pit on Pennsylvania State University’s lawn in May

1969, the stunt drew university students from their dorms and blocked campus traffic. SDS

member Barry Stein argued that spectacle became a talking point for situating students’ struggles

for free speech within a larger hegemonic power structures. Members like Stein took spectators

aside to “talk to them in small groups” about their coalitional struggles in an effort to “make

them understand the seriousness of the repression of the students and the blacks and to show

them how much this affects the earth and every student here.”63 Whole hog barbecues were often

paired with incendiary anti-police discourse elaborating on the murder, dismemberment, and

ingestion of their bodies to taunt retaliation. At one barbecue timed with the arrival of Vice-

President Spiro Agnew for a dinner at a local high school, Harry Temple from the University of

Delaware chapter of the Yippies announced plans to hold a rally at a nearby church where pork

would symbolically comprise the menu: “We’ll be roasting a pig while they’re toasting a pig.”64

Coverage of pig roasts was coupled with graphics depicting cops, President Richard

Nixon, and the military as pigs in cartoons that amounted to the porkification of “the Man.”

Curly-tailed pigs with helmets and riot gear were paired with coverage of the San Francisco State

Strike against police presence on campus.65 Hogs lazily sprawled across a map of the continental

63 “SDS Roast Stuffed Pig at College,” The Derrick (Oil City, Pennsylvania) no. 125 (May 26, 1969): Section 2, p.

13; “‘Repression’ at PSU,” Altoona Mirror (Pennsylvania) vol. 84, no. 295 (May 27, 1969): p. 15. 64 See “Yippie Convention Plans Upset by Money Hassles,” The Review (University of Delaware, Newark), vol. 93,

no. 16 (October 14, 1970): p. 2. 65 Frank Cieciorka, Illustration, The Movement vol. 4, no. 12 (January 1969): front cover.

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U.S. in stories of “fat-cat trustees” stifling young professors in academe.66 A pig-bodied Nixon

hid behind trashcans in a pigsty of filth that represented a shortage in trash removal services in

New York City’s Latino neighborhoods.67 Standing on the American seal, a snarling winged sow

holding six arrows slobbers on an uprooted olive tree; the title debated the American emblem:

“the eagle (or is it a pig).”68 In one graphic circulated in coverage of the fencing of Berkeley’s

People’s Park and murder of James Rector, a gigantic pig police officer stomps on a group of

limp, prostrate bodies lying amongst scattered daises—smoke fumes rise out of both barrels of

the officer’s shotgun.69 Images of “the Man” as pig unified a variety of social and political

movements around a shared enemy.

When radical African Americans used terms like “pig,” “bacon,” and “pork chop” to

describe cops and position them as the farm animals and food of the Black Panther Party, their

language was interpreted as a call to war rather than an indicator of boredom. In investigatory

hearings on the Black Panthers for the House Committee on Internal Security, Representatives

spent hours interrogating Black Panther members and law enforcement officials on the

significance of the word “pig” in provoking shootings of police officers. One portion of the

transcript featuring an exchange between Iowa Congressman William Scherle and nineteen-year-

old Clive Lisbon De Patten, member of the Des Moines Black Panther Party, reads like an

exhausting tango. Scherle questioned De Patten about the film, Off the Pig—the title of which

had been taken from the chorus in the Panther chant, “No more brothers in jail, OFF THE PIGS!

The pigs are gonna catch hell, OFF THE PIGS!” featured in one clip of the film. Scherle and

66 Frank Cieciorka, “Pig Covering U.S. Map,” Illustration, reprinted in The Minority Report vol. 1, no. 1 (January

1969): p. 4 67 “Young Lords Move in New York,” The Movement (November 1969): p 8. 68 Frank Cieciorka, “The Eagle (Or is it a Pig),” Illustration, The Movement vol. 4, no. 12 (January 1969): back

cover. 69 Anonymous, Untitled Cartoon, The Black Panther vol. 3, no. 6 (May 31, 1969): p. 7.

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other Representatives were persistent in their attempts to focus on pork metaphors as threats of

violence:

Scherle: Now how many people attended those Tuesday night movies showing “Off the

Pig” which means “kill the police”?

De Patten: I only went to one of them because the headquarters was [sic] bombed two

weeks after I joined, you know. The headquarters was [sic] packed that night.

Scherle: These PE classes that you showed how to kill policemen, which means “off the

pig,” were packed?

De Patten: We didn’t show them how to kill policemen.

Scherle: I mean the title “Off the Pig,” that is what it means?

De Patten: No, it doesn’t.

Scherle: In this here, I get that is exactly what it means.

De Patten: Who says that?

Scherle: I believe you do.

De Patten: I said there is more than one way of offing the pig. Like Eldridge Cleaver

stated any time you escape the mind of the oppressor that can be termed offing the pig.

Scherle: If I may, De Patten said that the Des Moines chapter definitely operated

according to the rules handed down by the national office. He said that the expression

“off the pig” by the strictest Panther definition means to kill them.

De Patten: Yes, by the strictest definition. But there is more than one definition. Like

Eldridge Cleaver even stated that.70

Although De Patten argued that listeners and readers were responsible for their own violent

interpretations of the use of “pig,” the metaphorical violence enacted against pigs became

projected onto Black Panthers as murderous anarchists—a racialized political narrative that

white activists could consume in hog roasts.

While Scherle parsed written forms of pork metaphors, Congressman John Ashbrook

focused on specific metaphorical depictions of how one might murder/slaughter a cop/pig.

Cartoons drawn by Black Panther artist Emory Douglas in the Black Panther coloring book had

become the focus of national attention because they depicted grotesque, human-like pigs

enacting violence against black communities from past to present. The book grounded violence

70 Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives Ninety-First Congress Second Session, Black Panther

Party Part 4, National Office Operations and Investigation of Activities in Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska

(U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1971): p. 4820.

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between African Americans and white policemen as part of a transnational, transhistorical

narrative of African American enslavement and insurrection. In one scene Douglas depicted Nat

Turner stabbing a pig, “three Negroes with knives, axes, killing and butchering pigs.”71 Histories

of African American oppression were painful, yet pig metaphors enabled to be easily digested—

the hegemonic power of their oppressor reduced to a single edible animal. To stab a hairy pig in

the back, as Turner did, was to ignite a revolution that transcended from West Africa to the

Southern plantation, all the way to the urban ghettoes of Oakland. In a column for Texas’s The

Cuero Record, President of the National Educational Program George S. Benson argued that

Douglas’s images featured in the Black Panthers’ recently released coloring book, made famous

by the congressional investigatory hearings, were an “incitation to murder.”72 Black Panther

Bobby Seale would later capitalize on this racialized and gendered politicization of pork by

releasing a cookbook of “righteous” recipes called Barbeque’n with Bobby that blurred the

borders between celebrating southern food and black masculinity with anti-police rhetoric.73

Although the Black Panthers encouraged other groups like the Yippies, SDS, the

Weathermen, the Young Lords, and countless others to use comedic pork metaphors that at times

were gratuitous, homophobic, and hypermasculine, this discourse was taken seriously as threats

of violence—to such an extent that its spoken, written, or visual metaphorical usage became

evidence to help incriminate Black Panthers like Mondo we Langa (then known as David Rice)

and Edward Poindexter.74 Congressman Richardson Preyer similarly argued that the Black

Panthers’ excessive pig-calling made their newspaper a pornography of dehumanization.75 When

71 George S. Benson, “Invitation to Murder,” The Cuero Record (October 1, 1969): p. 14. 72 Benson, “Invitation to Murder.” 73 Bobby Seale, Barbeque’n with Bobby (Ten Speed Press: 1988). 74 “Black Militants’ Fate in the Hands of the Jury,” The Lincoln Star, no. 168 (Lincoln, Nebraska, April 15, 1971): p.

3. 75 Committee on Internal Security, “Black Panther Party,” p. 4734.

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paired with images of acicular bloody knives and long-barreled revolvers wielded largely by men

and boys, bestial metaphors in Black Panther cartoons asserted physical and sexual control over

white men in power.

Young white activists played on the Black Panthers’ techniques in blurring the borders

between human and animal, murder and consumption. A photograph taken of a hog roast in

Berkeley’s People’s Park, titled, “Offed ‘N’ Fit to Burn,” depicts a young white boy standing

over and looking down upon the splayed pig carcass on the ground. The child’s stance

constructed him as the referent stand-in as the murderer orchestrating the “offing” of police

officers and thereby supporting the park as a breeding ground for an anti-police youth

generation.76 In another comedic description of how to roast a hog in the Berkeley Barb, the

author suggested a particular technique to ensure safety: “Two cooks are required. One sprays a

can of lighter fluid on the pigs tail by pointing the spout at the pig and crushing the can. A high

pressure jet of lighter fluid is the result and will saturate the tail of the pig. The second cook

holds an ignited cigarette lighter near the fluid saturated tail of the pig.” When the police officer

begins to run, those nearby can “help” put out the fire by urinating on him or kicking him:

“Remember, it’s the uniform, not the man. Wouldn’t you piss on a pig if his pants were on

fire?”77 Within the scenario, the pig became a metaphor to dehumanize it through physical

violence and urination in ways that effeminized pigs as vulnerable.

At the same time, pork metaphors created space for enacting reparative violence against

the state through violent hypermasculinity. Hog roasts as public mockeries of police that allied

with the Black Panthers upped the ante on pig-calling—enabling crowds of young men to call

out specific members of the establishment with edible effigies. While daytime eating celebrated

76 John Jakobson, Photo, Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8 1969): p. 4. 77 Asnen, Untitled, East Village Other.

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the vegetable as the symbol of passive (feminine) communality, evening meat feasts promoted

masculine dominance over male cops (pigs) as the fetishized objects of desire. Describing one

hog roast at Berkeley’s People’s Park, underground reporter Steve Haines detailed how the

bellies of two pigs were slit and stuffed with embers, lowered into a dug-out pit, and covered

with glowing logs and dirt: “Around 10 PM, the pigs are dug up and lifted out of the pit.

Someone has roasted sweet yams and potatoes. They get passed around. ‘Here come the pigs.’

‘It’s badge 15.’ ‘No it’s 63. ‘Here comes Dunn.’ The pigs get hoisted onto a table in mad

confusion…Nothing I ever put in my mouth tasted as good as that pig Sunday night. It was a trip

in itself.78” Their collective consumption is orgasmic—as both produced within the liberated

territory and as an act of naming and consuming the power of their oppressor. Sharing this slow-

roasted, one pot meal connected park creators with one another while the references to badge

numbers also symbolically christened it (and them) as both cross-cultural and radical—a political

communion and celebration of masculine virility. Collapsing the distinctions between sexual and

murderous definitions of “offing” and “porking” that made sexual and gastronomic

consummation equivalent, hog roasts as culinary pig-calling made sense of these semiotic

contradictions in both hypermasculine and homoerotic ways.

Hog roasts played with and, at times, extended the undertones of vengeful rape fantasies

in militant discourse in the underground press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Images, poems,

and articles in the underground press depicted The Statue of Liberty or Vietnamese women being

raped by the U.S. military industrial complex—soldiers offered silver wings for the opportunity

to “rape them, sack them, plunder pillage and pilfer things.”79 Accounts of African American

78 Haines, “A New Kind of Rest.” 79 Jim Schwall, “Uncle Sam, Wants You,” Poem, reprinted in the East Village Other vol. 2, no. 9 (New York City,

April 1-15, 1967): p. 12.

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women raped by Klansmen as punishment for civil rights activism undoubtedly circulated

through activist communities as university students returned to campus after participating in

Freedom Summer.80 At the same time, the mainstream press stirred fears of drug pushers raping

young white girls attracted to the hippie lifestyle.81 Meanwhile, emergent radical feminists began

to shed light on rape culture that pervaded women’s lives, putting sexual assault in the national

political agenda.82 Sexual assault as a medium for talking about oppression made “rape culture”

omnipresent in the left. Metaphorical rapes of the Algerian people, Iroquois, Golden Gate Park,

and “the mother planet” saturated the underground press in ways that spoke to the atrocity of

their experience while simultaneously gendering, sexualizing, and pacifying them as female rape

victims.83 To identify police officers and university administrators as rapists was to engage in

this politicized, cross-cultural discourse about unjust abuses of white straight men’s power.

To convert an animal metaphorically and physiologically into meat, feminist theorist

Carol Adams argues, is to eliminate its independent identity. Metaphorical hog roasts and bacon

jokes reconstructed “the Man” as an “absent referent” in which their dehumanization through

rape, dismemberment, and death become the ultimate reason for the existence and nourishment

80 Lee R. Seabran, Letter to Editor, Series: “Vine City: Voices, Voices, Voices,” Great Speckled Bird, vol. 1, no. 3

(Atlanta, April 12-25, 1968): p. 5. For a comprehensive analysis of the rape of African American women as political

tactic by men in the KKK see Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance

– A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Vintage Books, 2011). 81 For one example, see Paul Houston, “Young Girls Running Away at Record Rate,” LA Times (September 3,

1967): p. 24. 82 For earlier short pieces see Adrienne Rich, “Rape,” (1973); Kay Potter, “Rape Means Never Having to Say

You’re Sorry,” (1971); Barbara Mehrhof and Pamela Kearon, “Rape: An Act of Terror,” (1971); also see Susan

Brownmiller’s groundbreaking work on rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Simon & Schuster, 1975);

for a brief analysis of how feminist discourse on rape shaped mainstream press see Rachel Drzewicki, “Seize the

Press, Sisters: The Influence of Women in the Underground Press of the 1960s,” (PhD Dissertation, University of

Wisconsin-Madison, 1996). 83 For examples see Lynda Schaffer, “Movies: Revolution on the Screen,” The Rag vol. 2 no. 8 (Austin, TX,

December 11, 1967): p. 15; Allan Edmands, “Iroquois Land Rape,” The East Village Other vol. 2, no. 13 (New

York City, June 1-15, 1967): p. 10; “JFP”, “Both Ass and Hip Pack Monday Meet,” Berkeley Barb vol. 6., no. 20

(May 17-23, 1968): p. 3; Keith Lampe, “Loot In,” The East Village Other vol. 3, no. 26 (New York City, June 7,

1968): p. 11.

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of the vampiric consumer—the leftist revolutionary.84 Adams demonstrates how women and

animals become overlapping absent referents in American culture in ways that made women and

meat the passive objects of straight men’s edible, sexual, and violent desires. When wielded by

men against “the Man” within the context of hog roasts, pork metaphors tantalizingly blurred

homoerotic and sadistic borders to assert and challenge masculine dominance.85 Far more than a

textual war waged in the underground press, a hog roast was personal, performative, and most

importantly public. Roasting a whole hog required intimacy—a comfort with manipulating a

cavernous body, reaching inside the cavity and removing reproductive organs and others from

within, or, at the least, stuffing it with fruit and seasonings and sliding it onto a spit or into a pit.

Because the roasting process loosened the muscle tissue of the animal, handling the charred

carcass to prep for serving required delicate fingering. A spitfire offered the greatest opportunity

for physical context as a form of culinary play; left splayed out in the open, the meat was

rendered an object of the male gaze and the bystander’s grope.86 One attendee of a pig roast held

in Ann Arbor in 1969 captured how participants described the hog’s transition from corporeal to

comestible: He spent the day at the hog roast, “standing in the sun mopping their brows from the

heat some merely browning and crackling and getting delicious. A lot of pork any way you look

at it.”87 Stabbing the phallic spit through the throat and rear suggested sexual penetration—its

mouth wedged open to allow ventilation through the body signifying the domination of forced

entry.

84 Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York City: Continuum

Publishing Company, 1991): pp. 44-47. 85 Ibid. 86 Term “male gaze” adapted from Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Film Theory

and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999): pp. 833-844. 87 Unknown Author, “Ann Arbor Conference: U.P.S. and Downs,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1, no. 3 (July 25, 1969): p.

14.

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Although a hog buried in the pit of burning coals was less accessible, a spitfire

encouraged constant maintenance by spinning the hog to ensure an even roast and basting the

skin with seminal marinade throughout the day. As demonstrated in one photo of a 1969 hog

roast in Berkeley, the spit resembled a piece of metal rebar balanced on two stacks of cinder

blocks on which the male pit master sat. 88 Spinning the rod between his legs like an extension of

the phallus, he and the pig became one. With the whole corpse cooking intact and left splayed

out in the open, the spectacle drew in outsiders while its crispy marinated flesh transforming in

front of their eyes teased the park attendees near enough to feel its heat. Simultaneously, the

encircled crowd became chef/cop-killer/sexual violator through proxy while the multitude of

spectators reified the pit master as a valuable park contributor. Countering the dehumanization of

war, rape, environmental degradation, and police harassment, hog roasts became a playful

resistance tactic that humorously talked back to the state through sexual disempowerment.

In the 1960s, rebellion was a cultural war hinged on the politics of “symbol, pastiche, and

performance” as a medium for communication. Signs of revolt migrated from past to present,

one political organization to the next, growing more flexible as they lost their intended meanings

and took on new significance that reduced metaphors to individual interpretation.89 Hog roasts

that played on Black Panther pig-calling simultaneously facilitated both cultural appropriation

and cross-cultural coalition building. Years of anti-war, free speech, and Black Power protests

led to a near-constant police presence in the broader San Francisco area with the Black Panthers

in Oakland, student radicals at UC Berkeley, and hippies on Telegraph Avenue spatially

regulated through planning and policing. Yet through pork and pig metaphors that branded

Nixon, the military police, and racists as oppressors, the plight of African Americans could be

88 Photograph, Berkeley Barb, vol. 9, no. 3 (July 16-24, 1969): p. 3. 89 Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 164.

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connected with that of Vietnamese, Native Americans, and women. By imagining the pig as

police, hog roasts functioned as a cross-cultural demonstration tactic that unified the Movement

by visualizing policing as an intersectional issue of “rape” and linked the destruction of the

policeman’s teargas and the soldier’s gun, with the government’s bulldozer. Yet in an attempt to

return to the essence of masculine physical and sexual power as a source of resistance, men that

wielded hog roasts as performative pig-calling embraced “the savage” as a form of liberation.

Looking back on her memoir on the founding of Berkeley’s People’s Park, Wendy Schlesinger

only regrets calling cops pigs, having struck through its uses in her text and written over the

typeset with less incendiary terms like police man.90

4.4 Politicized Consumption: Gender, Race, Class and the Alternative Economies of

Food Production and Consumption in People’s Parks

People’s stews and hog roasts drew spectators in, yet parks often suffered from negative

stigma in the mainstream press that characterized these spaces as disheveled and violently

masculine spaces that shaped food cultures. When historian Studs Terkel conducted hours of

interviews Chicago’s Poor People’s Park in the fall of 1969, he often began his conversations by

asking participants their perspectives on “the digging” at the corner of Armitage and Halsted.

Women like Kitty characterized the park creators as violent dissidents— “destructive elements in

the community” who “misrepresent the Spanish American people” by feigning to contribute to

the neighborhood while not doing anything constructive in the park. Although she did not know

the park creators personally, she had shared rumors that they had violently choked a woman at an

earlier urban planning meeting. False claims like these that removed histories of institutionalized

90 Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park;” Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview (April 10, 2016).

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violence the conversation of resistance to urban renewal, intended to paint those who challenged

gentrification—the Young Lords—as gang members, violent wife beaters, and criminals.91

Food made by women at Poor People’s Park helped to challenge critics’ negative

perception of the Young Lords’ male leaders of color. While the majority of Terkel’s interviews

on the park were conducted offsite, his conversation with park participants focused on the

communality and deliciousness of one meal in particular made in the park by one woman, Ceil

Keegan. When Terkel approached Keegan at Chicago’s Poor People’s Park in the fall of 1969,

she was stirring a giant vat of soup—most likely an adapted version of the Puerto Rican dish

asopao de pollo or chicken stew. As Terkel meandered through the park, his interviewees often

spoke to him in brief rote messages of fighting “the Man,” proclaiming “power to the people,”

and citing their membership in ally organizations like the Mexican American Young

Comancheros, the white working-class Young Patriots, and the Latin Eagles.92 While the

foundation of chicken and rice formed Keegan’s hearty meal for the park’s horde of workers, the

savory aroma of garlic and tomato sauce, bay leaf and vinegar, wafted through the park

captivating Terkel’s interviewees who began to talk about her food like home-cooking. Park

participants spoke into the microphone about their commitment to social and economic change in

the neighborhood despite their frustration with displacement and poverty. They took pride in

their hard work and used their own experiences as anecdotal evidence to disprove negative racial

stereotypes perpetuated in the media of the park’s largely poor, brown-skinned creators as

irrationally violent. Some proposed their own ideas for the site, including a pool, church, park,

and more affordable housing.

91 Studs Terkel, Interview, T3402 SCD, ca. 60 min. recording, (ca. August 1969), Studs Terkel Collection, Chicago

History Museum. 92 Studs Terkel, Interview, T3400 SCD, ca. 60 min. recording, (ca. August 1969), Studs Terkel Collection, Chicago

History Museum.

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Keegan’s stew often became the subject of discussion in Terkel’s interviews that evening.

Children’s exclamations that the dish was Puerto Rican reflected their pride and excitement in

taking part in the meal as a public political statement about the reclamation of culture and space.

Using Keegan’s shared meal as a talking point, Terkel invited park creators to speak and play

with one another and to celebrate their literal construction and consumption of a cross-cultural

community. In a neighborhood that had seen years of violence enacted against its dwellers by

law enforcement and urban renewal that had put activist organizations like the Young Lords and

Black Panthers on the defensive, food created domestic comfort. Cooking and eating spaces were

moved from the private kitchen to the public fire pit, and backyard lounge spaces were expanded

to a shared acre. Picnic tables, afternoon campfires, and trashcan cauldrons became the material

foundation for proving that these illegally-created parks were safe, enjoyable, and productive. By

ladling and passing a bowl of hot soup, park creators joined together, their shared family meal

converting a disheveled lot into a home.

For marginalized groups whose autonomy was spatially regulated in American society,

politicized domestic spaces became what Berkeley-area feminist Pamela Allen called “free

spaces” that existed outside of the normative power structure, enabling participants to delve

deeper into complex discussions of structural inequality and oppression. Reflecting on her

experiences in a women’s liberation group, Allen wrote that shared pre-meeting meals helped

facilitate emotional connections among fellow feminists that made the personal political. Within

women’s consciousness-raising groups, food served as a building block of trust:

I remember that my first trust in the group developed through seeing the women bring the

food for the dinners we had together before our meetings. In those early days I was

distrustful of our talk about love and unwilling to trust my whole self with a group of

strangers, but I was willing to risk a meal. And the fact that I never went hungry—week

after week—made me begin to trust that we could begin to feed each other’s need for a

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place to be taken seriously and for a space to learn about ourselves and grow in

understanding and strength.93

For middle-class women escaping domesticity and poor women of color rejecting low-paying

domestic work in white homes, domestic spaces liberated through feminist consciousness raising

became sources of political identity formation and community building in the 1970s. Women

debated, networked, and organized at their own dining-room tables, restaurants and coffee

houses, and in the domestic spaces of cultural centers and political organizations, often sharing

food and stories of individual experiences and traumas transforming the personal into the

political.94 The corporeal and social experience of eating good food together facilitated trusting

relationships between participants who felt vulnerable about sharing personal experiences with

potential strangers about both oppression and privilege.

Within People’s Parks, women from a variety of racial, class, ethnic, and national

identities were essential to their visions of radical homemaking. Park food cultures illustrate how

cooking and eating zones within People’s Parks became spaces where both men and women

could explore the linkages between their gender and political identities. Cooking and eating

zones alongside encampments allowed park creators to both embrace and resist domesticity.

While communal meals brought from home and made on site by women complemented men’s

strength and power through manual labor and hog roasts, adding to parks’ seemingly more

“natural” and gender-neutral vision of an alternative society in the urban realm, women’s

cooking also helped domesticate these often male-dominated outlaw territories through visions

of nourished families. Images of children playing, women making lunch, and men roasting hogs

93 Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation, 2nd Edition (San Francisco:

Times Change Press, 1970): 18. 94 Chelsea Stripe, “Roads of Rebellion: Cultural Contributions by Women of the Beat Generation” (Ph.D.

Dissertation, Purdue University, 2014), pp. 58-73; Finn Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality Contested Space,

and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press, 2007).

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were interconnected gendered pieces of the larger park tableaux. In this historical moment in

which food took on symbolic political significance, outdoor kitchens and dining areas helped

expand women’s domain into the urban realm as a form of gendered culinary placemaking,

where “a sense of self [was] developed, an identity with production [was] created, and a

contribution to the community [was] fostered” through food as valuable labor.95 At the same

time, food shaped how gendered enclaves developed within these spaces. Video footage of

cooking and eating at Berkeley’s People’s Park and Berkeley Mobile Park Annex reveals how

women often congregated around picnic tables while men dominated barbecue pits and

campfires.96

Beyond the liberation many women experienced wielding hand tools while laboring

arduously at People’s Parks, growing, cooking, and serving food offered opportunities for

women to claim status by capitalizing on gender roles as a celebration of their “natural” talents.97

Park creators sometimes expressed gendered expectations that women uniquely brought love to

cooking. Terri Compost wrote in an edited primary source collection celebrating the 40th

anniversary of Berkeley’s People’s Park how impactful Judy Foster’s culinary carework had

been in transforming the park into a home during the 1990s: “Judy was inspiration, mentor,

mother, wise woman, caring; her heart opening wide to see the beauty in even the most twisted

of us, supporting and urging us to be all we are. She worked hard her whole life, cooking

amazing meals to share the sacred food with thousands. Her guiding light created ‘Gourmet

95 Traci Marie Kelly, “Honoring Helga, ‘The Little Lefse Maker’: Regional Food as Social Marker, Tradition, and

Art,” in Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food, ed. Sherri Inness (Lanham, MD: Rowman and

Littlefield, 2001: p. 29. 96 “People’s Park Mobile Annex (Berkeley),” Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News; “People’s Park (Berkeley),”

Archival Film Footage, KRON-TV News. 97 See Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence:

University of Kansas Press, 2009); and Timothy Hodgdon, Masculinity in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two

Countercultural Communities, 1965-1983 (Columbia University Press, 2008).

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Tuesdays,’ the best meal in town, [and] Food Not Bombs….”98 Foster was one of many men and

women who served meals to the homeless at Berkeley’s People’s Park, yet as a middle-aged

white woman, Foster embodied the essential maternal archetype—giving herself selflessly with

each heaping spoonful. Gendered expectations that women’s cooking was superior gave some

women status within these activist communities; for women like Compost, experiencing

women’s empathic dedication to culinary carework became part of their legacy at People’s

Parks. Like the eroticism underlying male-dominated hog roasts, women’s stews, soups, and

other creations similarly connected the emotional threads of exhaustion, hunger, and desire in

park laborers that made working on site transformative experiences. Women’s cooking, like

meals created by Keegan at Poor People’s Park, Laura Rodriguez at San Diego’s Chicano Park,

and Judy Foster at Berkeley’s People’s Park, became defining moments for park workers that

made these spaces not only functional in feeding workers, but promising as liberating, potentially

sustainable homes in an era of displacement.

Some women used cooking at People’s Parks to expand their political activism beyond

the kitchen. Although Ceil Keegan had not been active in anti-urban renewal organizing prior to

the creation of Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, bringing and cooking food at the lot became a

foundation for her further involvement in the movement. Advocating for Puerto Ricans, Keegan

escalated her political activism against urban renewal nearly one month later, speaking publicly

at the September 11, 1969 Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council (LPCCC) meeting

about how the demographics of the local urban renewal decision-making bodies did not reflect

the ethnic representation of the neighborhood mandated by federal law.99 At a time when critics

98 Compost, People’s Park, p. 160. 99 William Waters, LPCCC Secretary, “September 11, 1969 Agenda and Meeting Minutes,” Folder LPCCC

Organizational Minutes 1969, Box 1, LPCCC Collection, DePaul University Special Collections.

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targeted park creators as inherently violent, non-native, men of color, and park goers as

unscrupulous, women’s participation in these planning meetings became critical to portraying

these projects as heteronormative, familial and safe. Women like Laura Rodriguez at San

Diego’s Chicano Park negotiated the boundaries between the passivity of maternal caregiving

and the empowerment of physically challenging the state through spatial takeovers. For days

during the early construction of Chicano Park, Rodriguez brought tortillas, rice, beans, and

tamales to feed workers and campers who defended the site.100 Although she had not been

politically active prior to the park creation, making tamales precipitated a string of

demonstrations that shaped her legacy as a political force in Barrio Logan. After chaining herself

to the door of the Neighborhood House clinic and community center to protest lack of funding

for social services in the largely poor, Mexican American neighborhood, Rodriguez stayed

politically active in the community. In her reflection on Rodriguez’s legacy after her passing,

Maria Garcia wrote, “Her love and work for the clinic continued in many ways in and out of the

kitchen. Along with several other women, she would make what seemed like millions of tamales

to be served at the fundraising [Spirit of the Barrio] luncheons held in support of the clinic...One

luncheon accommodated seven hundred guests!”101 For Rodriguez cooking good mestiza food

became a form of political currency in Barrio Logan; her commitment to cooking for hundreds

became evidence to prove her sacrifices that made her a Madonna figure for the movement.

Women’s cooking became the hidden labor behind the politicization of shared ethnic

meals in parks. As captured by photographer David Giffey in 1969, community members in

100 Marco Anguiano, “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Chicano Park Steering

Committee (ca. 2000): www.chicano-park.com. 101 Maria Garcia, “The History of Neighborhood House in Logan Heights: The Legacy of Laura Rodriguez,” San

Diego Free Press (November 1, 2014): https://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/11/the-history-of-neighborhood-house-

in-logan-heights-the-legacy-of-laura-rodriguez/.

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Madison, Wisconsin converged at their James Rector’s People’s Park for a Mexican dinner

fundraiser for the United Farm Workers (UFW) organization that often partnered with the

Students for a Democratic Society.102 Although Giffey had traveled with the Obreros Unidos

photographing their events and experiences in the Midwest and Texas, the creation of James

Rector’s People’s Park by University of Wisconsin students coincided with a protest on campus

in support of the grape boycott. Footage of the park’s first anniversary Memorial Day celebration

reveals a mostly white male college-age crowd ladling thick soup from a giant fire-kindled

communal vat, or nodding in agreement with a rock band performing on a small platform—the

only built structure on the site.103 Stapled underneath the park’s entryway sign is a UFW poster

with an Aztec eagle reading, “Viva La Huelga, Viva La Causa” (Long like the strike, Long live

the cause). In the background reads another poster, “La Lucha es la Fuerza” (The Struggle is

Strength) indicating a visual trail of UFW material weaving throughout the densely-packed lot.

Although the park largely served as a hangout space for students and an outdoor concert venue

for rock bands, this shared meal fundraiser became an opportunity for UW students to learn more

about and connect with working-class Chicano activists in the region. Meals like these not only

celebrated mestizo culinary heritage but facilitated racialized consumption as a medium of cross-

cultural political organizing. Purchasing plates at tamale fundraisers enabled UW’s largely white

student body to playfully and politically consume the Chicano—their exotic brown skin, their

strength in colonial resistance, and their oppression.

102 David Giffey, “Madison UFW Benefit at People’s Park,” Photograph, Image ID 90052, David Giffey: South

Madison Oral History Project and Migrant Farmworker Photographs 1966-1971, 1999-2000 Collection, Wisconsin

Historical Society. 103 WKOW 956.5, Features (Newsfilm), 1969 June, Madison, Wisconsin, Television Newsfilm, 1955-1981

Collection, Series: WKOW Television Newsfilm, Wisconsin Historical Society.

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While male UFW members received the most political attention, women’s cooking was

critical to political networking events and fundraisers that situated food within a larger food

system that included fair labor conditions, a healthy environment, and access to free and

affordable meals. Amidst Chicano labor movements in which women not only fought for better

conditions at canneries and farms where they worked but ran strike kitchens to put pressure on

business owners to acquiesce to their demands, creating delicious meals gave women like

Rodriguez autonomy over political creation a source of power.104 Tamale-making became part of

a larger movement of Chicana feminists using indigenous food to celebrate their mestiza

heritage—using the kitchen as a site of resistance to cultural hegemony and the displacement of

women in the Chicano movement.105 Activists of color used food to reconstitute belonging

through the culinary celebration of group identity politics across urban boundaries, national

borders, and even histories of colonialism, transforming some People’s Parks into unique cross-

cultural borderlands.

While many meals were constructed on site at People’s Parks as shared public

performances, women’s efforts to bring ready-made foods from home or cook shared meals on

site became both liberating and limiting—creating space for women while illuminating larger

patterns of sexism in the postwar left. With Berkeley’s People’s Park dependent upon donations

while simultaneously not requiring only encouraging park labor, parks’ guiding frameworks of

non-hierarchical collaborative design failed to speak to how women carried the unspoken burden

of culinary carework. In coverage of Berkeley’s People’s Park by Ramparts, one photograph

showing a line of women preparing pots of vegetables in the park is captioned, “Some of the

104 See Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives. 105 Benay Blend, “‘I Am an Act of Kneading’: Food and the Making of Chicana Identity,” in Cooking Lessons: The

Politics of Gender and Food, ed. Sherrie Inness (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001): p. 41.

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workers were pressed into service as cooks—making stews and salads—for the growing park

community.”106 The “everybody gets a blister” mentality strained some park organizers who took

on added leadership roles in cooking, cleaning, and maintenance, namely women whose service

part of the collective, non-gendered effort rather than indicative of gendered hierarchies within

the movement. In her memoir on the park, Wendy Schlesinger described enjoying food after

their first day of hard labor as the culmination of a climactic community-building experience.

Digging into a pile of thirty “lovingly wrapped black bread cream-cheese and hard-boiled egg”

sandwiches, Schlesinger felt that the moment was consciousness raising. While she had taken

advantage of the project to try out heavy machinery and lead in political negotiating that became

empowering for her as a woman, she also recognized how these sandwiches had likely been left

by a woman.107 Writing her memoir on People’s Park nearly a year later, feminist criticisms that

men relegated women to the “shit work” of cooking and cleaning in the left encouraged her to

attribute this cooking to women in her historical record in an attempt to make up for the ways in

which women’s work had erased women absorbed into the collective “we.”108

Despite claims that People’s Parks as liberated territories would be free from sexism,

many gendered dynamics of food preparation and consumption were replicated within these

activist-created green spaces. Expectations that women would bring food to sustain park workers

at times relegated them to a gendered subservient status. Even from an outsider’s perspective,

some women felt frustrated that men did not acknowledge their cooking as valuable political

labor. As part of her “secret report” on the goings on of Poor People’s Park on behalf of the

LPCCC and the LPCA, Diane Taylor conducted informal interviews at the site as a spy. Taylor

106 Dugald Stermer, “A Photographic Essay of the People’s Park,” Ramparts (August 1969): p. 36. 107 Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park,” Chapter 4, p. 19. 108 For an explanation of the politicization of “shit work” as a popular term in the feminist movement, see Marion

Lockwood Carden, The New Feminist Movement (New York City: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974): p. 60.

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remarked on how a woman, she characterized as poor, old, and ugly, had been making a stew for

several hours in a makeshift stone fireplace at the park. A group of teenage boys stood around

while “a 40-year-old woman (missing a couple of teeth in front) was waving her hands in the air

and saying, ‘I made the stew and now it’s been three hours—three hours—and they still haven’t

come back for dinner.’” Taylor responded to her, “Women have been waiting dinners on men for

centuries and that there was no use in having a coronary over a tardy hippie or two.” 109 A

woman (like Ceil Keegan) recreated dinner time in the insurgent community’s new collective

kitchen and dining room, yet with no flurry of young workers to validate her labor through

communal consumption, the meal’s ephemerality made her efforts evaporate. Although Taylor

intended these critiques to sabotage the façade of equal communality of Poor People’s Park by

portraying their coalition as discordant, her reporting also illuminates how some women were

frustrated with the tedium of culinary care work within People’s Parks, as well as how their

resentment went unacknowledged by their male colleagues. Taylor reported having seen a map

indicating future plans for the park; while the park’s landscape architecture and its growing cadre

of occupants remained, the smell, sight, and taste of the woman’s hard work dissipated in the

evening breeze. The inherent ephemerality of cooking required emotional validation as well as

the recognition of women’s cooking as a legitimate form of political placemaking—both in short

supply as park work days continued and the newness of parks wore off.

109 Diane Taylor, “A Report from a Brave Reporter,” Letter to Steve (Shamberg), (August 13, 1969), Folder

“Reactions to the Disruptions at the July LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, LPCCC Collection, DePaul University

Special Collections.

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4.5 The Origins of the Criminalization of Free Food Giveaways

One of the greatest legacies of women’s culinary work at People’s Parks has been their

leadership and emotional caregiving in serving free food long after parks have been initially

constructed. While at certain activist-created green spaces, food became a form of compensation

and celebration for park labor, at several parks free meals became part of a larger political

project to situate their territorial demands within a larger resistance to structural inequality

perpetuated by capitalism advocated by other political organizations. The “free food” ethos of

many Berkeley-area People’s Parks was inspired by three local forms of anti-capitalist culinary

activism brought forth by the Black Panthers, the Diggers, and the Free Church. The free

breakfast initiatives of these organizations were rooted in decades of free-food giveaways by

civil rights groups and labor organizers from Operation Breadbasket to United Farmworker strike

kitchens, as well as direct actions like the Woolworth sit-ins that sought to liberate restaurants by

reclaiming seats at lunch counters.110 The nearby Oakland Black Panthers were the most well-

known organization advocating for free food as a formation for anti-racist community building in

the late 1960s. For racial self-determination groups like the Black Panther Party, making food

free illuminated how malnutrition was produced by the intersectional oppressions of race,

ethnicity, and class. Although caregiving male chefs became the focus of attention on their free

food giveaways, women were critical to this program that eventually fed thousands of children

across the country daily. These culinary self-determination projects within the postwar black

community countered paternalist racial and ethnic stereotypes in political discourses that argued

that poverty and instability in their communities were due to the breakdown of the “Negro family

110 Deppe, Operation Breadbasket; Rose, “From the Fields to the Picket Line;” Rose, “Women in the United Farm

Workers.”

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structure” and the emasculation of the black male.111 Organizations like The Black Panthers

widely publicized their free breakfast campaign for children as a survival program—a socialist

solution to the racist capitalist economy—and used demonstrations and articles in both the

mainstream and underground media to shame grocery stores like Safeway that failed to donate

food. The Black Panthers defended free food as a platform to educate black children about the

connections between poverty, malnutrition, and systemic racism, arguing that malnourishment

impacted children emotionally in ways that harmed their academic abilities and ultimately their

careers.112

The Bay area in the 1960s witnessed a growing movement of political, countercultural,

service organizations serving free meals as a critique of structural inequality in the United States.

People’s stews as public shared meals also reenacted mid-1960s hippie “be-ins” that offered free

food as a medium for community-building and critiquing capitalism. Shared potluck stone soups

were influenced by the Bay-area Diggers who popularized food giveaways as a playful civil

disobedience tactic in the mid-1960s to challenge displacement. The group emerged as part of a

coalitional resistance to police brutality, after troops shot into a black community center to quell

a riot protesting the police murder of an unarmed black teenager and then instituted a curfew

where both working-class African Americans and white street people lived.113 While writing to

their white hippie audience in their newsletters called “Digger Feeds,” the group continued to use

111 A classic example of this racial thinking can be found in “The Moynihan Report,” which although was not

intended to be racist, was used as firepower for white paternalism. Negro Digest in 1967 critiqued the report as

being “terribly incomplete and misleading.” See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for

National Action (The Office of Policy Planning and Research: United States Department of Labor, 1965); “The

Efficacy of Apathy,” Negro Digest, vol. 16, no. 3 (January 1967): p. 82. 112 “Food for Thought,” Photograph in The Movement vol. 5, no. 5 (June 1969): p. 6; Congressional Report no.

1787, “Child Nutrition Act of 1966” (July 29, 1966), United States Government Document. 113 “Hunters Point: Cops Shot into Community Center Sheltering 200 Children,” The Movement vol. 2, no. 9

(October 1966): p. 1; For more on the relationship between the San Francisco Police Department and social

movements and protests with attention to Hunter’s Point, see Christopher Agee, The Streets of San Francisco:

Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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their platform to shed light on the connections between institutionalized racism and anti-

capitalism—even calling out patterns of racial prejudice within their hippie community by

arguing that “HAIGHT-ASHBURY IS THE FIRST SEGREGATED BOHEMIA I’VE EVER

SEEN!” 114 In one of several tributes to Malcolm X, Digger Chester Anderson called on his

“brothers” to understand how the divide between their communities existed due to spatial

inequality: “They probably resent our freedom, both as hippies and as whites. They resent our

dipping so blithely into their ghetto: we can get out by cutting our hair, most of them know they

can never get out. It’s like been locked up for life in jail, someone said, and having somebody in

the next cell who’s free to come and go as he pleases. I know I’d resent that.”115 White hippies

could take advantage of the exoticism and affordability of working-class black neighborhoods,

yet poorer African Americans could not escape segregation. Anderson argued that capitalism

produced police repression, malnutrition, lack of affordable housing, and inability to congregate

in public spaces that both hippies and African Americans in the Bay area experienced, yet

because local blacks bore the brunt, hippies needed to employ a critical race lens in their Marxist

critiques of American consumerism.

The Diggers argued that the best coalitional defense against structural inequality was an

anti-capitalist revolution in which food, housing, farms, and tools would be available for free.116

Meals offered at no cost were part of the group’s larger liberation ideology, including setting up

free stores and free kitchens as a tool to critique and ultimately “drop out” of the normalization

of capitalism. Free shared meals enabled consciousness-raising ideas to be tasted, yet the Diggers

114 Chester Anderson, “Two Page Racial Rap, In Memoriam: Malcolm X, who died to make us free, too, baby,”

flyer (February 9, 1967), Box 1, Chester Anderson Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 115 Ibid. 116 “The Diggers State Simply,” flyer, (ca. 1966), Box 1, Chester Anderson Collection, Bancroft Library, University

of California, Berkeley.

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argued that paying to eat also rendered the mouth a receptacle through which capitalist,

patriarchal, and racist ideologies could be fed. The Diggers focused on feeding crowds in public

spaces, often discussing them like ticketless theatrical productions. At one event, the group

famously required attendees who wanted free food to walk through a giant empty wooden frame

as a symbolic “new frame of reference.”117 The U.S. food culture, the Diggers argued, reinforced

systemic capitalist relationships to food and eating that entangled the necessity of daily caloric

intake with ritualized performances of citizenship and acts of self-making, yet alimentation could

also serve as an embodiment of consciousness raising. Food as a nutritional life force

transformed the body into an organic process that connected people together with the Earth’s

produce. At times, the massive quantities of food they distributed at one time, with flyers

announcing takers for “100 cases of lettuce,” “Free soup—bring a spoon and bowl,” and “Free

Perch – 400 lbs.,” reflected their interest in sharing the excess they were fortunate enough to

acquire, rather than their own demands to feed the hungry.118

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, communes as well as eating and gardening

cooperatives increased, and the Diggers became part of a range of groups that argued that

growing, cooking, and eating “free” food—meat and produce that imaginatively existed outside

the bounds of capitalism—fostered an alternative economy where bodies and non-normative

political ideas could be nurtured and sustained. Centering food in their political street theater

and, the Diggers took over street corners, public parks, and vacant storefronts to give free food

and household items to the poor—namely starving teenage runaways who had fled to bulging

117 Michael William Doyle, “The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the Cultural Politics of Utopia, 1965-1968,” (PhD

Dissertation, Cornell University, 1997): p. 5; also see Martin, The Theater is in the Street, pp. 86-124. 118 See multiple flyers in Box 1, Chester Anderson Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

For digitized copies of Communication Company prints, see The Communication Company Archives:

http://www.diggers.org/Communication-Company-Archives/index.html.

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hippie ghettoes in search of a raised consciousness. Insurgent food giveaways became a

demonstration tactic for the poor to reclaim their right to the city and fully engage with public

space outside the bounds of for-profit food consumption.119 Publicizing photos, offering shared

meals, and giving away free food in occupied territories became a way to visually communicate

that their alternative domestic spaces and political groups were autonomous, and that their anti-

capitalist visions for society were sustainable.

The creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park were well-versed in the Diggers’ anti-capitalist

play, making the park not only an embodiment of their free-food ethics but a reaction to it. With

floods of hippie tourists arriving to the Haight every week by 1967, begging was becoming a

competitive labor market thriving on capitalism rather than offering an alternative to it. Some

critics argued that free food giveaways by the Diggers survived for so long because the group

was externally funded rather than dependent upon dwindling street donations, resulting in

grandiose demands to liberate all objects in American culture with little backing for structural

change.120 Now having “liberated” everything, Allen Asnen ridiculed the free food ethics of

hippies, asking, “‘What was left to liberate?’” The bologna.121 According to Wendy Schlesinger,

park organizer Mike Delacour disagreed with the Diggers, arguing that in an effort to foster self-

determination through culinary communalism, massive feed-ins, hippie be-ins, and Dionysian

festivals at public parks had resulted in gratuitous waste. Broken bottles and trash cluttered the

landscape, limiting access to those who had previously used public parks to walk around

barefoot for meditation and relaxation.122

119 For a description of the group’s anti-capitalist, pro-love food philosophy, see Alex Forman, “San Francisco Style:

The Diggers and the Love Revolution,” Anarchy no. 78 (August 1967): pp. 221-224. 120 Earl Shorris, “‘Love Is Dead’: Rise and Fall of Hippie-Land,” reprinted from the New York Times, LA Times

(1967): A-17, in Folder 28, Box 1, Berkeley Free Church Collection, Graduate Theological Union, UC Berkeley. 121 Allen Asnen, Untitled, The East Village Other vol. 4, no. 38 (New York City, August 20, 1969): pp. 10. 122 Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park,” Chapter 5, p. 1.

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Along with earlier free food giveaways started by the Diggers, Berkeley’s Free Church

became known as a leftist haven through the late 1960s and 1970s, opening the first social

service phone directory in the area and providing meals, shelter, and healthcare to thousands of

poor and homeless individuals throughout earlier waves of hippie flight and later waves of

violent law enforcement.123 The church’s free food programs emerged with others across the Bay

area in what would become an ecumenical culinary movement in which religious organizations

like the Hamilton Methodist Church and the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church opened cafes

like the Off Ramp Coffee House and The Hearth in church basements, creating safe, free spaces

for problem-solving.124 The Hamilton’s Off Ramp served coffee and snacks to two to three

dozen young people every night—many who were brought in from off the streets during the

church’s regular HELP Corps missions looking for troubled “street children.” Others were

recruited with posters and flyers, like one produced by The Hearth Coffee House that read in red

psychedelic print, “Notice all people! Feel free to communicate and tickle thy palate! Consume

life-sustaining food and drink cheaply…A friendly and spirited community living-room for all

people….”125

Seeing how law enforcement, politicians, and business owners colluded to alienate street

youths led organizations like Berkeley’s Free Church to politicize their anti-capitalist activism.

In one flyer from 1967, the church argued that they were part of a religious movement seeking to

establish a modern “liberated zone” that Jesus had first created through non-violence and non-

123 The Free Church, “The South Campus Community Ministry: Unified Proposal,” (July 1, 1968-June 30, 1970): p.

5, Berkeley Free Church Collection, Folder 15, Box 2, Graduate Theological Union Archives, University of

California, Berkeley. 124 Robert Lyhne, “Coffee and Help for Hippies,” The Catholic Voice (June 21, 1967): pp. 10-11, in Berkeley Free

Church Collection Folder 28, Box 1, Graduate Theological Union Archives, University of California, Berkeley;

Lincoln Richardson, “The Hippies: Try Anything and Everything Including Faith,” Presbyterian Life (August 1,

1967): p. 7-9, 41, in Berkeley Free Church Collection, Folder 23, Box 1, Graduate Theological Union Archives,

University of California, Berkeley. 125 Richardson, “The Hippies,” p. 9.

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exploitation. The church linked the Vietnam War with poverty and racism, arguing that “by

playing, by breaking bread and sharing wine, by turning people on to his love trip,” the church

encouraged followers to resist “the Man and his Occupied Territory, his IBM card mentality, his

napalm jelly, his lynchings, his riot control, [and] his busts” as forms of institutionalized

exploitation. Each week, “simple quiet life-things like feeding each other bread and wine”

became cause for celebrating love as the victory of liberation.126 Other organizations like the

West Hollywood Church sought to support the growing hippie population by combining nutrition

with creativity and making “feed-ins” “paint-ins” in which hippies could paint the church

parking lot every afternoon with “symbolic designs” when coming for free food.127

Throughout the 1980s, Berkeley’s People’s Park remained a central location for service

organizations to assist Berkeley-area citizens with free meals.128 Coverage in the San Francisco

Chronicle reveals a mixed-race crowd of at least three-dozen men winding through the park

toward a table of three white women. The women ladle food from a large industrial pot centered

on a red, checker-printed tablecloth. The article indicates how the Catholic Workers’ weekly free

food giveaways transformed the park into “a turf battle,” pitting the organization committed to

serving the homeless against the university who argued that the food attracted “a difficult and

volatile group” of homeless “indigents.” While the organization argued that it was “lend[ing] a

sense of dignity” to the downtrodden area, advocate Steve Michaels defended the meals as a

source of survival: “‘Try and go out and get a job on an empty stomach. You live outside for just

a week and see how it drains your energy.’” The university, however, threatened to step in in

126 Berkeley Free Church, Flyer, “The Free Church,” in Berkeley Free Church Collection, Folder 40, Box 1,

Graduate Theological Union Archives, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 127 Richardson, “The Hippies,” p. 8. 128 See Compost, People’s Park.

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1986 to stem what they argued were increased reports of crime and drugs due to the free

meals.129

On the night of May 9, 1989, the Berkeley Catholic Worker House of Hospitality towed a

66-foot trailer onto the park, complete with awnings and a front deck, that became the People’s

Café, serving breakfast every morning. In an oral history interview with Terri Compost, Claire

Burch described how this initiative not only intended to serve the needs of the homeless, but also

challenged negative perceptions about the park’s homeless denizens as violent. “You got here

and the homeless people would be having coffee and croissants and sitting there in the fresh air

and it was beautiful. Suddenly at breakfast time the park was transformed. It was really like a

café.”130 Although the University of California, Berkeley stepped in to remove the café and

attempt to prohibit free food giveaways, locals organized the East Bay chapter of the

international organization Food Not Bombs in 1991 that served free vegetarian lunches in

Berkeley’s People’s Park every afternoon for more than one decade. Photos collected in

Compost’s 2009 anthology reveal how giant metal pots or plastic tubs filled with different stews

served dozens every day offered opportunities for park advocates to not only share in the meal

but activate their political identities by serving food to the homeless. Women like Judy Foster,

Lisa Stephens, Carol Denney, and Wendy Schlesinger whose efforts to make community

gardening, vegetarian meals, and vegetable markets and giveaways accessible have shaped the

legacy of Berkeley’s People’s Park. Two months after the People’s Park confrontation, three

Berkeley residents Vivian, Jim, and Anita began sharing flying and pamphlets throughout the

university neighborhood, including People’s Park bulletins, recruiting knowledge on how to

129 Vincent Maggiora, Photograph, in “A New Controversy Over People’s Park,” by Nikki Rexroat, San Francisco

Chronicle (June 30, 1986), in Folder 3, Carton 4, Eric Dibner Papers (BANC MSS 99/186 c), Bancroft Library,

University of California, Berkeley. 130 Compost, People’s Park, p. 95.

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“conspire to eat” sustainably. In the collective’s Food Conspiracy Cookbook, the group

described how in just a few years, the switch to a whole foods movement was transformative in

sparking a movement of critical consumption:

Just as we have changed Berkeley with our 2000 members and 60 conspiracies, the

conspiracy has changed us. Many of us have sold our cars and now drive vans and trucks.

Some of us now use herbal medicine and even deliver our own babies. Some of us have

gotten more political, others less… We are all much more conscious of how we spend our

money and where we spend it…Buying food with your neighbors is just the start. Sharing

food with our neighbors leads to a community.131

The sketch accompanying the introduction to the Food Conspiracy Cookbook featured a young

woman reading flyers at the People’s Park bulletin board. Posters advocating for a women’s

march and the 1972 anniversary park takeover overlapped with a callout by the Conspiracy

providing information of composting.132 Since the publication of Warren Belasco’s Appetite for

Change, food studies and environmental studies scholars have increasingly cited the importance

of Berkeley’s People’s Park as “the greening of the counterculture” in helping to catapult an

ecology movement focused on local healthy food, as well as a local food movement focused on

increasing access to healthy vegetables via farmer’s markets.133

While consumerism of healthy, local food is encouraged, negative stigma regarding the

sharing of free food remains. At the same time that symbolic food play at People’s Parks

deepened a growing political consciousness about the capitalist food industry, free food has

increasingly become cause to vilify park creators and users. Free meals like anti-police hog

roasts, Puerto Rican stews, and tamales immediately became cause for concern for law

131 Lois Wickstrom, The Food Conspiracy Cookbook: How to Start a Neighborhood Buying Club and Eat Cheaply

(San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1972): p. 5-8. 132 Sara Ruffetto, “Image of Woman at People’s Park,” The Food Conspiracy Cookbook: How to Start a

Neighborhood Buying Club and Eat Cheaply (San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1972): p. 9. 133 See Belasco, Appetite for Change; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

(Penguin, 2007).

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enforcement in the 1960s, warranting police surveillance, harassment, and arrest. In some cases,

food-related citations became a tool for police to regulate spatial access to People’s Parks. As

Mary Potorti outlines in her comprehensive analysis of the Panther Party’s food politics, the FBI

waged an intense and prolonged campaign to reduce the popularity and sustainability of free

food giveaways by arguing that free meals functioned as forms of systematic brainwashing.134

Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard was one of many to publicize how the FBI “ransacked food

storage facilities, destroyed kitchen equipment, and attempted to disrupt relations between the

Black Panthers and local business owners and community advocates, whose contributions made

the programs possible.”135

Similarly at People’s Parks and other gathering spaces where free meals were cooked or

eaten, kitchen and dining spaces became a tool to regulate access to urban green space for Left-

leaning political groups. For example, Jim Fouratt of the Diggers was arrested in Newark for

“‘inciting a riot’ which was in reality giving away free food, but to be sure the police also

charged him for ‘passing out food without a license….’”136 Likewise, at the Young Lords’ free

breakfast program held in a Chicago church basement, police worked with the city inspector to

fine the church for code violations related to zoning and open fire prohibitions to close down

food-related activities as a political deterrent. The church was fined hundreds of dollars daily

because cooking the meals meant failing to meet fire code standards, a sabotage tactic that

ultimately dismantled the program and splintered the organization while painting its members

who pursued the free breakfast program as lawbreakers putting children at risk.137 For more than

134 Potorti, Food for Freedom. 135 David Hilliard, “Introduction,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, eds. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York

City: Seven Stories Press, 2002): p. 13. 136 “WHAT IS A FOU RATT?” The East Village Other, vol. 2, no. 19 (August 19-September 1, 1967): p. 3. 137 Glenn Scharfenorth, private letter to Rich Alberts (April 21, 1972), in Folder “Armitage Avenue Methodist

Church Correspondence 1969-1972,” Box 78, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Collection, Special

Collections, DePaul University.

224

three decades, volunteers serving free meals at Berkeley’s People’s Park have faced harassment,

with police, university administrators and politicians arguing that free food attracted the

homeless population.

In a recent UC Berkeley blog post proposing that it was “time for a change” at Berkeley’s

People’s Park, UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Architecture Sam Davis proposed that new

development of the park and new leadership by the university would reduce the homeless

population while serving as pest control: “Because homeless stay in the park throughout the day,

and food is brought to them, the campus has to mitigate the recurrent issue of food waste

resulting in a rat infestation.”138 While critics continue to argue that food served for free at

Berkeley’s People’s Park abets homelessness, park allies counter by arguing that attacking food

giveaways through zoning and food preparation violations hides the true intent of regaining

control over the park. In her poem “People’s Park,” Claire Baker wrote that without Food Not

Bombs, Berkeley’s People’s Park would be stripped of its political meanings—“a block of un-

real estate/gone homeless, spirit lost.” No other site could fill the void of its erasure with food

giveaways: “do potato salad and spaghetti/ saunter over to Center or Bancroft?/ What about

lemonade and coffee—/do they trickle down the drain/ toward Kittredge…?”139 Generations of

food giveaways, wrapped up in multiple layers of politicized culinary semiotics that made sense

of the random juxtaposition of lemonade and spaghetti, would be erased if Berkeley’s People’s

Park were displaced.

138 Sam Davis, “People’s Park: It’s Time for Change,” UC Berkeley Blog (September 29, 2015):

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2015/09/29/peoples-park-its-time-for-change/ 139 Claire Baker, “People’s Park,” reprinted in Carol Denney, “UC Bulldozes Community Garden in People’s Park,”

at The Street Spirit: Justice News and Homeless Blues (January 7, 2012): http://www.thestreetspirit.org/uc-

bulldozes-community-garden-in-people%E2%80%99s-park/.

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4.6 Conclusion

Immediately after Berkeley’s People’s Park was fenced, violence saturated the city, as

National Guard and local law enforcement reined in efforts by students and allies to reclaim the

lot and “let a thousand parks bloom” across the nation. This violence became the focus of

attention on activist-created parks that became part of larger efforts to discredit park creators in

ways that overshadowed their designs, spaces, ideas, and experiences. Throughout this period of

territorial confrontations, free food remained essential to the experience, mission, and political

symbolism of many People’s Parks that helped connect park creators with one another. And as

parks were increasingly regulated, culinary storytelling became part of parks’ historical

narratives of emotional nourishment. Looking back on a photograph of a soup potluck at

Berkeley’s People’s Park, Todd Gitlin remarked that the radical aspects of cooking in public

transformed simple sustenance into revolutionary theatre: “Steam rises from the pot. You know,

looking at [it] the stew probably tasted raunchy but it was there, it was there at the right time, it

was appreciated, and, who knows, it may still be remembered by those who tasted of it. It was

useful” for imagining a community.140 Like the park designs, posters, and political performances

held in these radical urban green spaces, shared feasts and communal outdoor dining areas

helped define People’s Parks as sensorial fragments of utopic socialism that made sense of

discordant ingredients through new politicized explorations of authenticity.

Growing, cooking, and eating food “liberated” from the capitalist food system fed the

movement biologically, by filling the bellies of park creators and their allies, but also spiritually

and politically as eating shared meals made from donated goods and local produce enabled them

to imagine these People’s Parks—and by extension, the movement—as nourishing, autonomous,

140 Todd Gitlin, “‘Death is not final. Only parking lots,’” Nickel Review (December 26, 1969): p. 7.

226

and sustainable. Through meals as a tangible product of the day’s manual labor and collective

experience, cooking and eating food reinforced insurgent placemaking as a utilitarian exercise in

community building at the same time that cooking and eating meals became opportunities for

playing with identity. Within this historical moment, food’s ephemerality and mobility enabled it

to take on new political meanings as it passed from one gender, one activist group, and one

locale to another through visual and performative storytelling.

In the words of Mary Douglas, “deciphering” the subtle and hidden codes of park meals

reveals a complex system of hierarchical social relations often erased in accounts by park

participants, park critics, and historians.141 By providing a central point of social convergence

within urban space, passing the bread, ladling the stew, and slicing the pork shoulder together,

shared meals helped activists imagine a cross-cultural, transnational, and transhistorical

community of unified activists. Gendered, racialized, and ethnically-saturated metaphors became

a form of culinary political theater to unify the diverse movement by articulating anarchist green

spaces as cross-cultural zones that existed outside the bounds of extant neocolonial power

structures embedded within the urban realm. Food play functioned as both consciousness raising

and political fantasy, through which eaters could embody multiple overlapping identities of

oppression and empowerment beyond their own personal experiences. Food grown, cooked, and

eaten in public space became a medium with which to identify with and romanticize anticolonial

movements within and beyond the United States. At the same time, migrants and communities of

color also used food to articulate their own agency by situating their national and ethnic food

cultures within a larger framework of social justice organizing. Growing, cooking, and eating

food facilitated shared experiences that helped raise consciousness about the colonial power

141 Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal.”

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structures enveloping the food system, and by extension, American culture. Adapting Monica

Perales’s argument about the inherent contradictions within discourse on authenticity, I argue

that People’s Parks attracted participants because they created a table where foods and people

coexisted, combined, and collided as a form of cultural play.142

142 Perales, “The Food Historian’s Dilemma,” pp. 691; For neoliberal multicultura

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CHAPTER 5. FROM BULLDOZER TO BUCKSHOT: POLICING,

BUREAUCRACY, AND VIOLENCE IN THE ORIGINS OF PEOPLE’S

PARKS AS PUBLIC BATTLEGROUNDS

“The People’s Park is a mirror in which our society may see itself. A country which destroyed

Vietnam in order to liberate it sees no paradox in building fences around parks so that people

may enjoy them. It is not at all ironic that officers of the law uproot shrubbery in order to

preserve the peace.”

American Federation of Teachers Local 1474 and 1795, May 30, 19691

5.1 Introduction

Cathy Clark was in Berkeley visiting her cousin Gilbert Shannon when violence broke

out on May 15, 1969 known as Bloody Thursday—the day the University of California, Berkeley

sent in California Highway Patrol Officers and Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies to fence and

defend Berkeley’s People’s Park. Clark was one of dozens who gave witness statements

regarding the violence she saw that day, expressing shock at how law enforcement responded to

demonstrators who marched to the park after a noon rally on campus. The pair had been on a

walking tour down Telegraph Avenue when they came upon local resistance. Alongside two gas

station attendants, Clark and Shannon watched the protestors flip and set a car ablaze before

using it as a target for rock throwing for what felt like an hour. Once police arrived, one officer

shot into the mass of protestors, wounding one and firing at countless more. Other officers

laughed, spraying tear gas into the mixed group of spectators and activists along the street:

When we came to the intersection, we saw the crowd tip over a car and throw rocks at it.

We stopped to watch and saw the crowd set fire to the car…Suddenly one of the

policemen raised his gun and shot a man across the street in the back. The police gave no

orders nor said anything. The man fell on the street, screaming and writhing around. A

couple of policemen laughed. The policeman who had shot the man turned and fired the

1 American Federation of Teachers Local 1474 and 1795, Leaflet (ca. May 30, 1969), quoted in Keith Lampe, “A

Peek at the Mirror,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p. 6.

229

rest of his ammunition at the crowd further up the street. The police began to go up and

down the street, spraying teargas….2

After James Rector died from gunshot wounds fired by police, debates concerning the use of

buckshot versus birdshot became central to critiques of excessive force of law enforcement in

defending the university’s land rights.3 By the following day, Governor Ronald Reagan stationed

more than 2000 National Guardsmen in the park and on streets to regulate pedestrian access

across nearly 18 square blocks in the South Berkeley area.4

The city became a military occupation. Alameda County Sheriff Deputies moved

throughout the city, matching frustrations by locals with escalated aggression. Rock throwing

and fists held high were met with fixed bayonets, nightsticks, and gas masks. Law enforcement

squads guarded vacant lots and parks, enforced an evening curfew, and restricted public

gatherings, assemblies, and loitering.5 By Monday, May 19, groups of protestors began flying

2 Cathy Clark, Witness Statement (May 22, 1969), in Leon Eli Collection of Witness Statements Relating to

People’s Park and General Unrest in Berkeley, California, 1969 (BANC MSS 99/80), in Bancroft Library,

University of California, Berkeley. These accounts are echoed in “The Battle for People’s Park: Round One

(Episode 1 of 8) (BB2422.1),” KPFA, produced by Carol Amyx and Don Kaufman (recorded, April-June, 1969, air

date, May 15, 1970), in Pacifica Radio Archive: http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb242201. 3 Witness testimonies dispute whether police used birdshot or buckshot. Bullet markings on Alan Blanchard, blinded

when shot by police in the People’s Park protest, clearly indicate a birdshot spray pattern. Others reported that by the

end of the day, Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies began replacing birdshot with lethal 00 buckshot to account for

the death of James Rector, shot on a rooftop. Stanley Irwin Glick details how these debates over the size of bullet

used to kill Rector was integral to the investigation of police brutality. Disputes over the size of bullet are part of this

battle over claims of innocence and the legitimacy of violence. These debates over buckshot versus birdshot were

included in coverage by allies outside of the Berkeley area, such as the Stanford University student newspaper that

reported that Sheriff Madigan stated in a press conference that troops were issued birdshot from a van that also

contained buckshot—routinely carried in police units for use in case their lives are threatened.” Photographs of

Bloody Thursday reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle and underground press clearly show an officer steadying

himself while taking aim at a man running away down Dana Street. See Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,”

PhD Dissertation (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984): pp. 99-107; Lang Atwood, “Police End

Second People’s Park; Guard Maintains Uneasy Order,” The Stanford Daily vol. 155, no. 62 (May 19, 1969): pp. 1,

6; “Chronology of Events,” OUTCRY! From Occupied Berkeley, Special Issue Pamphlet (undated, ca. May 15,

1969): p. 8, in Folder 1, Oversize Box 1, Leon Eli Collection of Witness Statements Relating to People’s Park and

General Unrest in Berkeley, California, 1969 (BANC MSS 99/80), in Bancroft Library, University of California,

Berkeley. 4 For the best historiographical coverage of violence concerning Berkeley’s People’s Park between 1969 and 1970,

see W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford University Press, 1989): pp. 154-171; Seth Rosenfeld,

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York City: Picador, 2012): pp.

447-487, 493. 5 Clark, Witness Statement.

230

kites in vacant lots to keep hovering helicopters preparing to teargas the city at bay.6 During this

period of conflict, hundreds of civilians were arrested in various altercations with police and

National Guardsmen while at least a dozen new activist-created parks were planted and at times

literally stomped out by police across the city within hours or days. Yet park advocates and

troops returned—this cycle of insurgent gardening and removal through physical force creating a

trail of growth and destruction, celebration and defense, across the city.

In this chapter I analyze the origins of violent discourse in People’s Parks, revealing how

park creations were embedded within histories of institutionalized violence, such as excessive

policing, racial discrimination, and urban renewal as mediums for displacement, as well as

movements of confrontational civil disobedience emerging within the postwar left. Park creators

used photographs, prose, witness testimonies, press coverage, recorded footage, art, and

insurgent landscape architecture to construct a dichotomous identity as one violently self-

deterministic and innocently authentic. At the same time, states and the media played on racial,

gender, and class stereotypes to position park creators as inherently violent—unruly white

anarchists, brutish immigrants, perverse public occupants, hippie sexual sirens, or homeless drug

addicts. Park allies countered by highlighting the innocent idealism of their projects, using park

creations to shed light on histories of institutionalized violence as extensions of white western

imperialism. Throughout this process, park creators often relied on shifting racial, ethnic, and

gender tropes that played to their advantage in proclaiming innocence or asserting dominance:

hypermasculine savagery, the exoticism of the revolutionary Other, the white virginal Madonna,

the Jesus Christ-like martyr, and the white Robin Hood-esque paternal provider. While food,

manual labor, and design within parks had been mediums for identity play in imagining cross-

6 “Kiting for our Cause,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 21 (May 23-29, 1969): p. 13.

231

cultural, transnational, and transhistorical communities, discourses of violence fragmented

coalitions and simplified complex discussions of power and structural inequality. Discourses of

gender neutrality and racial harmony that had attracted users to the People’s Park method

became flattened in a two-dimensional battleground—supplanted by new rhetoric on appropriate

users of space within state-backed structures of profit-driven neoliberal urbanism.

5.2 From Berkeley to Chicago: The Rise of Political Territoriality in Postwar U.S. Cities

The emergence of Berkeley’s People’s Park coincided with the intersection of various

strands of violence that reinforced overlapping layers of displacement in the postwar era. Police

harassment of working-class renters, civil rights activists, anti-war protestors, panhandlers, street

people, and attendees of happenings within the Bay area had constituted a preeminent threat of

forced dispersion over the past decade.7 Seeing, experiencing, and sharing narratives of violence,

across racial distinctions and national borders, linked activists with one another in postwar social

justice organizing.8 As anti-war, anti-racist, and student rights movements became more

publicized in the mid-to-late-1960s and police brutality against student resistance intensified,

radical protestors envisioned cities as battlegrounds—increasingly using the lexicon and

iconography of war to describe their own civil disobedience tactics and ideologies. Within the

escalation of the Vietnam War, activist groups began to understand policing, racial

7 For scholarship on the policing of radicals and the criminalization of public dwellers in the 1960s and 1960s, see

Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives; Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making

of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2017); Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police

Repression in Urban America (University of California Press, 1992); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass

Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012). 8 In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) described how seeing the beating

of black Southern activists had encouraged them to resist the complacency of American exceptionalism and the

military industrial complex that perpetuated ever-present fears of “the bomb” as a collective source of peril in the

Cold War. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, p. 3, in Folder 6, Reel 1, Box 1, Students

for a Democratic Society Collection (Mss 177/Micro 655), Wisconsin Historical Society.

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discrimination, and urban renewal as domestic forms of warfare that converted streets into battle

zones. Militarized protest rhetoric at home connected with activist discourse weaponizing

resistance abroad.9 By spring of 1968 when French students allied with factory workers in

calling for a revolution, Parisian activists referred to their own nonviolent sit-ins as occupations

and factory takeovers as coups de force.10 Posters featuring demonstrators wielding bricks or as

provincial weaponry asserted physical power against the state.11 Coverage of protests in France,

the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in the U.S. underground press revealed global patterns of

police militarization, as photographs depicted resisters confronted with riot police, tanks, and

bulldozers as an extension of the military industrial complex waging colonization overseas.12

Protestors matched this militarization with a show of force, with racial self-determination

groups like the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Young Comancheros, and Brown Berets allying

with guerrilla fighting insurgencies, donning army-like uniforms, and employing military

9 For scholarship on the strategic use of violence in postwar civil disobedience, see Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest:

Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Harvard University Press, 2005); Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage:

America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin Books, 2016);

Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North

Carolina Press, 2006); Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi

Freedom Movement (NYU Press, 2014); Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the

Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2005); Jeremy Varon, Bring the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red

Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence (University of California Press, 2004). 10 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (University of Chicago Press, 2004); Andrew Feenberg and Jim

Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (State University of New York Press,

2001). 11 For examples, see Atelier Populaire, “Beauty is in the Street,” Poster, (ca. May 1968) in Paris 68 Posters

Collections, Libcom: https://libcom.org/gallery/paris-68-posters; Johan Kugelberg and Philippe Vermès, Beauty is in

the Street: A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising (Four Corners Books, 2011). 12 Jeremy Suri, The Global Revolutions of 1968 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007); Suri, Power and Protest; Martin

Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton

University Press, 2011); Martin Klimke and J. Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism,

1956-1977 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth, Between Prague

Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960-1980 (Berghan Books, 2011); Cynthia Young, Soul

Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Duke University Press, 2006); George

Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987); George

Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of

Everyday Life (AK Press, 2006).

233

terminology when discussing their territorial imperative to reclaim power in the urban realm.13

Protesters challenged state violence by reproducing it through a visual and material culture of

war at home in ways critics used to position activists as militant and globally connected through

structural oppression.

This use of activist combat rhetoric to draw attention to institutionalized violence and

reclaim power expanded as protestors and anarchists escalated their civil disobedience tactics to

building takeovers and bombings.14 While there had been a long history of policing civil rights

and labor rights demonstrations that used spatial protest tactics like sit-ins, students felt that

police regulation of political protests by white youth became perceived as more pre-emptively

threatening. Police began to approach small groups of unarmed street dwellers as potentially

violent rioters in an attempt to quell insurrection before it began. Bayonets, tear gas, and

nightsticks wielded by police against protestors materially re-envisioned American campuses and

cities as battlegrounds. The media added to this narrative reinforcing fears of young, communist,

foreign, and non-white revolutionaries as enemy combatants who militaristically subverted

American democracy and brainwashed youths.15 Between 1967 and 1968, newspapers across the

U.S. used “militant” more than 70,000 times to describe and occasionally link the ideologies and

civil disobedience tactics of black civil rights groups, the North Vietnamese National Liberation

Front, Cuban revolutionaries, student demonstrators, and striking union workers as enemy

13 Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (University of North

Carolina Press, 2015); Betty Luther Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-

Presentations in the 1960s and 1970s (University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical

Politics and African American Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “The

Look of Sovereignty: Style and Politics in the Young Lords,” Centro Journal vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 2015): pp. 4-33. 14 Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The US Left since the Second World War

(Cambridge University Press, 2015): p. 145; Andrew Cornell, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth

Century (University of California Press 2016). 15 Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford University Press,

2004); also see Craig Perriso for analysis of how 1960s-era civil disobedience tactics used the media, Craig Perriso,

Radical Theatrics: Put-ons, Politics, and the Sixties (University of Washington Press, 2014).

234

soldiers.16 Many sources in the U.S. mainstream media framed mounting protests as part of a

pandemic of rebellion to reclaim spatial power at home and abroad. Even nonviolent student

demonstrations that grew throughout the late 1960s were frequently discussed in small town

newspapers as militarized attacks against American democracy that required National Guard and

police intervention to maintain government authority and by extension white male dominance.17

Local newspapers illuminate public debates regarding the militarization of the police in

responding to nonviolent spatial direct actions. After riot police beat students protesting Dow

Chemical Company’s relationship to the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Capitol Times

received numerous letters, both in opposition to the newspaper’s defense of law enforcement as

well as in support of future use of the National Guard in protests. The daily devoted more than a

page to contrasting opinions on the origins and impact of violence; one local correspondent

wrote that Madison-area coverage was biased against students by privileging coverage of a

police officer’s “broken nose” over the breaking of students’ skulls treated as “superficial

wounds.”18 This slanted coverage, the writer argued, was reinforced by statements from

Wisconsin legislators who derided student protestors as “‘beatniks and long-haired greasy pigs’”

and suggested “shoot[ing] them if necessary.”19 Many politically moderate urban dwellers felt

caught in a combat zone. Violent altercations between activists and police were escalating to

such an extent in U.S. cities that leftist magazine WIN (Workshop in Nonviolence) comically

proposed a new superhero for the average citizen—“Urbanman.” With an assortment of

16 This was gathered from a search for the word “militant” from 1967 to 1968 through NewspaperArchive.com’s

database, which although not comprehensive, includes thousands of different newspapers across and beyond the

United States. 17 One widely-reprinted example is the characterization of anti-war sit-ins as militant—See United Press

International, “Students in New Sit-in at S.F. State,” Redlands Daily Facts (Redlands, California) vol. 78 (May 22,

1968): p. 1. 18 Letter to the Editor, The Capitol Times (Madison, WI), vol. October 26, 1967: p. 12 19 Ibid.

235

accessories including kneepad spikes to wade through demonstrations, gas mask, and a briefcase

to hold your “midtown travel permit” and draft card during curfews, Urbanman captured the

mood of the average American citizen who felt caught between political turmoil when

commuting to and from work.20 While the topic of violent regulation of political rebellion often

made the headlines, buried within this national discourse were tensions over the core issues of

access to, power over, and the ability to move within urban space.

This context of ever-present violence shaped how the creators of Berkeley’s People’s

Park understood the establishment of a for-profit parking lot as part of a larger system of

displacement that transformed the city into a political battleground. From the beginning, the

creators of Berkeley’s People’s Park juxtaposed the language of violence and innocence in park

advocacy materials, capitalizing on a balance between play and provocation that both rallied

participants as a form of radical urban populism and incited censure as a physical threat to law

enforcement intrusion. In the original park callout, author Stew Albert defended the lot takeover

as an enactment of participatory democracy and spontaneous community building. Albert argued

that this parcel of land would become “their magical possession”—a blank slate for imagination,

leisure, and problem solving to combat “ugliness as a way of life” produced by a car-centric

culture.21 The university had plans to convert the block into another asphalt parking lot—one

more for-profit parking lot competing for “the allegiance of Berkeley’s Buicks,” yet Albert

disagreed. “One Sunday we will stop this shit.” Embedded within the park proposal was growing

resentment of escalating police harassment of anti-conformist communities that would become

part of the park’s iconography of war. While the park organizing committee began the callout by

depicting the land as “free” and their labor as the creation of “beauty,” the call concluded with a

20 “Urbanman,” Image, WIN vol. 5, no. 14 (1969): p. 17. 21 Robin Hoods Park Commissioner (Stew Albert), “Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17: p. 2.

236

show of force. Albert as “Robin Hoods Park Commissioner” stated that the park committee

would “not be fucked over by the pigs’ ‘move-on’ fascism.”22 Although activists threatened to

stand their ground through physical force, park creators argued that the state—the unified

amalgamation of the police, profit-driven developers, university administrators, and politicians

as the state—were the original aggressors.

Anticipating police harassment, park organizers on the first day of construction were

surprised to find law enforcement hesitant to intervene. One photo of the scene shows an officer

speaking with three long-haired white male park goers with bundles of sod in the background. In

contrast to the defensive headline, “COP ON OUR TURF. DIG?.” the photograph shows park

participants in various postures of timidity and uncertainty. Perhaps anxiously anticipating how

the officer would respond, the three men look off in different directions while another park goer

watches from the distant background. There was no standoff between park creators and police

and no arrests that day. Park advocates capitalized on this law enforcement hesitancy, arguing

that despite near constant police harassment in the South Berkeley area, park creation as a civil

disobedience tactic warranted a different response. As Stew Albert argued in the Barb, “At some

point in the early afternoon a pig appeared and wasn’t sure if our Park was disturbing the peace.

It looked like those guys liked what was going on but a lifetime of conditioning made it

impossible for them to act it out.”23 Park goers argued that the project as a valuable production of

beauty challenged law enforcement’s belief system about regulating troublemakers.

This initial hesitancy to intervene, park advocates argued, cracked the structure of top-

down urban design and private property ownership. Later in the day when the fire department

arrived to extinguish the bonfire, Albert claimed that police defended the park creators: “The

22 Robin Hoods Park Commissioner (Stew Albert), “Hear Ye, Hear Ye.” 23 Stew Albert, “People’s Park: Free for All,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 17 (April 25-May 1, 1969): p. 5.

237

water vulture fire department showed up and put out our source of heart and warm food. A weird

thing happened; some fuzz present tried to talk the fire fighters out of their little murder and

praised our work.”24 By the following week, Albert would report how “some friendly fuzz”

stopped by to wish them luck.25 Narratives of law enforcement conversion became part of the

park’s mythology of consciousness raising. As conflicts over the park escalated over the

following weeks, park advocates would continue to pit law enforcement against one another,

particularly younger out-of-town National Guardsmen against older, World War II veteran

patrolmen, to portray the state as ideologically divided on the use of violence.

When UC Berkeley released a statement on plans to reclaim its land title at the corner of

Haste and Bowditch, discourses of violence shifted as levels of anxiety elevated. More than 1000

workers had spent dozens of hours cleaning up the lot and forming a landscaping foundation for

what they anticipated would be seven weeks of hard manual labor. The statement released by the

Office of Public Information decreed that the lot was in the process of being developed into a

soccer field with the goal of constructing new student housing within a decade.26 Because the

university redirected attention to its urban renewal plan, the narrative of violence surrounding the

park broadened from targeting local acts of police brutality to the sweeping destruction of state-

backed gentrification. Park advocates now tackled the urban renewal plan itself, using the lack of

agreement by university representatives as well as the indeterminacy of the plan to shed light on

the displacement of top-down urban design.27 Pointing out how specific members of the

Berkeley City Council, the UC Berkeley architect, and forestry supervisor of the Berkeley

Department of Parks disagreed with UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor Earl Cheit and liked the park,

24 Albert, “People’s Park.” Berkeley Barb vol. 18, no. 194 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3. 25 Stew Albert, “Getting Serious,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3. 26 Steve Haines, “War of Nerves: Wolves on Prowl,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 3. 27 Steve Haines, “The Cheit Flies: Park in Danger,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3.

238

Haines argued, “If the game was to make the people [think] that the University and the City of

Berkeley are presenting a united front against the street people and ‘People’s Park,’ the jig is up.

Cracks have already appeared in the uniform façade.”28

Because Cheit informed the park goers that he expected no confrontation when the

university assumed its property ownership rights, rumors began spreading at the park that the

university would send in bulldozers to clear the park within days. Steve Haines captured

murmurs around the park’s bonfire: “‘Bulldozers.’ ‘A soccer field.’ ‘A soccer field? Who the

fuck plays soccer.’ ‘When?’ ‘In the morning,’ ‘O[h], next week sometime.’ ‘Are you sure?’”29

Headlines in the Barb now read “Save the Park,” Getting Serious,” and “PARK IN DANGER.”30

A visual and material culture of defense began to emerge within the park when someone added a

large triangle idiophone and placard reading “Bulldozer Alarm” on a telephone pole within the

park’s central information hub.31 Stew Albert argued that this threat was an act of war, and

outlined how a collection of self-appointed “park commissioners” began forming an action plan

for defense: “Some shit had to be implemented. A couple of Tom Paine cats would write a hand-

out information rap of self defense for the side walks of the going to school morning,” Albert

Stated. “Three of us crossed the bridge to KSAN (radio station) and the word of [the] Park went

out cool and explicit. ‘Our Park is under enemy attack, drag your hungover ass into the chilly

morning and stand guard with us.’ Some Brothers and Sisters stayed by a warming fire and slept

in the park.”32 Others issued calls to defend aspects of the park that they had contributed. Augur

Levy, on behalf of the Lunar Society of Drama that had helped build the park’s wooden stage,

28 Steve Haines, “The Cheit Flies: Park in Danger,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3. 29 Steve Haines, “A New Kind of Rest: Work in People’s Park,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 4. 30 Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 4. 31 Steve Haines, “The Cheit Flies: Park in Danger,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3. 32 Albert, “Getting Serious.”

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issued a call that they would defend it: “‘If the University tries to destroy the park we’ll stand on

that stage till [sic] they tear it down.’”33 With reports in the Barb of various groups holding

meetings in the lot, such as Berkeley Rent Control that used the stage to facilitate discussions

about how urban renewal institutionalized displacement, the park now offered opportunities to

make access to urban space a coalitional issue.34

By the following week after the university still had not fenced the lot, local police began

dismantling the park camaraderie by escalating their harassment of park goers on the periphery

to create a culture of paranoia awaiting a coordinated attack. In what would be called the “Great

Brick Robbery,” cops arrested six individuals including a UC Berkeley English professor for

taking $7.50 worth of bricks from the demolition site to be used for the brick pathways within

the park. Because park goers had been given permission by the property owners to collect the

bricks, park goers suspected that plainclothes policeman had been staking out the operation from

a nearby parking lot. All six were released without charges, although the conservative newspaper

the Berkeley Gazette publicized the names of the arrestees as a form of public shaming while

pitting park supporters against one another.35 Park goers feared that park informants were aiding

police, and grew suspicious of standoffish park voyeurs. The Barb reported that “Bob”

questioned an unknown man in the park who “became especially intent when someone

mentioned the need for pot. ‘I went up to him and asked if he was a cop,’ Bob said. The man was

caught off guard and nervously claimed to be an elevator operator.” After the man used a

payphone, law enforcement appeared and were surprisingly “quite civil” in telling occupants to

cool it. The report concluded: “Even in our own turf the Man is watching.”36 While some feared

33 “Platform,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 3. 34 “Meet Neat,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 18 (May 2-8, 1969): p. 11. 35 “The Great ($7.50) Brick Robbery,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 2. 36 “Be Aware! Narks in Park,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 2.

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informants, others feared the arrival of surveyors, fence builders, or demolition crews, and

organized a telephone tree to be able to reach 500 people in less than an hour.37 With “wolves on

the prowl,” the park degenerated into a “war of nerves.”38 Anticipating a bloody battle over the

land, park allies predicted that the state would treat park goers as enemy combatants with DDT,

bulldozers, and murder. An anonymous proclamation printed in the Barb urged readers to

“TAKE A SOLEMN OATH to wage a war of retaliation against the university if it BEGINS to

move against the Park,” such as sending surveyors or posting trespass warnings.39 The neutral

Revolutionary Community Medical Corps, that had been nursing wounds due to manual labor at

the park the past few weeks, now offered to be ready to attend to park defenders “if the

University moves on them,” and requested donations of bandages, gas masks, and helmets in the

days before the park’s fencing.40 The anxiety over bodily harm caused by police was palpable.

Park creators used the language of war to link police brutality with gentrification, arguing

that the university’s urban renewal plan was a coordinated effort to remove student radicals and

poorer street people from the South campus area. Berkeley had experienced years of debates

over urban renewal prior to the creation of the first known People’s Park in the area, Chuck

Herrick Peace and Freedom Park, in 1968.41 Mayor Claude Hutchison of Berkeley had initiated

gentrification projects more than a decade prior by creating an urban renewal committee within

the Berkeley City Council tasked with inspecting the entire city and identifying areas of blight

for future development. This movement of urban renewal emerged simultaneously with civil

37 “Peoples Park Alarm Set-Up,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 2. 38 Steve Haines, “War of Nerves: Wolves on Prowl,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 3. 39 “Proclamation,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 19 (May 9-15, 1969): p. 3. 40 “Medics Ready to Help,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 2. 41 The first known American leftist use of the term “people’s park” as an indicator of an insurgent territory is in

Austin, Texas in 1968 when locals renamed Woolridge Park People’s Park. After the national media attention

devoted to Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969, Austin’s People’s Park became more culturally significant within their

leftist community. See Glenn Jones, “Son of Flipped Out Week or a Medicine for Melancholy,” The Rag vol. 2, no.

20 (March 25, 1968): p. 10.

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rights organizing in the Bay area against racial discrimination in the workplace. From the

beginning, the geographic targets of the committee were West and South Berkeley, where poorer

whites, African Americans, and Asian Americans largely resided in older rented housing. These

patterns of segregation were the product of decades of exclusionary tactics across the Bay area.

Although African Americans had migrated to the west coast for higher paying jobs in the

shipyard, restrictive covenants, redlining, and other forms of housing and job discrimination

denied access to housing in richer, more stable neighborhoods, thereby denying access to higher-

paying employment and wealthier housing that would have afforded a middle-class lifestyle.42

Between 1940 and 1960, the African American population within Berkeley had more than

quadrupled from 3395 black residents in 1940 (4% of the population) to 21,950 African

Americans in 1960 (19.6% of the population) that exacerbating problems of poverty in

segregated areas.43 These issues of housing and access to space were not the backdrop to black

liberation but constituted it. As historian Robert Self argues, “Industrial restructuring,

redevelopment and urban renewal, highway and rapid transit construction, and suburban city

building together become the pivots around which black politics turned.”44 Equal access for

African Americans in housing, education, and employment became fuel for the white-dominated

movement demanding free speech.

As historian Douglas Henry Daniels has shown, by 1962, Berkeley’s Committee on

Racial Equality responded with spatial protest tactics, leading sit-ins and pickets outside the

offices of discriminatory realtors, while members of the NAACP and other civil rights protestors

held rallies and filed lawsuits to challenge de facto and de jure segregation.45 Young white

42 Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press, 2003). 43 See Berkeley Census 1940-1960, Bay Area Census: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Berkeley40.htm. 44 Self, American Babylon, p. 13. 45 Douglas Henry Daniels, “Berkeley Apartheid: Unfair Housing in a University Town,” History Research

242

adults, who made up more than 99% of UC Berkeley’s student population at the time, led sit-ins

at the Sheraton to support the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP in their fight for job

opportunities beyond janitorial positions. Looking back on her experiences as a young radical in

the Bay area, UC Berkeley undergraduate at the time Bettina Aptheker describes how being a

Jewish, anti-racist communist influenced her to protest racial discrimination. Aptheker took part

in anti-racist sit-ins and marches in which activists used their public visibility to pressure

corporations like Bank of America to change their hiring policies. In her memoir, Aptheker

recounts how frequent anti-war and anti-racial discrimination marches from UC Berkeley to the

Oakland Army Induction Center geographically and politically connected these communities and

the issues of free speech, an end to the draft, and civil rights.46 Years before the Free Speech

Movement coalesced on UC Berkeley’s campus, the issue of fair housing attracted a cross-

cultural coalition of supporters, uniting “progressive labor, civil rights, women’s, religious,

social, and cultural organizations” against segregationist realtors and landlords that “don’t rent to

Negroes or beatniks.”47 After California passed the Fair Housing Act of 1963 calling for an end

to racial discrimination in housing, students of color at UC Berkeley, including 300 African

Americans as well as a handful of “nonwhite” international students from Pakistan, India, and

Africa were still prevented from accessing rentals closer to campus.48 In light of the passing of

Proposition 14 in 1964 that largely invalidated fair housing law by restoring property owner

rights, multi-racial, interfaith organizations like the Citizens Committee for Low Cost Housing

May 2013, Vol. 3, No. 5, pp. 321-341. 46 Bettina Aptheker, How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Emeryville, CA:

Seal Press, 2006). 47 Daniels, “Berkeley Apartheid,” pp. 322, 329. 48 See Herbert Ruffin II, “The California Housing Act/The Rumford Act (1963-1968),” BlackPast.org

(encyclopedia): http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/california-fair-housing-act-rumford-act-1963-1968; Herbert Ruffin II,

Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769-1990 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014);

Robert Self, American Babylon; “Rent Bias Persists Against UC Students,” Berkeley Barb vol. 1, no. 2 (August 20,

1965): p. 4.

243

and the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination in Student Housing began advocating for

students of color at the same time that political radicalism on campus erupted over the issue of

free speech.

This coalitional resistance to racial discrimination, led by African Americans, emerged

simultaneously as the city used urban renewal to its advantage to gentrify neighborhoods where

African Americans, politically radical students, beatniks, and the working class lived.49 Under

terms of the Federal Housing Acts of 1959 and 1961, Berkeley gained non-cash credits for its

“rehabilitative” urban renewal program that, while protecting citizens from housing

discrimination, facilitated university expansion under the guise of slum clearance. As part of UC

Berkeley’s “Land Acquisition Program” within its “Long Range Development Plan,” the state of

California and the Berkeley City Council assisted the university’s aim to acquire nearly 18 acres

of land at substantial discount, razing dozens of buildings to meet the demands of a doubled

student population. These urban renewal projects co-existed with others in the surrounding Bay

area that pushed African Americans to use more innovative civil disobedience tactics, like

coalitional tent-ins, to protest the “phasing out” of black families in public housing slotted for

gentrification.50

Berkeley’s plan incorporated extensive landscaping projects to beautify the South campus

area dominated by African Americans that had been segregated from other parts of the city along

with student radicals and hippie loiterers who had flocked to the west coast.51 By the so-called

“summer of love,” sources from both mainstream and alternative communities warned of an

49 “Familiar Foes Join Hands against ‘Renewal,’” Berkeley Barb vol. 2, no. 13 (April 1, 1966): pp. 1, 2. 50 “Historic Tent-In Wins Housing Victory,” Berkeley Barb vol. 2, no. 25 (June 24, 1966): p. 3. 51 Campus Planning Committee and the Office of Architects and Engineers, “Long Range Development Plan,”

(University of California, Berkeley, June 1962), archived at ERIC: Institute of Education Sciences:

https://eric.ed.gov/?q=long+range+development+plan+berkeley+&id=ED036058.

244

influx of street people and political radicals into the Bay area. These warnings were reiterated or

fueled by statements made by the Diggers who argued that between 50,000 and 200,000 youths

would flock to the Bay in search of new ways of living.52 Mainstream newspaper and magazine

articles portrayed the hippie migration as parasitic or animalistic, having “tentacles…shooting

from pad to pad across the nation.”53 While cities newspapers carried reprints like these from AP

and UPI newswires, local authors often agreed that with the arrival of hippies, narcotics arrests,

panhandling, and venereal diseases increased, indicating the extent of the movement’s harmful

spread. Reports of the “hippie invasion” included warnings and condemnations from San

Francisco Police Chief Thomas Cahill and San Francisco Mayor John Shelley who, respectively,

claimed that hippies offered “no asset to the community” and declared them “unwelcome.”54

Articles like these helped to depict the growing community of young anti-conformists as an alien

threat descending upon and negatively impacting traditional American values of respect for

authority, private property ownership, and career-focused lives.55

Small cities like Nashua, New Hampshire worried that “‘long-haired no goodniks’” were

spreading to their communities, and looked to local police to “keep a lid on hippies” by

instituting new curfews on city parks where they congregated. While the Nashua perspective

featured local Police Chief Paul Tracy denigrating hippies as “momma’s boys” who had been

“rejected by their fathers for some reason or other,” an accompanying front-page report in the

same issue of the Nashua Telegraph read, “Hippie Violence Erupts; 2 GIs Stabbed in Boston,”

52 The Diggers, “The Diggers State Simply,” Flyer, (Communication Co., UPS, est. 1967), Box 1, Chester Anderson

Papers, ca. 1963-1980 (BANC MSS 92/839), Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. 53 Robert Strand, “The Hippie Story: Flower Children’s ‘Culture’ Spreading,” Tucson Daily Citizen Vol. 95, no. 157

(July 5, 1967): p. 25. 54 Cahill and Shelley quoted in Strand, “The Hippie Story;” See Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History

(Random House, 1984): sp. pp. 105-121; Sherry Smith demonstrates how many New Mexico Native American

communities found them unwelcome as well; See Sherry Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power

(Oxford University Press, 2014): p. 143. 55 “S.F. Fears Hippie Influx,” The Daily Review Vol. 74, no. 176 (Hayward, California, 1967): p. 25.

245

after police arrested park dwellers for violating a midnight curfew.56 Both articles agreed that

controlling access to public parks functioned well in controlling the growth of both the hippies

and the homeless. In addition to lack of access to affordable housing, persistent on-the-street

police harassment, event surveillance, planted saboteurs, and curfew arrests, the policing of

“appropriate” use of public green space was intended to disperse high concentrations of what

many critics characterized as potentially violent urban dwellers waiting to erupt.57

As Steve Glick argues in his dissertation on Berkeley’s People’s Park, these sentiments of

hippie fear were shared by UC Berkeley administrators and politicians who, in part, targeted

development of Block 1875-2 (bounded by Haste, Telegraph, Bowditch, and Dwight) to alleviate

the “high crime rate” in the South campus area. Although the development plan had never posed

gentrification as a means for reducing crime, Chancellor Heyns petitioned the Regents to

purchase the lot despite knowing that a lack of funds would prevent construction for nearly

another decade. This intention to remove street people rather than transform the lot into a more

utilitarian space, helped reinforce the mythology that violence might have been avoided had the

university not waited two weeks to announce that funds had been acquired to develop the lot as

planned.58 Yet as architectural historian Peter Allen has argued, these modernist planning

processes especially on university campuses were a pattern of “violent design” that, through

56 “City Police Keep Lid on Hippies,” Nashua Telegraph Vol. 100, no 121 (July 23, 1928): 1; “Hippie Violence

Erupts; 2 GIs Stabbed in Boston,” Nashua Telegraph Vol. 100, no 121 (July 23, 1928): p. 1. 57Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism, and Urban Renewal,” ISSC Working Paper

Series 2005-2006.21, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, (University of California, Berkeley, May 11, 2007),

reprinted online: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vz4s7jj?query=violent;hitNum=1#page-3; Peter Allen, “The End

of Modernism?: People’s Park, Urban Renewal, and Community Design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians vol. 70, no. 3 (September 2011): pp. 354-374. 58 Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” PhD Dissertation (State University of New York at Stony Brook,

1984).

246

various forms of displacement, catalyzed radical student protests by attempting to eliminate the

“blight of bohemia.”59

In 1967, UC Berkeley purchased the 2.8-acre lot at the intersection of Haste and

Bowditch Streets for student dorms and/or recreation facilities.60 As the author of the original

park callout, Albert positioned the project as a stark contrast to the University of California

Berkeley’s plans to convert the current “swamp” of an informal muddy parking area into one of

many for-profit asphalt-covered lots in the city.61 Locals lamented that the lot had been vacant

for more than a year after the university demolished what had been nostalgically remembered as

beautiful old townhomes rented to students in what had been a working class neighborhood of

color. Stories circulated that students had been evicted during exams week as early evidence of

the university’s cruelty regarding the property.62 After the student tenants were evicted and

homes were demolished by 1968, the university stalled its development plan due to lack of

funds, leaving the cleared site informally functioning as an unpaved, unmaintained parking area

turned “mud hole” on rainy days. Demolition had been part of joint efforts by the university and

the city to gentrify the politically radical South campus area near Telegraph Avenue—a street

bridging the hippie nexus of Berkeley with Oakland, home to the Black Panther Party and the

Oakland Army Induction Center where anti-war protests were held. These projects were

perceived by the Berkeley City Council as urban beautification by removing dilapidated

structures that raised leases for store tenants and home renters. The plan used eminent domain to

demolish properties to broaden green spaces on campus property, yet these lawns and parklets

59 Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism, and Urban Renewal,” ISSC Working

Paper Series 2005-2006.21, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, (University of California, Berkeley, May 11,

2007), reprinted online: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vz4s7jj?query=violent;hitNum=1#page-3. 60 Retired Lieutenant John E. Jones, “A Brief History of UCPD, Berkeley: People’s Park,” University of California

Berkeley Police Department: http://police.berkeley.edu/about_UCPD/ucpdhistory.html. 61 Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner, “Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” Berkeley Barb 8, no. 16 (April 18-25, 1969): p. 2. 62 Allen, “Violent Design,” p. 20.

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were off limits to Berkeley residents not affiliated with the university but who were part of the

population most likely renting housing slated for removal. Feeling targeted by the state and

university, some believed politicians intended the development to remove the “human cesspool”

puddling at the corner of Haste and Bowditch—what Assemblyman Don Mulford described as a

“rat’s nest that is acting as a magnet for the hippie set and the criminal element” in the city.63

Coverage of protests against urban renewal reveal how American citizenship became

embedded within discourses of urban spatial power during the late-Cold War era. As historian

Francesca Ammon argues in her book Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar

Landscape, between 1950 and 1980, more than 7.5 million dwelling units were demolished,

creating a “culture of clearance” that developers and politicians spun as American progress.

Construction equipment ads, children’s books, and government publications on urban renewal

painted the bulldozer as not only necessary but patriotic. By transforming the bulldozer from

military weapon to a tool rejuvenating U.S. cities, America could win the “dirt-moving war”

against blight.64 Yet as James Baldwin argued, “urban renewal” was code for “Negro

Removal.”65 Activists characterized gentrification as part of a larger war perpetuated by

American imperialism against poorer people of color, street people, and political radicalism. The

racial, class, and ethnic undertones of slum clearance helped position the bulldozer as the

embodiment of white masculine capitalism and as the bastion of American identity. Demolition

on the edges of college campuses in the late-1960s made the displacement of politically radical

students, people of color, and the working class a coalitional issue that fueled the labeling of

63 Don Mulford quoted in W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, p. 150. 64 Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale University

Press, 2016). 65 James Baldwin, Quotes, The Berkshire Eagle vol. 72, no. 105 (Pittsfield, Massachusetts, September 6, 1963): p.

18.

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urban renewal resisters as un-American. In a series of editorials on the Columbia University

protests in which students seized several buildings on campus for a week to protest the

construction of a racially segregated gym in Harlem’s Morningside Heights, Ohio’s Coshocton

Tribune called the demonstrators who held up signs declaring occupied buildings as a “liberated

zone” an “explosive militant minority of budding anarchists.” Students’ methods were

characterized as in parallel with those of the Hitler Youth, and their actions a “rehearsal for

revolution” connected with other “outbreaks” of “hooliganism” across the U.S.66

Activist organizing against urban renewal was similarly critiqued in the mainstream

media as oppositional to the legislative and corporate agenda and vilified as mutinous. In a

widely-reprinted article on urban renewal in Detroit, authors Robert Allen and Paul Scott

lambasted the efforts of the group Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC) who were

leading the local fight against slum removal that could potentially stall urban redevelopment in

other cities. Because CCAC argued that planning advisory boards did not represent the

demographics of the urban dwellers being displaced—namely, poorer communities of color,

recent immigrants, and political radicals—the group pressured Housing and Urban Development

(HUD) to withhold funds supporting urban planning projects in more than 65 cities until

advisory boards were economically and racially integrated. Allen and Scott characterized the

CCAC as a faction of “black militancy” to discredit their anti-gentrification organizing. The

piece reiterated rumors of the group’s ties to communist organizations as well as their alleged

efforts to subvert youths by “acquaint[ing] young Negroes with the guerrilla warfare teachings of

‘Che’ Guevara, the former Cuban official who was killed recently while trying to turn Bolivia

66 “Might Not Right in College Riots,” The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio), vol. 58, no. 253 (May 6, 1968):

p. 9; Bob Considine, “New York Neutral Site,” The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio), vol. 58, no. 253 (May 6,

1968): p. 9; John Chamberlain, “Rehearsal for Revolution,” The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio), vol. 58, no.

253 (May 6, 1968): p. 9.

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into another Vietnam.”67 While more than half the article critiqued CCAC as a threat to

democracy, Allen and Scott concluded by asking readers the extent to which the U.S.

government would allow “militant civil rights groups” to influence urban renewal campaigns in

American cities who sought to redistribute property as a form of spatial power. When framed by

activists as a political imperative to claim space as an aspect of full citizenship, the cross-cultural

issue of sovereignty was demonized as anti-American.

The park’s original callout and subsequent park advocacy materials campaigning for

community-based urban design demonstrated that the organizing committee of Berkeley’s

People’s Park anticipated armed conflict. Connecting the demolition of affordable housing with

the battles waged in Vietnam, activists argued that the park existed within a constant state of war

at home and abroad. Connecting the park with anti-colonial resistance movements across the

world, the callout declared they would “police [their] own park and not allow its occupation by

imperial power.” Signing with the pen name “Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner,” Stew Albert

defended the act of spontaneous park design as a “rural reclamation project” that would take

property back from the rich and give to the people, an action that was most likely interpreted by

critics as a radical socialist call to arms to radically redistribute property as a form of wealth.

Albert already had a substantial record of arrests and political activity, and publishing under his

own name on the park at the end of the first week attracted both radical followers and police

surveillance.68 Albert had been tracked by the FBI since becoming vocal in the anti-war

movement in 1966 before gaining notoriety for his participation in the attempted exorcism and

levitation of the Pentagon in 1967 as well as the election of a pig at the 1968 Democratic

67 Robert Allen and Paul Scott, “New Black Militants Under Federal Watch,” Hagerstown Daily Mail (Hagerstown,

MD), (December 21, 1967): p. 4. 68 Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner, Ibid.

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National Convention where he was arrested and initially charged as a co-conspirator to incite a

riot—what would famously become the Chicago Seven trial. Through the late 1960s, Albert’s

affiliation with white male radicals such as Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Tom Hayden (one

of his roommates in Berkeley) who had connections to such civil disobedient groups as the

Diggers, the Youth International Party (the Yippies), the National Mobilization Committee to

End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) and SDS made him “armed and dangerous” according to FBI

records.69

For years Albert had worked with these groups that capitalized on political

demonstrations to provoke regulation through public mockery of American power structures,

such as blocking traffic, throwing blood, and burning money. The Red Squad, part of the

Chicago Police’s department for monitoring leftist political activity, had been monitoring these

organizations within the city. Rumors circulated that demonstrators would execute a range of

stunts, from one thousand bare-breasted women marching for peace and Yippie women seducing

delegates by drugging their drinks to fears that the city’s water supply would be poisoned with

LSD.70 Critical of the “Festival of Life” organized by the Yippies and MOBE to be held outside

Chicago’s Democratic National Convention (DNC), Mayor Daley argued that these seemingly

carefree happenings in Grant Park and Lincoln Park functioned as tactical maneuvers to control

public space, distracting from the nomination of President Johnson and therefore attempting to

disempower the Democratic Party as a state apparatus for war.71 Proclaiming, “The Streets

Belong to the People!” demonstration leaders suggested that if police attacked DNC protestors

69 See files in Folder “Albert, Stewart, 1966-1972,” Box 10, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo Albert Papers, Joseph A.

Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. 70 Jack Mabley, “Across America, War Fueled a Growing Discontent,” Chicago Tribune (August 20, 1978): section

2, p. 1. 71 See David Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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they should spread throughout the city in groups of 50 to 100, using creative “street action” to

strategically target delegate hotels, draft boards, and banks to prevent law enforcement from

stopping the demonstrators in one swift maneuver. Critics of these demonstrations, such as

Daley, perceived convention protestors as an occupying force rather than performers of political

theater. To ignore the power of their prolonged public visibility, their self-proclaimed alliances

with the Vietnamese, Cuban revolutionaries, and the black resistance was a form of benign

negligence that failed to account for how their acts of civil disobedience could attract a

revolution.

The Yippies were self-identified Peter Pan figures who knew that their politicized

frivolity would provoke paranoia, and require the attention of law enforcement in the city center

“that would divert troops from the black community” in the urban periphery.72 A poster callout

for the festival warned attendees that President “Johnson [would] be nominated under military

guard, under the protection of bayonets and the Army.”73 While framing themselves as innocent,

the Yippies intended for their protest to incite violence with the expectation that “the more

troops, the better the theater.”74 Court documents during the Chicago 7 trial reveal how

demonstration spokespeople, like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Tom Hayden, used language

to imagine the public park as territory gained in an escalating land battle with enemy forces.

Although the defense attorney repeatedly objected, in his closing argument Prosecutor Tom

Foran portrayed the protestors as “filthy,” “evil,” and “vicious” savages, by encouraging “fuck-

72 Jerry Rubin, Fifth Estate (April 1-15, 1968), reprinted online at Fifth Estate Archive:

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/62-sept-19-oct-2-1968/rubin-yippies-infiltrated/. 73 “Rubin, Yippies Infiltrated,” Fifth Estate no. 62 (September 19-October 2, 1968), reprinted online at Fifth Estate

Archive: https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/62-sept-19-oct-2-1968/rubin-yippies-infiltrated/. 74 Yippies, Washington Free Press (February 29, 1968): quoted in House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress,

Second Session, “Disruption of 1968 Democratic National Convention,” in Hearings before the Committee on Un-

American Activities (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 30-May 2, and May 22, 1968): p.

2253.

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ins” and threatening to propel urine and fecal missiles. Foran capitalized on spatial commands

directed to park goers in a “battle plan”: “Hold the park,” “Take the city,” and “Liberate the

space”—all phrases that would become part of the narrative at Berkeley’s People’s Park. When

demonstrators climbed on monuments and took down the American flag, Foran argued festival

goers sought a violent revolution despite their allegations of seeking to create a utopian

encampment in Lincoln Park. The encampment was a “psychological training ground of this

crowd and the psychological torture of the police.” Foran argued that police were left with little

recourse but to remove the combatants.75

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records reveal that although Stew Albert was not

charged during the Chicago Seven trial, his residence, writings, relationships, and movements

throughout the Bay area were being monitored. At the same time, local police in Berkeley and

college administrators took notice of his participation in demonstrations on UC Berkeley’s

campus in 1969 and began tracking his political involvement. By spring of 1969 when the FBI

called his house in Berkeley to determine his whereabouts, agents were writing about him to FBI

Director J. Edgar Hoover, characterizing him as a “leading agitator” who expressed “strong or

violent anti-U.S. sentiment,” and had both “mental instability” and a “propensity for violence.”76

The FBI was most likely watching Albert when he and his partner met with park organizers five

days before Albert published the original callout. This small group of mostly white, middle-class

community members with ties to the Yippies, the Free Speech Movement, the National

75 Tom Foran, Closing Arguments, United States of America vs. David T. Dellinger, et al., Defendants (No. 69 CR

180), in Folder 89-3, Box 89, Subseries 1, Series 1, Richard J. Daley Collection (MSRJD_04_Series1), Richard J.

Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago. 76 See various FBI notes, Folder “Albert, Stewart, 1966-1972,” Box 10, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo Albert Papers,

Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

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Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and local businesses met to brainstorm

ideas on how to recruit workers to transform the muddy lot into a shared recreation area.

Having monitored his writings at the Berkeley Barb, his political involvement, and

movement throughout the city, law enforcement undoubtedly interpreted the lot transformation

as a tactic to radically redistribute property. Albert argued that the park creation was an

environmental improvement as well as a carefree “happening,” but his relationship with

Hoffman, the Yippies, the Black Panthers, as well as his participation in actions that used playful

street theater to elicit police violence attracted the attention of police and politicians. While the

park’s original callout identified the vacant lot as a site for utopian idealism and the action as an

embodiment of beauty and freedom, Albert’s callout also situated the project as a reaction

against police militarization. This callout became the first material piece of a body of

iconography, speeches, and rhetoric on violence surrounding Berkeley’s People’s Park that

situated the threat of police encroachment within a longer history of urban renewal as a tool of

spatial regulation in the Bay area. California Governor Ronald Reagan saw the park development

as an opportunity to put his gubernatorial campaign promise “to clean up the mess at Berkeley”

into action.77

5.3 Natural Aggression: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Representations of Violence in

Chicago’s Poor People’s Park

At the same time troops fenced and guarded Berkeley’s park in the May of 1969, poorer

residents of color in Lincoln Park were fighting their local urban renewal board to prevent the

77 For more on how “cleaning up” unrest in Berkeley was central to his political career, see Michelle Reeves, “’Obey

the Rules or Get Out’: Ronald Reagan’s 1966 Gubernatorial Campaign and the ‘Trouble in Berkeley,’ Southern

California Quarterly vol. 92, no. 3 (Fall 2010): pp. 275-305.

254

construction of a for-profit tennis court on a lot recently rendered vacant by the demolition of

affordable housing. Tensions over spatial power had been brewing since Puerto Ricans began

migrating to Chicago in the postwar era. Compounded by the displacement of American

imperialism in Borinquén, Puerto Rican migrants were met with racial discrimination in housing,

employment, and police brutality upon migrating to the Windy City.78 Historiography and oral

history interviews have illuminated how this migration and settlement was difficult for families

who sought to create a new life in America’s urban metropolis yet were treated like foreigners.79

Racial and class discrimination against Puerto Ricans were worsened by expansive urban

renewal projects that targeted Puerto Rican neighborhoods for removal.80

After a police officer murdered a man during a Puerto Rican parade in 1966, the Wicker

Park and Humboldt Park neighborhoods responded with open rebellion against racial

78 For broader history of American imperialism in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican migration as a context for

displacement, see César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898

(University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in

Twentieth-Century New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto

Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony (New York City: Nation Books, 2015); José Ramón Sánchez,

Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States (NYU Press, 2007). 79 For historiography on Puerto Ricans in Chicago and the troubles they faced with urban renewal and police

brutality, see Ana Ramos-Zayas, National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican

Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Jacqueline Lazú, “The Chicago Young Lords: (Re) constructing

Knowledge and Revolution,” Centro Journal vol. 15, no. 11 (Fall 2013): pp. 28-59; Michal Staudenmaier, “Between

Two Flags: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Formation in Puerto Ricans Chicago, 1946-1994,” PhD Dissertation

(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2016); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto

Ricans in Postwar Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Mérida Rúa, A Grounded Identidad: Making New

Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2012); Gina Pérez, The Near Northwest

Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (University of California Press, 2004); For primary

sources, see oral history interviews by José Jiménez with Lincoln Park residents, such as Patricia Devine-Reed and

Carlos Flores, Young Lords Collection, Special Collections, Grand Valley State University, archived online:

http://cdm16015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16015coll6; Carlos Alvarez, Interview with Studs

Terkel, in Studs Terkel, Division Street America (New York City: New Press Edition, 1993): pp. 88-92. 80 For scholarship on Chicago urban renewal, see Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public

Policy on Chicago’s West Side (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the

Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (Picador, 2010); Arnold Hirsch,

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (University of Chicago Press, 1998); Gregory

Quires, Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline (Temple University Press, 1989); Michael

Carriere, “Chicago, the South Side Planning Board, and the Search for (Further) Order: Toward an Intellectual

Lineage of Urban Renewal in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History vol. 39, no. 3 (2013): pp. 411-432; Neal

Samors, ed., Chicago in the Sixties: Remembering a Time of Change (Chicago’s Books, 2006).

255

discrimination and police brutality.81 This three-day, cross-cultural neighborhood resistance

known as the Division Street Riots propelled the formation of several politically radical groups

in the area, including the Young Lords Organization (YLO), led by twenty-year-old José “Cha-

Cha” Jiménez.82 Jiménez would later root his activism within his upbringing as a Puerto Rican

migrant and former member of the Young Lords gang, which had officially formed in 1959 as a

neighborhood defense league against police violence and harassment that often functioned as a

youth gang during its early years.83 After he was arrested for narcotic possession, Jiménez

encountered the Nation of Islam and the writings of Malcolm X while in prison, influencing him

to initiate a Puerto Rican nationalist agenda and network with local Black Power leaders like

Fred Hampton and local anti-urban renewal organizers upon leaving prison in the late-1960s.

Linking police brutality with housing discrimination, Jiménez made institutionalized violence

against communities of color the foundation for the cross-cultural organization.84 When YLO

member Manuel Ramos was murdered by an off-duty police officer in 1969, Jiménez stated,

“You can arrest us, you can burn us, you can shoot us, you can kill us, but you can’t stop us.”85

Ramos’s murder strengthened the ties between social justice organizations in Lincoln Park and

created a rainbow coalition that asserted their survival as rooted in physical self-defense.

Connecting Black Panthers, white Appalachian migrants, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans,

81 For more on the Division Street Riots, see Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, “Riot and Remembrance: Puerto Rican

Chicago and the Politics of Interruption,” Centro Journal vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall 2016): pp. 204-217. 82 José Jiménez, “The Young Lords in Lincoln Park,” Student Summer Scholars (Grand Valley State University),

Paper 96: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/sss/96. 83 For historiography on the Chicago Young Lords, see Judson Jeffries, “From Gang-Bangers to Urban

Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 96, no. 3

(Autumn 2003): pp. 288-304; Jeffrey Ogbar, “Puerto Rico en mi Corazón: The Young Lords, Black Power and

Puerto Rican Nationalism in the U.S., 1966-1972,” Centro Journal vol. 18, no. 1 (Fall 2006): pp. 149-169. 84 For historiography situating the Chicago Young Lords within Puerto Rican organizing, see

Darrel Enck-Wanzer, ed., The Young Lords: A Reader (NYU Press, 2010); and situating the Chicago Young Lords

within broader Puerto Rican organizing, see Andres Torres, The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora

(Temple University Press, 1998). For evidence of how he Young Lords claimed this gang identity as part of their

past, see Hilda Vasquez Ignatin, “Young Lords Serve and Protect,” Y.L.O. (May 1969): p. 6. 85 Janet Jones, “You Can’t Stop Us,” The Movement vol. 5 no. 5 (June 1969): p. 4.

256

and white students, the demonstration was part of a larger resistance to institutionalized violence

that linked urban renewal with police brutality.

As the face for Chicago’s law enforcement, Mayor Daley responded to activist calls to

demand greater accountability for police brutality and structural inequality as threats of violence,

escalating them with bureaucratic red tape and aggressive public statements. During the 1968

Democratic National Convention, Daley had used threatening undertones from the Yippies and

SDS as cause for hiring extra officers and stationing National Guard troops as protection during

the convention. In an attempt to dissuade protestors from congregating, the police reinforced a

curfew in public parks during the convention. The first major conflict occurred when police

stormed the park after curfew was announced, forcing park goers to flee into surrounding

neighborhoods. Some social justice organizations like the North Side Cooperative Ministry

anticipated how convention protests could be manipulated as an excuse to harass locals of color,

arguing that police could use fleeing protestors to their advantage to beat, harass, and arrest local

working-class people of color accused of breaking the curfew. 86 The Chicago-based ministry

served as a social justice congregation of 26 churches in the Near North/Lincoln Park area that

pressed churches and congregants to advocate for social justice issues as a form of liberation

theology. In preparation for the convention in the summer of 1968, the North Side Cooperative

Ministry’s Common Council organized an Emerging People’s Summer Task Force with a plan to

prepare by providing medical attention, shelter, and clothing in distinct geographic areas “should

[Chicago] become a combat zone.” Anticipating that police would target communities of color

during convention protests, churches across Lincoln Park in the Near North area were designated

as emergency centers, refugee shelters, or first aid hospitals, stockpiling food “in case normal

86 Ibid.

257

flow of supplies is cut off in an attempt to seal off the ghetto,” and healing and sheltering the

injured in case of martial law.87

After three nights of tensions between activists and the police, the North Side

Cooperative Ministry marched to the park to advocate for the park to remain open 24 hours a day

for free and peaceful assembly. The assembly, holding a religious service in the park, was

attacked by police when troops entered the park at curfew.88 Roy Ries, a student at Lincoln

Park’s McCormick Theological Seminary who had been beaten while participating in the service

spent twelve days in the hospital for temporary blindness caused by a fractured skull.89 Calling

the Chicago police maneuvers an “unconstitutional” abuse of power, Ries felt that his work

defending protestors near the police line and singing “America the Beautiful” was eye-opening:

“It was a great experience of politicization,” he explained. “Most of the kids were idealistic. But,

you get clobbered by a rifle butt or a nightstick, and you learn an awful lot. I can’t say what these

groups…will do, but it’s for sure they’re not going to stand there and get beat.”90 Ries felt part of

a growing movement of citizens unwilling to accept police beatings as a state tool in regulating

spatial citizenship.

87 Emerging Peoples Summer Task Force, Folder “Education Task Force Committee-minutes, March-December,

1968” (304), Box 29, North Side Cooperative Ministry Collection, University of Illinois Chicago, Richard J. Daley

Library Special Collections and University Archives; for coverage on how police did target local citizens of color

during DNC arrests, see Lincoln Park Press (September 1968), sp. pp. 1, 4, in Folder 106 Part 1, Box 7, Institute on

the Church in an Urban-Industrial Society Records (MSICUI89) Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and

University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago. 88 Robert Slater, “Local Man Files Suit vs. Chicago,” Bucks County Courier Times (Levittown, Pennsylvania,

November 19, 1968): pp. 1, 23, 37. 89 Ibid. As an educated, religious, young white man from quintessentially American Levittown, Ries became the

lead complainant for a case introduced by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenging a mid-1950s

statute arguing that police officers were individually responsible for their use of force. In addition, Ries sued the city

of Chicago for $1.25 million dollars in damages due to a fractured skull, temporary loss in vision, and a 12-day

hospital stay. 90 Slater, Ibid.; Tom Foran, Closing Arguments, United States of America vs. David T. Dellinger, et al., Defendant.

(No. 69 CR 180), Folder 89-3, Box 89, Series 1, Subseries 1, Richard J. Daley Collection (MSRJD_04_Series1),

Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago.

258

Chicago’s Poor People’s Park, created only a few blocks away from these beatings in the

heart of Lincoln Park, was inspired by this turmoil along with ongoing disputes over urban

renewal, police harassment of people of color, and the need for greater access to public parks and

playgrounds. Lincoln Park’s “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan,” issued in 1962, was a

campaign for blight removal and historic preservation that resulted in catastrophic damage to

what had been a close-knit diverse community.91 The plan flattened entire blocks to make way

for the construction of new middle-income townhouses. Chicago was part of a transatlantic

movement of urban renewal in post-World War II cities that capitalized on federal grants for

slum clearance, infrastructure, and new urban middle-class housing with the intent to eliminate

the concentration of inner-city impoverished communities that had amounted to what many

argued was an “urban crisis.”92 Historians have revealed how residents across Chicagoland

experienced dramatic upheaval due to urban renewal in the postwar era, with the city obtaining

more than 100 million dollars in federal grants to maintain “successful progress” in

redevelopment efforts.93 Neal Samors’s published collection of memoirs, Chicago in the Sixties,

offers numerous accounts of entire blocks faced with relocating to other parts of the city to make

way for the expanded campus of University of Illinois, Chicago, the expansion of Augustana

Hospital, in addition to other major stimulus projects attempting to pull young white middle-

91 Department of Urban Renewal, “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan” (lp.lpca.dur.0005), (1962), Lincoln Park

Neighborhood Collection, Special Collections, University Library, DePaul University, reprinted online at:

http://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/cdm/ref/collection/lpnc6/id/1041. 92 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University

Press, 1996). 93 “City’s Urban Renewal Aid Sets Record,” Chicago Tribune, Classified Real Estate and Rental Guide (January 7,

1968): 3A 1; for more on Chicago postwar urban renewal see Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans

and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Arnold Hirsch, Making the

Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Beryl

Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America

(New York City: Picador, 2010).

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class professionals back into the city limits.94 According to the film short, A Place to Live,

commissioned by the Chicago’s Department of Urban Renewal in 1968 to promote urban

renewal and respond to growing backlash, more than 3000 people were forced to move each year

in the postwar era.95

Residents of Lincoln Park were hit especially hard during this time period, after already

experiencing decades of displacement. In the 1950s, large populations of Puerto Ricans migrated

to Chicago in search for employment. Segregation created two major Puerto Rican enclaves—La

Madison (Halsted to Kedzie via Madison) and La Clark (Ohio to Armitage bounded by State,

Clark, La Salle, Wells, and Halsted)—that bordered Lincoln Park, making the intersection of

Halsted and Armitage, where Poor People’s Park would be formed, one nexus of this

community. As urban renewal projects such as the construction of Carl Sandburg Village and the

University of Illinois, Circle Campus dispersed these concentrations, Puerto Rican enclaves

began forming in the Lincoln Park and Wicker Park areas by 1960. The urban renewal campaign

known as “Keep Chicago Clean” in the near North side of Chicago was led by the Lincoln Park

Community Conservation Council as the local liaison and decision-making body for urban

renewal in their neighborhood working with adjacent councils including the Ranch Triangle

Association, the Old Town Triangle Association, and the Sheffield Association. The Lincoln

Park General Neighborhood Renewal Plan encompassed a development area of 300 square acres

and anticipated displacing more than 70,000 residents in that neighborhood alone with 18.5

million in federal grants.96 The project targeted the demolition of affordable housing occupied by

94 Neal Samors, Chicago in the Sixties (Chicago’s Neighborhoods, Inc., 2006). 95 A Place to Live, Film, directed by DeWitt Beal (Department of Urban Renewal, City of Chicago, 1968), DeWitt

Beal Collection (F.2012-01-0026), Chicago Film Archives, archived online:

http://www.chicagofilmarchives.org/collections/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/11481. 96 Department of Urban Renewal, “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan” (lp.lpca.dur.0005), (1962), Lincoln Park

Neighborhood Collection, Special Collections, University Library, DePaul University, reprinted online at:

http://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/cdm/ref/collection/lpnc6/id/1041.

260

poorer communities of color, further displacing Puerto Ricans by forcing them to begin moving

further Northwest of the city center. Grand Valley State University’s oral history archives

include hours of interviews with former Lincoln Park residents who were manipulated into

selling for rock-bottom prices, harassed by police into agreeing to move, and forcibly evicted

without support for relocation.97

With the backing of interested developers, the gentrification campaign demolished older,

at times derelict, affordable housing in communities of color to make way for the expansion of

universities, hospitals, and middle-income townhouses. Advocates of urban development in

Lincoln Park pushed gentrification as an “important” “collective action” led by “citizens” with

“foresight and organizational backbone.” The Chicago Tribune was a steadfast supporter of local

urban renewal and positioned the work of the Lincoln Park Conservation Association (LPCA)

and the Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council (LPCCC), appointed by the mayor and

in charge of approving gentrification projects on behalf of the city, as cooperative, hardworking,

and benevolent. The newspaper praised the effort to preserve Lincoln Park’s “heterogeneous

blend of old and new” by stemming deterioration, attracting new businesses, broadening access

to social services, while saving the poor from inept landlords who profited from renting sub-

standard housing.98

Activists had been organizing against urban renewal for years. Meeting minutes from the

LPCCC in 1967 reveal how representatives from a variety of organizations, including the

Neighborhood Commons Corporation and the Student Activities Council of DePaul University

97 See oral history interviews by José Jiménez with Lincoln Park residents, such as Patricia Devine-Reed and Carlos

Flores, Young Lords Collection, Special Collections, Grand Valley State University:

http://cdm16015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16015coll6. 98 James Linn, “Restore Lincoln Park Area: Citizens’ Groups, Urban Renewal Stem Deterioration,” Chicago

Tribune (November 2, 1967): Section 3 A, p. 4.

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among others, wanted to stop the demolition of low-income housing in Lincoln Park until new

replacement affordable housing could be built in the project area.99 By 1969, they formed the

Concerned Citizens Survival Front (CCSF), a coalition of political groups, racial self-

determination groups, and religious organizations committed to social justice. The CCSF began

arguing that Chicago’s urban renewal campaigns were racist and classist by removing entire

neighborhoods of affordable housing to make way for white middle-class families recruited to

change the face of inner-city Chicago. CCSF worked with the Spanish American Federation to

advocate against urban renewal on behalf of Lincoln Park’s 15,000 Spanish-speaking residents to

proposal urban renewal that would maintain the neighborhood’s income diversity. Most

mainstream newspapers, however, advocated for urban renewal. The Chicago Tribune positioned

the LPCA’s plan and policies as an example for other communities, and encouraged the LPCA to

take pride in their accomplishments in the first phase of gentrification, Project 1. For the Puerto

Rican community in Lincoln Park who had experienced decades of upheaval due to urban

renewal, racism, and police violence since migration began, Daley’s support of urban

redevelopment of their neighborhood warranted a counterattack. Activists resisted, arguing that

urban renewal was privileged rich developers creating housing for the middle class while

disproportionally dislocating communities of color across the near-West, near-North, and South

sides of the Chicago loop—what BOHIO (in Taíno, the indigenous population of Puerto Rican,

bohío means house or hut), a Puerto Rican housing improvement organization, articulated as part

of a larger process of “spatial deconcentration” to whiten Chicago’s immediate periphery by

99 LPCCC, Minutes, Folder “Organizational Minutes 1967,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council

Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University.

262

making more upper middle-class housing available.100 When the urban renewal decision-making

bodies refused to listen, activists escalated their tactics to attract media and political attention to

their demands. In response, newspapers and politicians that advocated for urban renewal

criticized the activists as violent insurrectionists.

The Young Lords Organization, as the most prominent activist organization against urban

renewal in Lincoln Park, never shied away from displays of physical force as political theater to

gain notoriety and media attention for issues in their community. Breaking store windows or

throwing chairs at events was intended to draw attention to institutionalized classism and racism

that prevented self-determination. The Young Lords not only used violence to reclaim their

masculinity as a form of racial self-determination, but did so in an attempt to control their

narrative. Young Lords member Yoruba described the position of the group as defending

“constructive violence” rather than “anarchist violence,” differentiating their tactics from more

middle-class white-dominated anarchist groups like the Weatherman to whom the Young Lords

were being compared by critics. Yoruba stated, “Constructive violence is getting rid of a system

that’s got us all down in the hole. If I have a slingshot, I’ll use it, and if I have a gun, I’ll use it.”

Jiménez added, “The Weathermen are nothing. They are useless to the people. What we want is

organized violence, not their brand of anarchy.”101 These statements, circled and attached to

complaints sent in to the alderman about the group became the focus of criticism. Despite

attempts by many to demonstrate how, backed into a metaphorical corner by structural

100 BOHIO: Barrio Organized for Housing Improvements, Inc., Pamphlet (PRCC_02_001_0015_0016), Puerto

Rican Cultural Center Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago,

http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/u?/uic_prcc,351. 101 Flyer, “Klonsky, Pals Tell Revolution,” pp. 1-2, Folder “Armitage Ave. Methodist Church Collection 1969-

1972,” Box 78, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul

University.

263

inequality, inflexibility forced violent reactions by marginalized groups, the media stereotyped

the Young Lords as temperamental gang members.

Over the mid-1960s, the Young Lords restructured itself from a self-identified gang into a

political organization, modeling their leadership structure and ideology on the Black Panthers.

By 1968, the Young Lords expanded their use of spatial protests as resistance tactics to

dramatize the plight of low-income communities of color used negative publicity to their

advantage and to demonstrate the seriousness of their issues. After the group restructured itself

from a self-identified gang into a racial self-determination political organization, modeling their

leadership structure and ideology on the Black Panthers, the YLO along with other members of

the CCSF protested urban renewal in Lincoln Park by taking over an LPCCC meeting and

trashing the Lincoln Park’s local office for the Department of Urban Renewal. Throughout the

spring and summer of 1969, the Young Lords and allies disrupted LPCCC meetings or

police/community workshops by breaking furniture and shouting as well as holding sit-ins at

government offices to demand greater access to social services and freedom from police

harassment. LPCCC meetings required police officers to protect their order of business and to

deny local citizens displaced by urban renewal a voice in these decision-making meetings.102

In May of 1969 after YLO member Manuel Ramos was murdered, the Young Lords

formed a coalition, including members from the Concerned Citizens Survival Front, the Latin

American Defense Organization, the Young Patriots, the Welfare Mothers of Wicker Park,

Hermanos, the Independent Precinct Organization, and the Lincoln Park Town Meeting.

Together they formed the Poor People’s Coalition and occupied an administration building at the

102 “Young Lords and Friends Shout, Disrupt Police Council Meeting,” Near North News vol. 13, no. 24 (February

15, 1969): p. 1, Folder “Young Lords – Newspaper Articles,” Box 81, Lincoln Park Conservation Association

Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University.

264

McCormick Theological Seminary for a week to dramatize opposition to the seminary’s $20

million campus expansion in the neighborhood. Renaming the brand new $2 million W. Clement

and Jessie V. Stone Administration Building the Manual Ramos Memorial Building, the

protestors demanded the institution take a greater role in advocating for the services and welfare

of low-income communities of color in their neighborhood by providing more than $600,000 for

low-income housing, $25,000 to open a free clinic, $25,000 to open a People’s Law Office, and

$25,000 for a Puerto Rican Cultural Center. In addition, the protestors demanded the use of

campus facilities for a daycare center, that seminary-owned apartments should be rented to

working-class families of color, and that the black iron gate surrounding the seminary be torn

down to allow non-students access to the campus’s green spaces.103 The YLO seminary takeover

was widely covered by United Press International, and featured alongside coverage of Berkeley’s

People’s Park protests.104

The building takeover ended, yet on May 5, 1969, seminarian students echoed these

demands by occupying the lawn in front of the new building. In addition to the list of monetary

demands the building occupiers had issued, the students called for full financial disclosure from

McCormick’s board, official seminary opposition to city urban renewal policies, and request that

the seminary “join in co-operative ventures aimed at solving the housing problems, especially the

North Side Co-Operative Ministry.” Ries who had spoken out against police brutality at the 1968

DNC took part in the tent-in, saying, “There is no adequate placement service for the families,

103 “People’s Demands,” The Movement (June 1969): p. 5. These demands would later become part of a Senate

committee report on the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the subversive tactics and

Communist ideologies of Puerto Rican self-determination groups. See Senate Committee on the Judiciary,

Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, The

Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization: A Staff Study (94th Congress, 2d Session: March 1976): p. 22. 104 United Press International, “National Guard Controls Berkeley Streets,” The Bakersfield Californian vol. 82, no

257 (May 18, 1969): p. 1.

265

mostly blacks and Puerto Ricans, who have to move out,” he said.105 The Chicago Daily News

described the occupation as a small isolated “small tent-village” inhabited by only 29 largely

white, middle-class “married” students whose encampment served as a powerfully “symbolic

act” in advocating for the poor. In contrast, the Chicago Sun-Times played on racial and class

stereotypes to position unborn renewal activists of color as foreign infiltrators or brute rebels

versus white students characterized as noble yet corrupted by the political radicalism of former

gangs. The Sun-Times reported that more than 1000 seminary students were joined by LADO

and the YLO, mixing cardboard and plywood shanties with tents and protest placards reading

“Viva Che!” The newspaper reported that simultaneous protests occurred at DePaul University,

where the student newspaper reported that on May 8, 1969 a group of black and white radical

students led a sit-in in Dean Edwin Schillinger’s office as part of the Black Student Union strike

before occupying the entire administration building “and then proceeded to invite the Blackstone

Rangers, Young Lords, and Black Panthers into the building as their guests.”106

The takeover became a key moment of coalitional organizing in the history of urban

renewal in Lincoln Park, as well as an indicator of how the media portrayed working-class,

protestors of color as inherently violent and irrational. While seminary students who had

protested for many of the same demands two weeks earlier were met with praise, Seminary

President Arthur McKay announced that he was requesting an injunction to remove foreign

occupiers. Coverage of these protests in Lincoln Park often de-contextualized the issue of urban

renewal, ignoring how the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and Young Comancheros worked with

105 Ries quoted in Sam Washington, “1,000 in Protest Rally at Seminary,” Chicago Sun-Times (Wed., May 7, 1969):

p. 34, in Folder “Newspaper Articles,” McCormick Theological Seminary Collection, Special Collections, DePaul

University. 106 James Hammonds, “‘Watch Out—A Revolution is on Its Way,” The DePaulia (May 29, 1969), Folder

“Newspaper Articles, 1967-1969,” Box 15, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University.

266

students, white anti-racist activists, and white religious officials in a multitude of coalitions that

reflect how the resistance to urban renewal was cross-cultural. And newspapers erased how these

direct actions were part of a growing resistance movement to years of institutionalized violence.

When the LPCA board made no changes to the urban renewal plan, activists escalated their

tactics to more permanent occupations.

Citizens who allied with the Young Lords were often harassed by law enforcement and

critics to the point of acquiescence.107 In June of 1969, after Armitage Avenue United Methodist

Church voted as a congregation against repeated requests by the Young Lords to use the

basement for offices, a free breakfast cafeteria, and a daycare cooperative, the YLO seized it,

transforming it into “The People’s Church” to protest the lack of services provided to working-

class people of color in Lincoln Park. Regular congregants were allowed to attend service, but

the activists created their own Spanish service for working-class immigrants. The group began

feeding hundreds of children breakfast in the basement, painting murals of (male) revolutionary

leaders of color, and holding political organizing meetings in the church. Because the pastor of

the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church, Reverend Bruce Johnson, refused to have the activists

removed and admitted the church had fallen short of advocating for the neighborhood’s most

marginalized groups, critics began using the state to fragment the coalition. Members of the

LPCCC and LPCA began working with politicians, city inspectors, and police to have the

activists and the church discredited and removed. Urban renewal board members spread rumors

that the Young Lords had transformed the church into a site for “prostitution, the sale of

107 Chicago City Council, Resolution (September 17, 1969), in Folder “LPCA Crime Prevention Committee

Correspondence 1960-1969,” Box 35, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University.

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narcotics, armed revolution, shooting, and murder” that created bad publicity for urban

renewal.108

Critics argued their murals expressing revolutionary ideals, like portraits of Che Guevara

or the Young Lords’ logo with a rifle as the backdrop to the slogan “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi

Corazon,” were not only cheapening the value of property, but brainwashing children—revealing

the dangerous motives of the Young Lords. Church records and decisions were scrutinized and

became firepower for accusations that, because the church now served as host to political

discussions in which activists discussed the use of violence, they were anti-American. Because

the church now gave shelter to members of SDS or the Community Party, gave food and funds to

any allying organization of the Young Lords, and allowed the YLO, the NCSM, and the CCSF to

use the church’s address in political organizing materials, they were accused of abetting crime

and revolution.109 Although Bishop Thomas Pryor and Superintendent Carl Mettling of the North

Illinois Conference to which Armitage Avenue Church belonged supported Reverend Bruce

Johnson in allowing the activists to stay, Alderman George Barr McCutcheon calling the Young

Lords terrorists whose threats, obscenities, and insults discouraged hard-working, law-abiding

residents fleeing bodily injury from political radicals to abandon their homes.110

When the church still allowed the activists to remain, Alderman McCutcheon harnessed

the city in calling on inspectors to fine the church for code violations—what quickly amounted to

108 Glenn Scharfenorth, private letter to Rich Alberts (April 21, 1972), in Folder “Armitage Avenue Methodist

Church Correspondence 1969-1972,” Box 78, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Collection, Special

Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 109 “Pieces in the Puzzle – or – a Partial Picture of the Renewal Caucus,” United Methodists for Methodism

Newsletter no. 17 (October 1970): pp. 1-12, Folder, “Armitage Avenue Methodist Church Correspondence 1969-

172,” Box 78, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul

University. 110 “Letter to Mid-North Association Members,” (August 4, 1969), Folder “Reactions to the Disruption at the July

LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University.

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nearly $200 daily because the Young Lords’ cafeteria prevented the church from being enrolled

in the joint conference fire and liability insurance plan. The Chicago police had heavily

surveilled and harassed the Young Lords and their allies, yet now politicians called on police to

protect civilians from radicals, creating a culture of fear and anxiety that pushed residents

worried about losing their homes away from the coalition. After demonstrations against the

urban renewal board, DUR meetings now required police in attendance to ensure order. After

activists disrupted an LPCCC meeting in July, local newspapers reported that urban renewal

organizations in surrounding areas, such as the Mid-North Association, announced that police

would be present at their future meetings.111 At the September 11, 1969 LPCCC meeting, at least

eight white male police officers guarded LPCCC members on the stage of Waller High School

while other officers stood ready in the aisles. Two LPCCC council members walked out in

protest of the extremist police presence after one member brought forth a motion to have the

“excessive” police presence removed.112

At a later Department of Urban Renewal meeting, police officers were on hand to arrest

anyone who got up from their seats. A photograph taken of that meeting in the Chicago-Sun

Times showed Pieter Clark, a white cabdriver who had lived in the community for 27 years,

being arrested by three police officers for leaping from the gallery and bounding across the

chamber after the board rejected a proposal by the coalition to build housing.113 Clark was

111 “Letter to Mid-North Association Members,” (August 4, 1969), Folder “Reactions to the Disruption at the July

LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University. 112 Larry Nocerine, Photo, “Lincoln Park Lineup,” Chicago Sun-Times (September 12, 1969), in Folder “Lincoln

Park Photographs,” Box 17, Series 3.2, Chicago and Lincoln Park Ephemera Collection (MSS0121), Special

Collections and Archives, DePaul University; William Waters, Secretary of the LPCCC, “September 11, 1969

Agenda and Meeting Minutes,” Folder “LPCCC Organizational Minutes, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community

Conservation Council, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 113 William Waters, Ibid.

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arrested for aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.114 Critiquing the

demonstrations rather than the police process, DUR Commissioner Lewis Hill stated, “This is an

unfortunate example of some people’s idea of the democratic process.”115 Clark was later

photographed with bruised and swollen eye and cheekbones at Augustana Hospital as he argued

that Chicago Police took turns beating him on the way to the Central Precinct Station.116

Alderman George McCutcheon worked with the Chicago City Council to issue a

resolution instructing the Chicago Police Department to “increase substantially the concentration

of police in this neighborhood” to limit the growth of this “enclave of lawlessness” for fear that

“these growths [would] lead to mob action which [could] easily result in such outrages as the

gunning down of aldermen in the street, the gunning down of judges, and the burning down of

aldermanic offices.”117 In response, a representative of the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church

announced Alderman McCutcheon was personally responsible for using inflexible bureaucracy

and law enforcement harassment to force violent encounters that overshadowed the Young

Lord’s nonviolent community-building projects. On behalf of Armitage Avenue Methodist, a

representative wrote to the Chicago City Council, arguing that the alderman was personally

blocking proposals for badly needed social services because of his dislike of the Young Lords:

If his complaint is the methodology or radical style of the Young Lords and the Church,

doesn’t he realize that the escalation of force or pressure is generated by the degree of

resistance? The Young Lords and the Church and the community and the city agencies—

114 Thomas Dolan, “Beating Charge Probed,” Chicago Sun-Times, in Folder “Young Lords Newspaper Articles

1969-1975,” Box 81, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul

University. 115 Harry Golden Jr., “Poor Lose on Lincoln Park Site,” Chicago Sun-Times (February 12, 1970), Folder “Young

Lords – Newspaper Articles,” Box 81, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University; Joe Kordick, Photo, Chicago Sun-Times (February 12, 1970), Folder “Young Lords –

Newspaper Articles,” Box 81, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives,

DePaul University. 116 Dolan, “Beating Charge Probed.” 117 George McCutcheon, “Resolution,” Chicago City Council Chamber (September 17, 1969), Folder

“Correspondence 1960-1969,” Box 35, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University.

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all want day care developed, so why can’t our alderman aid it, lend his influence and

assistance to make it happen for the sake of his community? Mr. McCutcheon’s very

resistance is part of the blockade which guarantees the forceful confrontation which he

seems to dislike.118

Fear of violence in Lincoln Park focused on threats against politicians or homeowners rather than

violence enacted against working-class communities of color metaphorically, bureaucratically,

discursively, and physically. Although some members of the YLO took pride in the threatening

notoriety of their demonstrations, coverage isolating he Young Lords as terrorists failed to

account for the group’s repeated demands for affordable housing and social services that were

never acknowledged nor remedied years prior.

While newspapers were quick to highlight how the Young Lords were disobedient, at

times physically destructive, at urban renewal meetings, the YLO was simultaneously blamed for

violence enacted against its own members and allies that went unaccounted for in the press. In

the fall of 1969, an apartment within Armitage Avenue Methodist where the janitor lived and

where the Young Lords hosted a medical examination center was firebombed.119 Reverend Bruce

Johnson who had been an ardent supporter of the Young Lords was brutally stabbed to death; his

wife, Marjorie Eugenia, was stabbed nineteen times and died from a crushed skull. With no

evidence, the Chicago Tribune alluded that the Young Lords were responsible when reporting

that the killer was known to the family, likely murdering him “in a fit of rage” after talking over

coffee in the Johnson home.120 The Johnson murders remained unsolved while known law

118 Armitage People’s Church (Armitage Avenue United Methodist Church), Public Statement (September 22,

1969): p. 1, in Box 78, Folder” Armitage Avenue Methodist Church Correspondence 1961-1972,” Lincoln Park

Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 119 Ad Hoc Committee on the Armitage Avenue Project, “Armitage Committee Report to Conference Board of

Missions,” Document 110 (May 25, 1970), Folder “Armitage Avenue Methodist Church Correspondence 1969-

1972,” Box 78, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul

University. 120 John O’Brien, Clews [sic] Fading in Murder of Cleric, Wife,” Chicago Tribune vol. 123, no. 274 (Wed. October

1, 1969): Section 1, p. 5.

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enforcement who murdered Manuel Ramos and Fred Hampton and beat Raphael Rivera went

unpunished.

The media capitalized on arrest reports of park allies also used to discredit the group as

criminals. As police harassment of park creators escalated in October of 1969, the Lerner

Booster reported that four men had been originally charged with mob action at the July LPCCC

meeting. Because many members of the Young Lords and Young Comancheros had arrest

records as former gang members tracked by the Chicago Police Department, they faced harsher

sentences even when arrested for charges like disrupting the peace. Young Comancheros

member Robert Colon, age 20, pleaded guilty to charges of disturbing the peace for fear that

claiming innocence like the other three arrestees would result in jail time. Colon received five

years’ probation while the others, Richard Vission, Richard Brown, and Dennis Ankrum, awaited

trial.121 Critics that targeted YLO’s leader José Jiménez portrayed him as a bad father and

husband. One widely-reprinted story involved a family dispute over parent guardianship, in

which Jiménez was accused of kidnapping a 14-month-old girl. As the underground newspaper

Kaleidoscope noted in his defense, the “kidnapped” girl was his daughter and his wife had not

accused him of kidnapping.122 When police officers harassed Jiménez and other YLO members,

their acts of self-defense were portrayed as aggravated battery.123 Headlines for arrests of YLO

members and allies were monthly yet the media failed to follow up on their resolution to clear

121 “Disrupter Given 5 Years’ Probation,” Lerner Booster (October 1969), Folder “Reactions to the Disruption at the

July LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special Collections

and Archives, DePaul University. 122 Wisconsin’s underground journal Kaleidoscope noted this discrepancy, arguing that “Jacqueline J” at FRED

radio and the Belmont Booster newspaper were the only two sources in the “straight press” to represent the story

correctly, arguing that this skewed coverage “was an unusual case of movement harassment.” See “Cha-Cha Naps

Own Kid,” adapted from FRED coverage, Kaleidoscope (May 31-June 13, 1969): p. 9. 123 José Jiménez, Personal Interview (February 28, 2016).

272

their name as a perpetual “condemnation of blackness.”124 In contrast, Chicago police,

photographed in the Chicago Sun-Times standing shoulder to shoulder to ensure that planning for

urban renewal would not be impeded, were envisioned as protectors of American capitalism and

democracy rather than instigators of institutionalized violence that displaced poor people of

color.125

The LPCCC chairman called meetings to order, allotted time to council members to bring

forward motions, and allowed community members to speak only by submitting written requests

for permission prior to the start of the meeting. This protocol was lauded as inclusive because

when activists attempted to use this bureaucracy against the board by taking control of the

microphone at one meeting to force a stalemate, meeting minutes of the LPCCC and LPCA

reveal how the board used bureaucracy as a form of institutionalized violence to silence critics of

gentrificationLocal residents could attend, but were designated as “visitors.” The council was not

legally required to allow anyone who was not an LPCCC member to speak.126 After more than a

year of spatial protests across Lincoln Park and petitions to add affordable housing for

communities of color to the urban renewal plan, no changes were made to the project. The Poor

People’s Coalition protested the July 29, 1969 meeting of the LPCCC that planned to vote on the

proposal for lot 19 by taking control of the microphone to force a stalemate if they would not

allow the voices of community members to be heard. Diane Taylor, who frequently characterized

organizations allying with the Poor People’s Coalition as enemy combatants, reported on the

meeting on July 29 in the LPCA newsletter. More than 500 attendees crowded the room. Diane

124 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban

America (Harvard University Press, 2011). 125 Nocerine, Photo. 126 William Waters, LPCCC Secretary, Agenda Meeting Minutes (July 29, 1969), Folder “LPCCC Organizational

Minutes-1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special Collections and Archives,

DePaul University.

273

Taylor, on behalf of the LPCA, characterized them as subversive. Summarizing the meeting

minutes, Taylor reported in the urban renewal board’s own newsletter that before the meeting

commenced, LPCCC member Richard Brown, African American and advocate for the Poor

People’s Coalition on the council, allegedly took control of the secretary’s stenotype machine.

Women from the Welfare Mothers of Wicker Park, that Taylor characterized as a “militant

coalition,” refused to sit in the audience six feet down below, but instead moved their chairs onto

the stage in front of the LPCCC committee.127

At this meeting, the board had planned to vote on how lot 19 CR would be developed.

With Richard Brown as a key advocate on the council, the Concerned Citizens Survival Front as

part of the Poor People’s Coalition took control of the microphone to defend their counter

planning proposal for lot 19 CR (CR signifying its DUR designation as commercial recreation) at

the corner of Halsted and Armitage. With the lot having been vacant for more than a year, the

LPCCC and LPCA supported the construction of a for-profit tennis court on the site, vetting

three proposals for tennis clubs—one with an estimated $1500 annual membership fee. This fee

amounted to more than a month’s salary for 90% of the first 900 families displaced by urban

renewal in the Project 1 area.128 In contrast, a proposal put forth by the Poor People’s Coalition

and its allies demanded “1/3 of Lincoln Park to be available for low-income housing,” and

designed its own affordable housing apartment building on lot 19 with shared community spaces

and ramps designed by architect Howard Alan.129

127 Diane Taylor, “Disruption at LPCCC,” LPCA News vol. 69, no. 4. (July-August, 1969): pp. 1-5, in Folder

“Reactions to the Disruption at the LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Conservation Association Records,

Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 128 William Waters, LPCCC Secretary, “January 14, 1970 LPCCC Agenda and Meeting Minutes,” Folder “Minutes,

1967,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul

University. 129Judson Jeffries, “From Gang-Bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago,”

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 96 (Autumn 2003): p. 290; for further description of the plan see

Howard Alan’s oral history interview with José Jiménez, (August 22, 2012), Young Lords Collection, Special

274

The audience protested the presence of police guards, cheering, “Get rid of the pigs.”

Brown knew that if the board refused to approve the development of affordable housing, that

activists would revolt. Brown moved to table the vote until a representative of the community

could be appointed to advise the LPCCC on the needs of the displaced, as legally allowed by the

Department of Housing and Urban Development, yet was ruled out of order. Arguments broke

out after the LPCCC voted 8 to 4 to reject the affordable housing proposal, and the meeting was

adjourned amidst fist fights initiated by people on both sides of the issue. According to Taylor,

Brown moved the chairman out of the way of the podium to address the crowd, causing him to

fall, an act captured in a sequence of eleven video stills from WLS-TV intended to prove

Brown’s physical assault of Mayer even though Brown had a chair thrown at him. Brown instead

argued that he made his way to the microphone to attempt to restore order. For nearly an hour,

representatives from organizations within the Poor People’s Coalition spoke at the microphone

yet Taylor recorded none of their arguments or different perspectives on lot 19. Instead she

quoted their cursing and shouting, characterizing commotion from the crowd as an “animal noise

level associated with a fight increased to a frightening pitch.” Residents who were prevented

from speaking publicly to petition for affordable housing were described as “grabbing,”

“swarming,” “pushing,” and “assaulting” council members, while LPCCC representatives as

citizens “announced,” “voted,” “addressed,” and “agreed.”130

Similar coverage of the meeting in the Chicago Sun-Times reduced the complexity of the

protest coalition and their issues, identifying assailants as purple beret-wearing members of the

Young Lords who reacted irrationally against city officials. The leading photograph for the story,

Collections, Grand Valley State University:

http://cdm16015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16015coll6/id/101. 130 Taylor, “Disruption at LPCCC;” Also see Waters, LPCCC Secretary, “January 14, 1970 LPCCC Agenda and

Meeting Minutes.”

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one of three, depicted a young white man with long stringy hair in disheveled dress rearing back

his right arm while the suited Chairman Mayer kneels on the floor. The photo played on fears of

politically radical long-haired males; in actuality the man, Pieter Clark, was holding back others

to assist Mayer in standing after he had fallen.131 The cover of the LPCA News featured a

photograph reprinted from Chicago Today of the “melee” at the LPCCC meeting; dozens of men

crowd the stage while one stood on a table with his fist raised, appearing to take aim at council

president Steve Shamberg.132

Peter Bauer, an attorney appointed to the LPCCC and also elected member of the LPCA,

capitalized on depictions of the YLO as violent to discredit the organization and anti-urban

renewal advocacy. In contrast to Jiménez, the Chicago Sun-Times positioned Bauer as a local

responsible citizen and representative of the majority of Lincoln Park residents in advocating for

urban renewal. Although protestors argued that urban renewal produced vacant lots where

affordable housing once stood, Bauer removed issues of race and class from discussions of urban

renewal, arguing that citizens’ frustrations at being forced to look for affordable housing

elsewhere were caused by lag time due to bureaucratic oversight rather than LPCCC’s

misappropriation of state and federal funds. Repudiating accusations that the LPCA and LPCCC

only advocated for the white middle class, Bauer and James Moburg (a member of the LPCCC

and president of the nearby Ranch Triangle Association for urban renewal bordering Lincoln

Park), argued that unlike LPCCC board members, the activist demonstrations had been

premeditated and intentionally confrontational. In an official letter sent to LPCA members, the

president described the Poor People’s Coalition, specifically the Young Lords, as “pseudo-

revolutionary middle-class totalitarians” who [threw] the meeting into utter chaos” by pounding

131 Sam Washington, Fights Disrupt Urban Renewal Meeting Here,” Chicago Sun-Times (Wed. July 30, 1969): p. 3. 132 Diane Taylor, “Disruption at LPCCC.”

276

on the walls and screaming threats to harm persons who opposed the chaos.”133 Moburg accused

the groups of taking advantage of race-baiting language to position members of the LPCCC and

LPCA as racist outsiders. Reiterating critiques of the YLO as the true foreign communist

infiltrators, Moburg argued, “These groups of kids and radicals, many of whom are Maoists and

encourage armed revolution, are not going to push us out. We are people who have lived here for

years—they haven’t—and have worked for what we have…When it comes down to it, we’re

going to win. If one of us is burned out, then there will be 50 in his place.”134 While similar

comments of political persistence by Jiménez were depicted as threats of a communist takeover,

the steadfastness of the LPCCC and LPCA reflected their inherent loyalty to American

democratic progress.

Urban renewal advocates as representatives of the establishment responded with equal

force by using the rhetoric of war against park creators, arguing that poor people of color were

inherently violent by framing incidents of frustration as indicative of broader patterns of

aggression. In official correspondence to members of their own urban renewal advocacy

organizations, Lincoln Park residents simultaneously played on stereotypes of the Poor People’s

Coalition as both middle-class militants masquerading as the working-class as well as idle

welfare recipients with no respect for property. Bauer argued. “It is time to stop a tiny minority

of SDS-inspired militants, abetted by ‘movement’ sympathizers, from intimidating the 70,000

residents of Lincoln Park by violence, assaults, and threats of arson.” Bauer encouraged residents

to surveil their own neighborhoods by reporting threats of violence made by white radicals and

133 Stephen Shamberg, “Letter to LPCA Members” (June 3, 1969) Folder “Reactions to the Disruption at the July

LPCCC Meeting 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council, Special Collections and Archives,

DePaul University. 134 Paul Galloway, “Radicals Assailed: 2 Supporters View Urban Renewal in Lincoln Park, Chicago Sun-Times

(August 31, 1969).

277

working-class people of color rather than the threats of urban renewal expansion.135 Vigilant,

fearful residents became the informants for Chicago’s Red Squad that tracked Jiménez and more

than six dozen individuals and five dozen organizations identified as having affiliated with him

or the Young Lords Organization between 1969 and 1974. As released by the FBI to Jiménez,

the Chicago Police Department used informants to monitor urban renewal meetings, court

hearings, and press conferences, surveillance to follow attendees and their cars after

demonstrations, and police officers to detain contact information found with arrest warrants and

on arrestees.136 In addition, the LPCA sent its own members to Poor People’s Park to conduct

“secret reports” on the park’s design, attendees, and their conversations.137

Allies of the Poor People’s Coalition left the disrupted urban renewal meeting with a

proclamation that the group would create Poor People’s Park on lot 19 CR as a holding action

until authorities guaranteed the land would be used for affordable housing. In contrast to 24 other

parks developed by Chicago’s Department of Urban Renewal on vacant lots in the Lincoln Park

area or environmentalists searching for some “hip greenery” in other states, the creators of Poor

People’s Park argued that this protest was embedded within a context of war: “It’s poor people

fighting for survival in a city that is trying to wipe them out.”138 Using the park along with

speeches, events, and visual iconography as a canvas, the Poor People’s Coalition drew attention

to the ways in which state-sanctioned urban renewal corroded Lincoln Park’s heterogeneity. The

135 Peter Bauer, “Letter to Mid-North Association” (August 4, 1969), in Folder “Reactions to Disruptions at the July

LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special Collections and

Archives, DePaul University. 136 See “Chicago Police Red Squad – Personal Subversive Files,” in Folder, “Young Lords Chicago Police Dept.

Gang Analytical Files, 1969-1970,” Box 4, Young Lords in Lincoln Park Collection (RHC-65), Special Collections

and University Archives, Grand Valley State University. 137 Diane Taylor, “A Report from a Brave Reporter,” Letter to Steve (Shamberg), (August 13, 1969), in Folder

“Reactions to the Disruptions at the July LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation

Council Records, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 138 Park in other parts of Chicago “People’s Park in Chicago,” Y.L.O. 1, no. 4 (1969): 4; Chicago Daily News

(Thursday July 31, 1969).

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creators of Poor People’s Park argued that the bureaucracy of urban renewal, police harassment,

absent landlords, lack of access to social services, and broader racial and class discrimination

functioned as forms of interconnected violence. To raise the consciousness of locals about the

devastation that Daley’s urban renewal plan would wreak in Lincoln Park for the benefit of white

families, allies of the Poor People’s Coalition and their park visualized their communities as a

war zone with urban renewal functioning as a military industrial complex. In a letter to the editor

of the local Lerner Booster, Frederick Trost, Pastor of the nearby St. Paul United Church of

Christ characterized urban renewal as rumbling through the neighborhoods, stripping the

community of pride and property. Trost asked how long the neighborhood must wait before

“smoke belches” and the “streets overflow with fury” as lives were destroyed by the “wrecker’s

crane” to the “workman’s sledge.”139 In one political cartoon created by park advocates for an

anti-urban renewal flyer, the artist represented Chicago’s force of urban renewal as a military

tank crushing a person and a row of affordable housing. Park creators argued that while this war

had been waged in poorer neighborhoods of color throughout the early Cold War era. Now in

Lincoln Park, urban renewal was “destroying the community—driving out the people.”140

When historian Studs Terkel visited Poor People’s Park in August of 1969, he confronted

the stereotype of park creators as violent gang members directly. Speaking with white CCSF ally

Harley Budd, owner of the Tap Root Pub, one of a handful of buildings left standing after

massive demolition on Larrabee Street, Budd argued that the description of park creators as

violent distracted people from understanding urban renewal as a form of warfare by the state.

139 Frederick Trost, “Letter to the Editor,” Lerner Booster (August 31, 1969), in Folder “Reactions to the Disruption

at the July LPCCC Meeting, 1969,” Box 1, Lincoln Park Community Conservation Council Records, Special

Collections and Archives, DePaul University. 140 Tank Flyer, in Folder 235, Box 22, “McCormick Theological Seminary Correspondence, October 1968-

November 1971,” North Side Cooperative Ministry Collection, Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and

University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago.

279

Photographs and video footage of streets in Lincoln Park during the late 1960s frequently reveal

only one or two buildings left standing on an entire block, the rest bulldozed to make room for

new condominiums or mixed-use developments.141 Comparing a bulldozer to the devastation of a

bomb, Budd stated:

Well I know the people on the east end of the ward have this fear of violent street gangs

that are developing in the area and so forth, but I think if these people lived over west

here, they would understand what fear is. A bulldozer sounds like a half-track coming

down the alley. Tearing and gutting out buildings that looks like a war-torn area with

people crying and wailing because there’s no place to go and what can I do, where am I

going to work, where’s the grocery store, where’s the business man… ‘The guy that used

to live next door used to watch my house,’ [you] would hear little old ladies say, ‘Now

that there’s nobody here I’m afraid. Here comes the bulldozer.’ Now these things here

have all become a great tragedy in this west end of the ward that has created the need for

people to unite and create. Maybe they’re called street gangs and maybe they’re not.

Maybe they’re called community organizations.

Take a look at the Lincoln Park Conservation Association—the fear that they have made

for the people in the west end of the ward and the thousands of buildings and two and

three thousand families that were displaced, 350 businesses put out of business, my God,

this is more than a bomb could create. It would take four or five 5-ton bombs to create as

much devastation and as many lives would be lost as people that die of heart attacks. And

they talk of violence. These people have produced violence without a gunshot and

without a yell. I feel that they are creating violence for the west end of the ward and of

course there may be some retaliation. And this is America! It looks like a revolution

coming. A class war. The rich are taking from the poor, the lands are taken from the poor

to subsidize the rich.142

Reminiscing about local kids who had helped him build a bar patio, Budd looked around at the

vacant lots surrounding his pub. Broadening the limited discussion of violence concerning the

park, from chair-throwing at a neighborhood meeting to the state’s destruction of an entire

working-class neighborhood, Budd argued that the LPCA’s bureaucratic urban renewal process

functioned as a form of institutionalized violence. With histories of urban renewal as a form of

141 For examples of footage, see files SIVss2-392, SIVss2-324a, SIVss2-324b, SIVss2-330C, Richard J. Daley

Collection, Series IV, Sub-Series II, Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives,

University of Illinois, Chicago. 142 Studs Terkel, Interview T3401SCD, ca. 55 min. recording, Chicago History Museum (ca. 1969): Studs Terkel

Collection, The Studs Terkel / WFMT Oral History Archives, Chicago History Museum.

280

bureaucratic violence erased from the historical narrative of Lincoln Park, Poor People’s Park

appeared to indicate a growing movement of immigrant gang territoriality that needed to be

stopped to defend American progress.

5.4 Conclusion

When Berkeley’s People’s Park was fenced and guarded in the early morning hours of

May 15, park advocates met at an outdoor forum on campus to speak publicly about what to do.

The meeting functioned like an open roundtable, with each speaker taking two minutes at the

microphone to give their perspective. The forum expected to go for a while, with a lineup of

speakers who had been involved at the park. The speakers understood both urban renewal and

spatial regulation in the form of a fence as acts of social and ecological violence upon their

communities. Once weapons of war, bulldozers now destroyed happiness by demolishing homes

to make way for the concrete and fence posts of modern design. A representative from the

coalitional Peace and Freedom Party compared the military occupation of the park to a war zone

in the Middle East, asking why police offers needed to wear bulletproof vests to prevent students

from accessing the garden.143 Poet and UC Berkeley English Department faculty Denise

Levertov, who had worked to remove trash during its construction, called People’s Park “a little

island of peace and hope in a world made filthy and hopeless by war and injustice” that was now

being destroyed by militarized and wasteful junk taking over the park.144 Artist Frank Cieciorka

captured this broader sentiment that development was a form of social and political ecocide in

143 Recording of People’s Park Rally (Phonotape 3602), (ca. May 15, 1969), in Malcolm Burnstein Collection of

Sound Recordings on the Free Speech Movement, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 144 Denise Levertov, quoted in Recording of People’s Park Rally (Phonotape 3602), (ca. May 15, 1969), in Malcolm

Burnstein Collection of Sound Recordings on the Free Speech Movement, Bancroft Library, University of

California Berkeley.

281

his famous poster supporting the park, “Let a Thousand Flowers Blossom.” A giant fist as a

symbol of collective resistance burst forth from the asphalt with the ruins of modern America in

the background—signs for used car sales, gas, and highways piled high in a junk heap with signs

noting privacy, property, and for sale.145 Roadway signs like “No Turn,” and “No Trespassing,”

were coupled with crumpled cans, chain link fences, and dilapidated power lines. Yet from the

disheveled rubble of capitalism and the privatization of space causing a chasm in the asphalt,

environmental and political power in the form of a stemmed rose in a fist grew.

Other speakers at the May 15 rally focused on state violence, connecting urban renewal

with police harassment of low-income communities of color. Pastor Dick York of Berkeley’s

Free Church, who had helped lead efforts to house and feed hippies and runaways, compared the

fencing of the park as an attempt to move out the hippies with the repression of segregated black

neighborhoods. “Inflexible paternalism does not work in the ghetto and it won’t work here,”

York stated.146 UC Berkeley student Michael Lerner and Student Body President Dan Siegel

focused on the government regulation of property as a tool of social and political control. The

university planned to close People’s Park to develop a student soccer field before dorms would

be developed in the following decade. He stated, “They symbol of the fence means we will give

it to you. We will control it for you…Because if that idea catches on that we can have control

over our own lives, it will bring down capitalism.”147 The police were not opposed to flowers and

grass, nor swings and children playing, Lerner argued, but were opposed to decentralized power

145 Frank Cieciorka, “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” Poster, (1969), All of Us or None Archive, Oakland Museum

of California, reprinted online at: http://picturethis.museumca.org/pictures/let-thousand-parks-bloom. 146 Dick York, quoted in Recording of People’s Park Rally (Phonotape 3602), (ca. May 15, 1969), in Malcolm

Burnstein Collection of Sound Recordings on the Free Speech Movement, Bancroft Library, University of

California Berkeley. 147 Michael Lerner, quoted in Recording of People’s Park Rally (Phonotape 3602), (ca. May 15, 1969), in Malcolm

Burnstein Collection of Sound Recordings on the Free Speech Movement, Bancroft Library, University of

California Berkeley.

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over urban design. The park was symbolically fenced to preserve private property ownership as a

tool of control.

Siegel followed, arguing that the state’s militarized defense of the park was an

inappropriate expenditure. Chain link fences, barbed wire, police surveillance, and armed guards

cost the state money, Siegel argued, and functioned as a material culture of control. “Maximize

the cost to them and minimize the cost to you,” by making it more difficult to repeatedly warrant

its fortification. “Go down there and take the park.”148 Although others were scheduled to speak,

this was the last sentence spoken to the crowd.149 The microphone was removed from his grip

amidst the murmur of confused excitement, yodels, and collective clapping and chanting before

the crowd began to migrate off campus down Telegraph Ave toward the park.150 Troops

wounded more than one hundred with buckshot, killing one and blinding another. As witnesses

began to piece together their accounts to pinpoint the blame for the havoc, Siegel’s rallying cry,

Stew Albert’s involvement, and their allusions to violence became the firing shots for critics’

intent on proving the park had always been intended as a weapon against the establishment.

Danger became written onto their tactics and bodies as spatial activists rather than the destruction

perpetuated by urban renewal, pollution, and policing that became hidden from view in the

mainstream media.

148 Dan Siegal, quoted in Recording of People’s Park Rally (Phonotape 3602), (ca. May 15, 1969), in Malcolm

Burnstein Collection of Sound Recordings on the Free Speech Movement, Bancroft Library, University of

California Berkeley. 149 Wendy Schlesinger has a better memory of this moment than perhaps others because she was slated to speak in

the lineup after Siegel and that opportunity was taken away from her. Wendy Schlesinger, Personal Interview

(March 15, 2016). For a description of this, see Schlesinger, “The Creation of People’s Park,” Chapter 7, p. 5. 150 This moment has been characterized differently. Having heard an audio recording of the event, this is how the

event appears to end. However, some have argued that the power to the microphone was cut by an unknown person

in the basement of Sproul Hall, thereby insinuating that the university was sabotaging the park creators by

technologically editing their voices so as to make them appear violent. I cannot hear anyone in the recording talking

about why the sound no longer works. There is no audible confusion or anger, only claps and cheers from the crowd.

Regardless, this moment to “reclaim” the park has become part of the park’s mythological narrative, blurring the

borders between innocence and violence, imagined and real worlds.

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Testimonies of violent altercations between police and civilians were recounted in the

underground and mainstream press, legal testimonies, flyers and ephemera, television and radio

interviews, as well as in books, murals, anniversary rallies, and walking tours. Photography

exhibitions and published collections of photos immediately following the fencing captured the

fear and shock of law enforcement shutting down the city.151 Coverage of Berkeley’s People’s

Park helped visualize intersecting timelines of force and confusion that made the local issue

concerning control over a vacant lot at the corner of Haste and Bowditch part of a national

conversation over how violence shapes spatial citizenship. Activists’ efforts to raise awareness

about the police murder of James Rector inspired dozens of other activist-created parks,

community gardens, as well as memorials demanding their designation as sacred spaces. Within

this historical moment, discourses of creation and violence were coexistent. Americans used

public demonstrations like activist-created parks to weigh in on how violence shaped the urban

experience: How do profit-driven developers commit violence against urban dwellers? How does

the state use violence to regulate access to urban space? And, what are the limits of violent force

in the demand for and regulation of spatial use? These questions dominated coverage of many

People’s Parks, yet as violence between activists and police escalated, some People’s Parks

became shrouded in a spiraling declension narrative that blamed park creators for homelessness,

drug use, and crime. Historians have echoed this criticism. In declaring 1970 the end of idealistic

unity and the rise of urban lawlessness, scholars have distracted our attention from the structural

inequality that produced vacant lots, as well as the faces of institutionalized violence that

regulated them from the beginning.152

151 For one example, see Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai, eds., People’s Park (New York City: Ballantine Books,

1969): pp. 13, 16, 17, 21-23, 87. 152 Seth Rosenfeld argues that Berkeley’s People’s Park was where “the end of the sixties would begin.” See Seth

Rosenfeld, Subversives, p. 448.

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With park advocates focused on telling the history of park creations, little attention has

been paid to the immediate aftermath of these contestations about urban power. Chicago’s Poor

People’s Park existed as a leftist territory for nearly two years after its creation in 1969, yet its

symbolic creation as a resistance to racist urban renewal has been all but erased in the historical

record. The campaign to discredit, imprison, and remove the working-class Lincoln Park

community lasted for years. Politicians, police, and developers used the mainstream media to

redirect attention from the systemic violence of intersecting patterns of regulation to the

misbehavior of individual park users. Park organizers and their political allies were repeatedly

arrested. Donations for bail funds tapered off as bad press about organizational infighting and

drug use grabbed the headlines of the mainstream press. At the same time, sentencing for arrests

increased, discouraging many from protesting to defend parks. The bureaucracy behind Lincoln

Park’s urban renewal program was unstoppable. Without the construction of new low-income

housing to keep community members embedded within the neighborhood, the cross-cultural

coalition of park allies splintered as occupants were forced to migrate to outlying neighborhoods.

Council members appeased some park organizers by agreeing to build low-income housing, yet

the development stalled for years, forcing community members to move to other neighborhoods.

By the time the LPCA reneged on their plans to develop affordable housing at the corner of

Halsted and Armitage, and sold the development rights to a luxury condo developer in the late

1970s, the Poor People’s Coalition had dissipated. Park creators feared the arrival of the

bulldozer, yet bureaucracy, police harassment-induced paranoia, and incarceration as a tool of

social control did more to eliminate the original mission of community-based urban ecological

design than a bulldozer could have accomplished in those early days.

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In the aftermath of Bloody Thursday when law enforcement and park advocates began

openly fighting in the streets of Berkeley, a multitude of political activists, students, mothers,

urban design practitioners, legislators, artists, and ecological advocates united to protest the

state’s use of war weaponry against students. More than 30,000 people participated in the

nonviolent Memorial Day march down Telegraph, while other vigils, marches, and rallies were

held in satellite cities across the U.S. The Barb reported how, with the fence still enforced,

activists began creating parks around the city—at times, laying sod on asphalt in streets and

parking lots as acts of civil disobedience.153 Signs, bonfires, and gardens became the symbolic

materiality to designate these lots as claimed territories. Even in places like Berkeley City Jail,

where those arrested during Bloody Thursday piled into cells, scrawling the name “People’s Park

Annex No. 7” onto the “shit-green colored walls” countered the displacement and isolation of

lock up by signifying the space as resistant territory.154

At the same time that the murder of James Rector pushed a range of people to protest

police violence, the violent fencing of Berkeley’s People’s Park fueled a movement calling for

community-based planning and urban ecological design. Asrchitects who had participated in the

park like Professor Sim Van der Ryn facilitating public conversations about the need to design

with people rather than for them.155 Countless coalitional forums on the park became spaces for

dealing with trauma, sharing consciousness-raising information, and organizing to demand

153 The Barb covers these park creations for a few weeks after the fencing; See Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May

30-June 5, 1969); Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969); Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 24 (June 13-19, 1969). 154 Art Goldberg, “City Dachau,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 21 (May 23-29, 1969): p. 14. 155 Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism, and Urban Renewal,” ISSC Working

Paper Series 2005-2006.21, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, (University of California, Berkeley, May 11,

2007), reprinted online: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vz4s7jj?query=violent;hitNum=1#page-3; Peter Allen,

“The End of Modernism?: People’s Park, Urban Renewal, and Community Design,” Journal of the Society of

Architectural Historians vol. 70, no. 3 (September 2011): pp. 354-374; Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: How

Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet,” Places Journal (October 2015):

https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-modernism/.

286

change. Much of this discussion, such as UC Berkeley’s six-hour “Ecology and Politics in

America” teach-in, situated the violent fencing of the park within global discourses of

oppression, and encouraged the middle-class to take a greater role in challenging the violence

and unbridled expansionism of the state. Within this historical moment, park advocates linked

the racist imperialism of Indian removal and the Vietnam War with the environmental racism of

urban renewal and pollution of poorer neighborhoods.156 The American Federation of Teachers

local 1474 and 1795, one of several sponsors for the teach-in, spoke for many in arguing, “The

battle for a people’s park in Berkeley has raised questions that go far beyond the immediate

objects of public attention.” Their leaflet for the teach-in stated,

They are questions about the quality of our lives, about the deterioration of our

environment and about the propriety and legitimacy of the uses to which we put our land.

The questions raised by this issue reach into two worlds at once: the world of power,

politics and the institutional shape of American society on the one hand, and world of

ecology, conservation and the biological shape of our environment on the other…

Trees are anarchic; concrete and asphalt are orderly and tractable. Defoliation is

Civilization…The history of America is a history of hostility and conquest. We have

constituted ourselves socially and politically to conquer and transform nature. We

measure ‘progress’ in casualties, human and environmental, in bodies of men or board-

feet of lumber. Ecology and politics are no longer separate…157

The murder of a man to destroy a park merged discourses of environmental improvement and

survival. The teach-in featured Van der Ryn, author Gary Snyder, and Cliff Humphrey of

Berkeley’s Ecology Action whose conversations inspired a growing coalition of park advocates

as well as others calling for an end to police violence.158 In the wake of the fencing, People’s

Park became a launch pad for starting direct actions and discussions about transnational,

transhistorical, and ecological patterns of capitalism as a form of American imperialism.

156 Keith Lampe, “A Peek at the Mirror,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p. 6. 157 American Federation of Teachers Local 1474 and 1795, Leaflet, p. 6. 158 Ibid.

287

The creation of insurgent parks became mediums to address the local impact of larger

national issues, such as the capitalist development of shared public land, the lack of affordable

housing, the repression of free speech, and the demand for local agriculture. People’s Parks

became stages where these arguments over violence and innocence in the defense of urban

environmental sovereignty shaped the legacies of this political movement. While many newly-

created parks like Madison, Wisconsin’s James Rector Memorial Park, MTU’s People’s Park,

the University of Missouri’s Peace Park, and others became memorials for James Rector and

subsequent shootings by law enforcement such as Kent State University, coalitions in other cities

embraced the principle of insurgent community-based urban design and reclaimed lots as parks

that catered to their own interests.159 Madison, Wisconsin’s Walden Park became a horticultural

experimental zone, a series of People’s “Victory Gardens” in the Bay area became sources for

urban agriculture, and parks in New York City’s Loisaida like Plaza Caribe celebrated racial and

ethnic diversity.160 The physical performance of park construction and its symbolic power as

public defiance inspired organizers new to direct action to develop new projects like Berkeley’s

interracial cooperative housing squat People’s Pad and the nationwide commune network Earth

159 David Giffey, “Madison UFW Benefit at People’s Park,” Photograph, Image ID 90052, David Giffey: South

Madison Oral History Project and Migrant Farmworker Photographs 1966-1971, 1999-2000 Collection, Wisconsin

Historical Society; “Michigan Tech Students Build Park in Protest,” The Arizona Republic (May 14, 1970): p. 16-A;

Abigail Keel, Ryan Famuliner, and Jack Howard, “Why Peace Park is Called ‘Peace’ Park,” KBIA Radio

(September 10, 2014): http://kbia.org/post/why-peace-park-called-peace-park-0#stream/0. 160 Ann Beckman, “University and Walden Park are at Odds,” Madison Capitol Times (August 18, 1972), in Folder

“Walden Park Subject File,” Dean of Students, Student Affairs Historical File (Accession 1995/071), University

Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Steve Haines, “Black Peoples’ Victory Plots Growing Fast,” Berkeley

Barb vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11; Mike Schechtman, “People’s Park, Garden United,” Berkeley Barb

vol. 8, no. 20 (May 16-22, 1969): p. 11; Garry Tyler, Photographs, “People’s Park Built by Squatters” (July 25,

1971), in Box 17a, Shoot 710173, Daily Worker and Daily World Negatives Collection (PHOTOS.223.001),

Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. For more on parks created by Puerto Ricans

in the Lower East Side, see Miranda K. Martinez, Power at the Roots: Gentrification, Community Gardens, and the

Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side (Lexington Books, 2010); Michela Pasquali, Loisaida: NYC Community

Gardens (Self-Published, 2006).

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People’s Park, from California to Vermont.161 Yet at the same that that parks facilitated cross-

cultural coalitions, the history of insurgent park creation has been whitewashed, sanitized, and

pacified. This network of People’s Parks have been erased from the historical memory of the late

Cold War era—our minds and cities “gentrified.”162

161 Associated Press, Photograph (2000.1.1630), (June 26, 1969), The Oakland Tribune Collection, Oakland

Museum of California, reprinted online at: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/200011630. 162 Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind.

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CHAPTER 6. EPILOGUE

“Building a street park in Berkeley or rather a peoples’ park with my love Carol along. Oh yes,

later she said, ‘Oh come now, its [sic] really for the confrontation!’

Yes of course, if you step back, of course. They could only go so far in claiming the land as

theirs, if anything is permanent and established then the U[university] knows it’ll be harder to

bring it down. Then strike fast, before anything is really done. Otherwise it’ll be hell of a job to

tear down the park. Even now I can imagine police bringing on bulldozers to rake it over. That’s

probably what they’ll need to guard against the crowd there to save it.

I guess that’s why its [sic] a big story from the start. Max knows it. It could be the big story of

this year—go nationwide. Funny the other papers haven’t picked it up—the straight press, nor

the radio or tv. Don’t see how they can eventually escape writing about it, covering it—it’ll be in

the news either way.”

John Jakobson, 19691

6.1 Berkeley’s People’s Park

The popularity of the disconnected People’s Park movement rested in its ability to fuse

reality with imagination. Park creators remember how the manual labor of creating and

maintaining these spaces tantalized their senses and emotions. At the same time, they characterize

these projects as grand gestures of coalitional utopianism—even if only for a short while. Using

visual, culinary, and material discourses of anti-colonial revolution, activists transformed vacant

lots into borderlands as stages for theatrical political performances. This movement of territorial

reclamation appeared to correct histories of American colonialism and newer practices of profit-

driven urban development. This radical rejection of urban renewal, top-down urban planning, and

police harassment required seeing the city as a new frontier that flipped the narrative of white

western modern American progress—the city now reclaimed by the people as a form of power.

Activists used parks to simultaneously defend both playful and forceful discourse of territorial

1 John Jakobson, Diary entry (April 20, 1969), From author’s personal archive, Courtesy of author; Lennie Lipton,

Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, Film, 16 mm (1969), in the Pacific Film Archive Film and Video Collection, Berkeley

Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, archived online:

https://archive.org/details/cbpf_00002.

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reclamation in ways that attracted white leftists and political moderates, along with radical political

organizations of color. While parks were often rooted in longer histories of displacement, insurgent

park creations became the starting point for new methods of radical direct action, affordable

housing or urban design projects, and anti-war environmentalism.

These coalitions, as well as threats that park organizers would expand their park creation

campaigns, frightened property owners, police, and developers seeking to take advantage of

gentrification to expand their own territories. Park critics resorted to reinforcing their own power

structures to stop this movement: stagnant bureaucracies governing urban renewal that silenced

poorer citizens; police troops that violently attacked and harassed citizens daily; and developers

and politicians that used the mainstream media as a mouthpiece to disparage park creators as

violent and irrational, their parks as unsafe and poorly managed. Most People’s Parks folded under

the pressure of police harassment and surveillance, as well as internal disagreements. If they

survived, they changed shape and took on new meanings as urban political contexts shifted. Most

lots were developed into condos and businesses, some were absorbed into municipal park

departments, others became homeless encampments, and a majority have been forgotten

altogether—abandoned as overgrown areas until interested developers called for their construction

in the 1980s or 1990s.

In the case of Berkeley, the violence of the fencing and troop occupation catalyzed new

supporters for the park movement at the same time that fear and paranoia overshadowed park

experiences. Park advocates debated over the best course of action—creating new parks or

militantly reclaiming the lot at Haste and Bowditch, with park allies largely divided over the issue

of park defense versus survival. Some like Barb reporter Kathy “Country Girl” Williams and local

activist Jack Radey were high on emotions, living day to day in a war zone. On May 30, 1969, an

estimated 30,000 people marched through Berkeley to protest the fencing of the park two weeks

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prior and began building “Haste Street People’s Park” on top of the asphalt in front of the cyclone

fence. Williams described the event as “a beautiful impromptu street party,” with topless women,

multicolored balloons, and dancing.1 Looking back on the day, Radey’s teeth still grind at the

memory: “We were expecting to get machinegunned, a distinct possibility, and some folks thought

it was a party thrown for them to have fun at. I’ve nothing against parties, fun, or drugs (some

kinds), but Jesus on a Pogo Stick, NOT WHEN PEOPLE’S LIVES ARE ON THE LINE.”2 Nacio

Jan Brown remembers the Memorial Day parade as terribly depressing. Although the nonviolent

carnivalesque marches playfully rejected the culture of fear that the militarization of Berkeley

perpetuated, Brown felt that with the park fenced, their political theater was meaningless.3

That evening after the march, Williams spent the night under a nude dancing circle around

the bonfire in the newly-created Mobile People’s Park Annex at Grove (now Martin Luther King,

Jr. Way) and Hearst, celebrating how there had been no massacre. The park began with the

takeover of a parcel rendered vacant as part of a transit development project for Bay Area Rapid

Transit (BART).4 Named as a military expansion of the fenced park to signify conquered territory,

the Annex mirrored a new sign now hanging above the occupying soldiers at Berkeley’s People’s

Park—“Fort Defiance.”5 Although many called the Annex a success because it had not been

1 Kathy Williams, “Green Grass Grows All Around,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p. 5. 2 Jack Radey, Personal Correspondence with Bettina Aptheker (June 3, 2017), courtesy of author. 3 Nacio Jan Brown, Personal Interview (September 19, 2017). 4 Kathy (Williams), “Don’t Take the Gobi for Eden,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 7; Lorraine

Wild, “Transgression and Delight: Graphic Design at Cranbrook,” in The New Cranbrook Design Discourse, ed. Hugh

Aldersey-Williams (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 31; Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area Design

Radicals Tried to Save the Planet,” Places Journal (October 2015): https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-

modernism/. 5 The park takes on a few different names during this time, including Gobi Desert #2 and Insurrection City.

Insurrection City was intended to ally with African Americans. The week of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, the Poor

People’s Campaign held a tent-in on the National Mall that they called Resurrection City. Critics called it

“Insurrection City,” arguing that the alleged $2 million cost of guarding and restoring the lawn was criminal. These

nicknames reflect how parks take on overlapping meanings as new park creators. Additionally, it indicates this period

of park creation as one of chaos, in which the power of parks often rested in the symbolic power of renaming land.

Park synonyms contribute to the metaphorical narrative of numerous coexistent parks emerging spontaneously like

guerrilla forces—with a name calling them into being, their mere existence resisted police efforts to stop park creation.

For a mention of Insurrection City, see Thurman Sensing, “What is Insurrection City?” Denton Record Chronicle

292

fenced, police regularly raided the park as acts of material and social terror. At one evening bust,

police dispersed 150 people before using their nightsticks to knock over a half-dozen six-feet tall,

newly-planted saplings, overturn a slide and swing, and dismantle a tool shed. The Oakland

Tribune reported that law enforcement claimed they were acting on “hundreds of complaints of

noise and illegal burning.” The accompanying photo for the story depicted a young UC Berkeley

student sitting in the Annex, despondently staring at a broken tree.6

Liane Chu had described the first day of work at Berkeley’s People’s Park as fun and

joyous.7 Yet only four days into the creation of the Annex, some called “Insurrection City,”

Williams now argued that the Annex could never replace Berkeley’s People’s Park. While the

community project had been “something beautiful and permanent, a Garden of Eden in a blacktop

jungle,” in contrast, “the Annex was created as a war tactic.” Despite the planting of trees and

construction of playground equipment, it was not a park. “It was conceived and seized as a military

move by the street masses, in a state of emergency, in an occupied territory. Later on, tents went

up and the ‘ground people’ moved in to join the ranks.”8 The encampment and bonfire symbolized

conquered territory. In sharp contrast, the university brought in bulldozers to level areas of the

original park to make way for the new parking lot and intramural field.

The occupied park, the bayonetted National Guardsmen, and the circling helicopters,

reminded park organizers of the impending threat of death that pushed locals to fight against one

another rather than toward their common enemy. Although prior to the park fencing only a handful

(Texas, June 30, 1968): p. 4; For a photograph of the “Fort Defiance” sign, see Associated Press, Photograph

(2000.1.798), (May 28, 1969), The Oakland Tribune Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, reprinted online

at: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001798; For more on the multiple names of the Mobile Park

Annex, see Kathy Williams, “Don’t Take the Gobi for Eden;” Kathy Williams, “Green Grass Grows All Around,”

Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 22 (May 30-June 5, 1969): p. 5. 6 Associated Press, Photograph (2000.1.840), The Oakland Tribune Collection, Oakland Museum of California,

reprinted online at: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001840. 7 Liane Chu, Personal Interview (September 18, 2017). 8 Kathy (Williams), “Don’t Take the Gobi for Eden,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 7.

293

of largely white male leaders reported in the Barb on new developments in the park, after Bloody

Thursday, hundreds now used the press, photography, art, and organizing meetings to share their

opinions on the future of the park as well as the infighting that the fencing had caused. The shared

trauma of attack galvanized many new to insurgent park creation to join the conversation about

Berkeley’s People’s Park in ways that some original organizers feared were disrupting their initial

vision. Some like “Diane” tried to spin the fence positively, arguing that the military occupation of

the park provided an opportunity for organizers to fulfil their mission of spontaneous park design

as a form of civil disobedience across the city. Diane tried to redirect attention from the fence

symbolizing lost territory to its current function in containing the police. “Practically speaking, if

the robots of law and order must have a place in which to play, what better place is there than a

fenced in dungheap mudhole?” she asked. “This leaves all the surrounding area free for free

people.”9 The fence protected park allies and creators by containing law enforcement in what she

called a self-made “concentration camp,” yet abandoning the material vestiges of the park meant

rejecting the cultural memory of empowerment, consecration, and birth that working within it had

manifested. Others like Radey and Williams could not move on so easily, and felt pulled between

opposing strategies: on the one hand, embracing the inherent anti-capitalist radicalism of insurgent

park creation, and on the other, radicalizing the People’s Park ideology to situate violence against

park creators within a larger critique of systemic displacement. Can you build a park while fearing

for your survival? Their complaints about the violence at the Annex and of park enthusiasts

seemed to argue that it could not.

The external pressures from law enforcement and bureaucratic politics were pushing park

advocates to respond not only violently but hierarchically, forcing what had been imagined as a

9 Diane, “Up the Fence,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 4.

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leaderless coalition to crack from within. Despite disagreements on courses of action, some called

for a loyalty oath amongst park advocates to ensure one course of action.10 Without the park as a

central hub, dozens met to deliberate the formation of the “People’s Park Corporation,” as the new

governing body of the park at the same time that a People’s Park Annex Committee was formed. A

clearly designated leadership council, advocates argued, could represent the park in negotiations

with the university and city to prevent or at least anticipate the intrusion of law enforcement.

Others disagreed, arguing that allocating power to those who had not worked on the site during its

early days abandoned its principle of equal labor.11 In a Barb opinion piece, “Barbara” described

how fear about the constant police presence had halted their activism, leaving many “on the fence”

about how to move forward: “There are pigs out there, wild animals circling People’s Park Annex,

waiting for an opening, a breaking point, while we stand inside doubting each other. The fence is

still up and we are frustrated. We sneer at each other. Liberal! Pacifist! Pig Lover! We split into

factions and blame anyone, everyone but ourselves. We forget that all of us, ALL of us are the

Park.”12 While many remembered the chaos of park construction being resolved through collective

deliberation, now that hundreds more wanted to have a say in the park, demands for a leadership

structure within the looming threat of police attack pushed many to choose sides or drop out

altogether.

The violence sparked over the fencing of Berkeley’s People’s Park had wide-reaching

impact. The media capitalized on the violence between activists and police over park creations,

using page-turning headlines and threatening photographs to capture the physical conflicts more

than systemic histories of displacement that inspired it. Both mainstream and underground media

10 Barbara, “On the Fence,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 4. 11 Steve Haines, “New Tactics – Armies of the Night to Bring Fence Down,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12,

1969): p. 5 12 Barbara, “On the Fence.”

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outlets carried headlines about the violent aftermath of Berkeley’s People’s Park.13 Despite the

danger, television and radio reporters waded into the mass of crowds on Bloody Thursday to get

their unique version of the story that would bring in viewers, listeners, and ad money.14 African

American television journalist Belva Davis was one of several reporters trapped in the street

battles on Bloody Thursday. Although she had forgotten her state-issued gas mask, her heavy

studio makeup and contact lenses protected her from the nauseating plumes of tear gas that singed

her lungs and eyes. Making it through the crowd, she became overwhelmed by a mixture of fear

and determination upon seeing law enforcement take aim in her direction. “When they faced our

direction and knelt, rifles in hand, we ducked into a recessed doorway immediately below street

level. Not knowing what was to come, we waited and listened,” she stated. “I could have called it

quits, declared that this kind of journalism was too risky for a mother of two small children. But I

knew that in this time and this place, I was doing what it took to be a real reporter.”15 Weathering

the police violence as well as harassment by anti-mainstream media protestors to capture the story

felt like a way to prove her worth in the white male hegemonic media as well as a white, male-

dominated media story like Berkeley’s People’s Park.

13 While analyzing mainstream media coverage has not been part of the scope of this study, some of the underground

photographers I spoke with admit to having their photographs of the park, Bloody Thursday, and the Memorial Day

march published in the Associated Press, the Universal Press Syndicate, and the Liberated News Service, as well as

sold to foreign newspapers and magazines. 14 Some reporters, like radio journalist Chet Hancock, were beaten by law enforcement despite their press passes.

Some photographers like Stephen Shames remembers carpooling and sticking with other reporters at protests lessened

the likelihood of police taking away their press passes or attacking them if separated from witnesses. “Baker’s

Bluster,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 24 (June 13-19, 1969): pp. 5, 13; Stephen Shames, Personal Interview (October 5,

2017). 15 Belva Davis and Vicki Haddock, Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism (Oakland:

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011): pp. 109-112. Davis had worked hard, becoming the first African American

television journalist on the west coast in 1966. By 1970, after covering many violent protests, she was promoted to

anchorwoman at KPIX-TV in 1970. To read more on her career and the significance of her being named a television

reporter and anchorwoman by 1970, see Jim Mantell, “Moving Up in the Media: Belva Davis,” Baltimore Afro-

American vol. 84, no. 92 (July 17, 1976): pp. 21-22.

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Figure 6.1, “Welcome to Berkeley, Map”: Not only were other mainstream media outlets looking to the Barb for

information, but, in anticipating tens of thousands of outsiders visiting the city for the Memorial Day march, the Barb

marketed itself as a tour guide to out-of-town park demonstrators. On the day of the march, the Barb replaced

coverage on its back page with a hand-drawn map of the city with areas designated for legal aid, medical aid, and

information (including the Barb office), as well as addresses for park supporter meeting locations. Unknown Artist

“Welcome to Berkeley,” Map (ca. 1969), Public Domain, Courtesy of the Berkeley Free Church Collection,

Contributed by Richard York, Graduate Theological Union, University of California, Berkeley.16

While few papers had covered the park creation prior to the fencing, news outlets made

money off the violence the fence provoked. John Jakobson, then Assistant Editor of the Barb in

16 Unknown artist, “Welcome to Berkeley” (GTU_056), Map (ca. 1969), in Berkeley Free Church Collection (GTU

049), Contributor Richard York, Graduate Theological Union, University of California, Berkeley, reprinted online:

http://imgzoom.cdlib.org/Fullscreen.ics?ark=ark:/13030/kt3199r921/z1&&brand=oac4. It should be noted that the

map is drawn with North to the left, which indicates the direction with which they expected most of the park

supporters to be coming from, namely the whiter San Francisco to the East versus the blacker Oakland to the West.

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charge of the day to day operations of the newspaper, recently stated that many photographers did

not want to be assigned to the park until Bloody Thursday because its youthful idealism and

anticipated ephemerality meant their photos would not be able to compete with other more

dramatic headlines.17 The Barb, known as the platform for the park, now sold thousands of copies

after the fencing by relaying page-turning episodes of hidden violence coupled with photographs

of topless women at protests and parks.18 Because street fighting on Bloody Thursday occurred so

quickly, the Barb had an advantage in capturing the violence that made the newspaper and its

freelance and staff reporters money.19 When writers like Steve Haines and Stew Albert, as well as

photographers like Nacio Jan Brown and Stephen Shames, reported on Berkeley’s People’s Park,

they did so to use their voice and art to shed light on the police state. Jakobson remembered: “We

put out the best issue of the paper ever, the May 23-29, 1969, issue, of the Berkeley Barb. The

outside world could then see and understand, firsthand, what life was like in an occupied American

city.”20 In advocating for a cause in which they believed, they were also able to attach their names

to one of the leading stories in the Bay-area and to make a profit. Photographers received $15 per

photo printed in the Barb, while photos could be sold to mainstream print news outlets like Time

for $100-150 per photo. Staffers estimated that the newspaper’s circulation had permanently

increased by 20,000 readers, an estimated thirty percent increase in profits, as a result of People’s

17 John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). 18 For more on the Barb during this era, see Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground

Press (New York City: Pantheon Books, 1985); Arthur Seeger, The Berkeley Barb: Social Control of an Underground

Newspaper (New York City: Irvington Publishers, 1983); Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of

the Underground Press (New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1972). 19 John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). 20 Sam Whiting, “Catching up with the Staff of the Barb,” SF Gate (August 2, 2015):

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Catching-up-with-the-staff-of-the-Barb-6417938.php.

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Park and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the Barb as the voice of

revolution.21

The violence over Berkeley’s People’s Park sparked Barb reporters to analyze the value of

their labor, the hierarchical structure of the newspaper, as well as the newspaper’s role in effecting

change. Knowing that university officials and undercover law enforcement were monitoring the

Barb for information on the resistance movement, some anticipated California Governor Ronald

Reagan would shut the paper down as a political bust.22 Taking the park’s ideology as well as the

urgency of violence to heart, for six weeks, beginning around the time of the Memorial Day

March, reporters for the Barb negotiated with owner Max Scherr for better wages and “mutual

respect.” Although the underground press was known for paying paltry sums, staff members now

felt their wages—65 cents an hour or freelance reporters 25 cents per column inch—were too low

for the price they paid in weathering police violence and rejecting stable employment to capture

the conflicts at any time of the day.23 Some wanted to convert the newspaper into a cooperative to

not only have more pay, but greater say in editorial control.24 With a majority of the Barb staff

politically committed to the defense of Berkeley’s People’s Park, the tight grip on salaries

appeared hypocritical. Haines stated, “We felt that it is sheer hypocrisy for the Barb to mouth the

21 Stew Albert, “He Built a Fire on Main Street…” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1, no. 2 (July 18-24, 1969): p. 5; John Jakobson

said that at its highest, the Barb had a circulation of about 93,000 because of the People’s Park news headlines. John

Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). According to my interviews, shortly after the Memorial Day

march, the Barb had a higher readership shortly after the Memorial Day march than the local establishment journal, the

Berkeley Daily Gazette. 22 For documentation that the City Council was reading the Barb, see “DeBonis Hands: Sticky with Blood,” OUTCRY!

From Occupied Berkeley, Special Issue Pamphlet (undated, ca. May 15, 1969): p. 8, in Folder 1, Oversize Box 1, Leon

Eli Collection of Witness Statements Relating to People’s Park and General Unrest in Berkeley, California, 1969

(BANC MSS 99/80), in Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Haines, “Barb on Strike;” John Jakobson

says that the newspaper regularly met with lawyers on what they could and could not print regarding violence and

nudity. In addition, he stated that because Reagan called out the Barb by name as inciting violence, that their

circulation increased. John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). 23 Steve Haines, “Barb on Strike,” Barb on Strike vol. 1, no. 1 (July 11-17, 1969): p. 3; John Jakobson claimed

freelance writers were paid 50 cents per column inch, while he as Assistant Editor was paid $135 a week. Jakobson,

Personal Interview (September 4, 2017). 24 John Jakobson, Personal Interview (September 4, 2017).

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words of revolution, while lining Max’s pockets with the people’s cash. We felt that Barb profits

should go for bail funds, legal defense funds, medical clinics, crash pads, food and other

community needs…We wanted Max to pay medical or legal expenses for a Barb staffer hurt or

arrested while on assignment.”25 When negotiations fell through, most of the Barb left to form

their own newspaper, the Berkeley Tribe, where they continued to cover violent altercations over

Berkeley’s People’s Park and the Mobile Park Annex competition with the Barb.

Immediately into the creation of the Annex, the site became plagued with violence. After

police raided the park, Berkeley Police Chief Bruce Baker defended how officers had broken park

equipment and trees. “The officers were probably aware of the attempted rapes, the use of

narcotics, and other goings ons [sic] at the Annex,” he stated. “Since that Annex began we have

had over 100 complaints over what went on. We have had neighbors from there literally come

begging to use with tears in their eyes for assistance.”26 These accusations were reiterated by

Kathy Williams who described the Annex differently from the park: “It is not all peace, love, and

good vibes,” she clarified. “The far-out freak-out that went on for days there Memorial Day

weekend was marred by a lot of little bummers. Like rip-offs. Like a rape or two. Like a few split

skulls. And, as should have been expected with a happening like last weekend that attracted

thousands of people, a lot of little punks, burn-artists, and fucked-up kids also made the scene.”27

Police raids, heavy-handed bureaucracy, and infighting discouraged many from participating in the

park creation. Many assumed that park creation was “dead.”

While underground reporters were much more willing to report on power structures within

parks after the fencing, between May and September, park advocates wrestled with funding,

25 Haines, “Barb on Strike.” 26 “Baker’s Bluster,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 24 (June 13-19, 1969): pp. 5, 13. 27 Kathy (Williams), “Don’t Take the Gobi for Eden,” Berkeley Barb vol. 8, no. 23 (June 6-12, 1969): p. 7.

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maintenance, and advocacy, attempting to transform the park from a “violence-prone jungle—

which it was for some months after its recapture” to a community center.28 Almost immediately,

the park included an encampment—in part, to keep watch for police raids as other parks like the

Mobile Park Annex had included in the days after the initial Bloody Thursday fencing.29 This

encampment shaped how the broader community perceived of the park. Edward and Sarah Guzzi

had lived in the park three weeks by the time they spoke in a forum on the park held June 18, 1969

at Berkeley’s Unitarian Church.30 Although 65-year-old Quaker and retired chemical engineer

Wells Webb who had regularly worked in the park that summer tried to rally the audience to

petition the university for a better sprinkler system, a reporter attending the event noted that “the

audience seemed little touched, explaining that they had their own backyards to relax in and were

afraid to bring their young children to the park.31 By August, Webb petitioned the Berkeley City

Council for $1500 to install additional portable toilets and pay for food and services for what he

identified as the “100 honest street people” crashing in the park. A reporter for the local leftist

Grassroots newspaper detailed how fights, largely between black and white men dominated the

park in the summer of 1969. Although pairing white and black park workers on tasks had reduced

tensions, the reporter felt that the university was waiting for the park to fail: “There is a strong

suspicion among Park people that the University continues to subtly undermine their work. Police

seem to overlook disruptive gangs and come down on freaks and blacks.”32 The university

capitalized on this conflict, waiting for internal tensions to crush the park movement from within.

28 “Population, That Is – People Explosion,” Berkeley Barb vol. 15, no. 6 (August 11-17, 1972): p. 11 29 Ibid. 30 Paul Ghinger, “People’s Park Pique,” Berkeley Barb vol. 14, no. 25 (June 23-29, 1972): pp. 4, 8. 31 Ibid. 32 “Tensions Ease in People’s Park,” Grassroots vol. 1, no. 2 (August 1972): pp. 1, 3, in Berkeley Free Church

Collection, 1959-1976 (GTU 89-5-016), Folder 13, Box 27, Graduate Theological Union, University of California

Berkeley.

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Coverage during the summer and fall of 1969 also reveals how the community began using

the Annex in new ways that invited collaboration and creativity.33 By the fall of 1969, Martha

Mueller had helped organize a People’s Community school for children ages 5-12 in the park.34 A

Free University class planted a vegetable garden.35 And Berkeley’s Ecology Action started a free

store at the Annex, accepting donations for furniture mattresses, rugs, and kitchen ware rescued

from dump trucks.36 Countless forums were held discussing the park in conversation with global

war, pollution, and colonialism. Connecting community-building direct actions with the symbolic

empowerment of land reclamation, such spatial direct actions as occupations, urban encampments,

squatter communities, park creations, and insurgent gardens appeared as endless possibilities to

connect the systematic oppression of displaced people with their environments. Over time, the

Annex would eventually become Ohlone Park, named for the areas indigenous inhabitants.

Between 1970 and 1985, the fenced park at the corner of Haste and Bowditch exchanged

hands through violent conflicts several times. When the university converted Berkeley’s People’s

Park into a parking lot in 1970, park advocates protested by agitating site users—posting signs like

“Parking for James Rector,” cutting holes in the fence, and slashing tires to discourage use that

would prevent the university from profiting off the lot.37 On the second anniversary of Bloody

Thursday, clashes between demonstrators and police caused extensive damage throughout the

city.38 In May of 1972 after President Richard Nixon announced he would blockade North

Vietnam’s main port, park advocates tore down the fence. Captured in a red and yellow poster for

33 Joy Marcus, “Peoples Park Annex,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1, no. 12 (September 26-October 3, 1969): p. 11. 34 “Help!” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1, no. 15 (October 17-23, 1969): p. 22. 35 Joy Marcus, “People’s Park Annex.” 36 “Trash Stash,” Berkeley Tribe vol. 1, no. 16 (October 24-30, 1969): p. 8. 37 Associated Press, Photograph (2000.1.815), (July 15, 1969), The Oakland Tribune Collection, the Oakland Museum

of California, reprinted online: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001815. 38 Associated Press, Photograph (2000.1.941), (May 15, 1971), The Oakland Tribune Collection, the Oakland Museum

of California, reprinted online: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/20001941

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the third anniversary of the park, the image depicts a group of park demonstrators opposing a

police officer in riot gear, and reads, “We dedicate the park to the liberation struggles of the

Vietnamese and American people.”39 Other anti-war activists took to the streets, breaking

windows, setting fires, and throwing bricks at law enforcement. Thousands of other demonstrators

across the U.S. protested the new Vietnam War developments, while politicians shut down cities,

held Congressional vigils, and spoke out against President Nixon.40 By September of 1972, the

Berkeley City Council voted to lease the site, yet the university rejected the offer with plans to

build student housing on the site.41 In 1979, when the university converted the free parking lot in

the park into a fee-paying parking lot, park advocates rebelled, forcefully moved chunks of the

parking lot asphalt into the street, and began reconstructing the park.42 While street people now

“controlled” the lot, at least to the point of preventing university development, university

maintenance workers engaged in micro-aggressive tactics throughout this era, including removing

and destroying park benches, plants, and structures.43

In 1982, UC Chancellor Michael Heyman convened the People’s Park Planning Committee

to have representatives from twenty-four groups, including neighborhood organizations, street

people, and landscape architects, etc., vote on the best solution for the lot now that the Berkeley

City Council designated the park a city landmark and California State Senator Nicholas Petris

introduced legislation to memorialize the park. Three years of deliberations later, the coalitional

39 “May 15, 1972: 3rd [Third] Anniversary of People’s Park” (2010.54.549), Poster, Paper Screen Print (1972), All of

Us or None Archive, Oakland Museum of California, reprinted online at:

http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/201054549. 40 Hear local Berkeley radio news, WBAI, put Berkeley’s park protests and street standoffs in conversation with

nationwide backlash against the war. Hoh-Kun Yuen, “The 1972 War of People’s Park 5/9/1972,” Radio recording,

WBAI (May 5, 1972), in Carton 177, Reel 8, H. K. Yuen Collection (BANC MSS 2005/290), Bancroft Library,

University of California Berkeley. 41 Larry Spears, “U.C. Pressures Berkeley to Buy ‘People’s Park,’” Oakland Tribune vol. 99, no. 260 (September 16,

1972): p. 1. 42 Terri Compost, ed., People’s Park: Still Blooming, 1969-2009 and on (Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books, 2009). 43 Gordon Sullivan, “Visions of People’s Park,” The Monthly (ca. 1985): in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric Dibner Papers,

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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committee proposed their recommendations for the park to be expanded with more gardens, a bike

bath, and a wheelchair accessible bathroom. When the committee proposed their park design

proposal to Heyman in 1985, he called for a “hiatus in planning,” arguing that their proposal to

transfer property ownership to the city and manage the park as a land trust did not account for UC

Berkeley’s ownership of the lot.44 Making light of the stalemate, East Bay’s The Monthly

published its own satiric proposals to develop the park. Reflecting a turn to profit-driven

innovation as the new frontier of the 1980s, one artist proposed the development of a five-story

“MGM Grand-type copying place” with a “fountain of toner” and a crazed psychedelic printer

repair man. Another proposed turning People’s Park into a franchise, offering kits with bathroom

facilities, a free box, vegetables, and rolls of turf packed into a semi-truck and carted to other

locales as far as Bora Bora. Finally, one design asked supporters to send a nickel for a bag of dirt

from People’s Park to clear the landscape and make room for a towering statue of President

Ronald Reagan, “The Great Liberator,” that would be haunted by the ghost of James Rector. The

plan was, according to the author, an homage to the entrepreneurship of opportunistic park rioters

who had allegedly incited violence by selling bricks taken from housing demolitions for a nickel

on Bloody Thursday.45 Taken together, the proposals revealed how control over the lot was no

longer a debate about liberation but a burden on the public who felt pushed and pulled by the

binary between park advocates and the university. The shifting urban political contexts had

44 Craig Anderson, “After three years of planning, People’s Park is still in limbo,” The Daily Californian (April 15,

1985): pp. 1, 13, in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric Dibner Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 45 Philip Garner, “Proposal 1. A People’s Franchise, and a Theme Building for Berkeley,” in Gordon Sullivan,

“Visions of People’s Park,” The Monthly (ca. 1985): p. 21, in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric Dibner Papers, Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley; Charlie Haas, “Proposal 2. A Monument to the People’s Struggle with

Resumes,” in Gordon Sullivan, “Visions of People’s Park,” The Monthly (ca. 1985): p. 25, in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric

Dibner Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Dan O’Neill, “Proposal 3. A Statue of the Great

Liberator,” in Gordon Sullivan, “Visions of People’s Park,” The Monthly (ca. 1985): p. 27, in Folder 13, Carton 4, Eric

Dibner Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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transformed insurgent park creation, from vibrant radical placemaking and rebellion in 1969 in the

Reagan era—a bureaucratic time-waste with looming developers.

6.2 Current Spatial Occupations and the Historical Memory of Berkeley’s People’s Park

Nearly fifty years later, the University of California, Berkeley has reignited its call to

develop the lot. Anxieties circulate, as park supporters fear an impending attack by the university

and police remain. Since 1969, the university has increasingly positioned the park’s homeless users

as dangerous. Redirecting attention away from lack of affordable housing, a death in funding for

drug addicts and the poor, and lack of access to other public spaces for socialization, the university

characterizes the park as an impediment to new urban renewal projects such as the development of

student dorms.46 Despite efforts by park advocates to celebrate the diverse memories of the park,

like Terri Compost who published an edited collection highlighting decades worth of festivals,

Frisbee matches, and free speech protests at Berkeley’s People’s Park, the violence of early

standoffs remain centered within the park’s cultural memory.47 Photographs of National

Guardsmen blocking Berkeley streets and occupying the park, along with protestors throwing

rocks or teargas canisters back at law enforcement on Bloody Thursday, overshadow the principles

of spontaneous collective design that inspired the park’s beginnings.

The bloodied bodies of James Rector, Alan Blanchard, and the bullet wounds of dozens

become what Marita Sturken calls “technologies of memory”—not artifacts but technologies that

“embody and generate memory and thus are implicated in the power dynamics of memory’s

46 Daniel Borenstein, “Borenstein: Half-Century after Deadly People’s Park Riots, It’s Time to Build Housing There,”

East Bay Times (August 23, 2017, updated August 25, 2017): http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/08/23/borenstein-

half-century-after-deadly-peoples-park-riots-its-time-to-move-on/. 47 Terri Compost, ed., People’s Park: Still Blooming, 1969-2009 and on (Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books, 2009).

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production.”48 Sturken argues that the presence of bodies are essential to the production of cultural

memory: “Survivors stand at the juncture of cultural memory and history, their bodies offering

evidence of the multiplicity of memory stories.”49 While birdshot-speckled chests of Bloody

Thursday victims reproduce the horror of the urban warzone in 1969, drawing our attention to the

similarities in violent treatment of protestors today, those same bodies “produce amnesia.”50

Seeking resolution, this footage enables forgetting, ignoring a multitude of perspectives that

shaped the park, including: the patterns of systemic displacement that led to the lot’s initial

vacancy; the park’s cross-cultural and gender-neutral attraction; the project’s hierarchical struggles

in the wake of ongoing violence; as well as the revolutionary impact of the park’s ideology of

spontaneous, collective, urban ecological design.

Focusing on the fear and chaos of the standoff at Berkeley’s People’s Park as told through

photographs of both soldiers and the slain has forced narrative closure, reducing park narratives to

binaries of violence and innocence, success and failure.51 For park advocates, the occupation and

fencing of Berkeley’s People’s Park, along with the terrorism by the police and National Guard, in

many ways killed the freedom of creative exploration that the park inspired. At the same time, park

critics who focused on infighting erased the People’s Park movement as a watershed moment in

demanding full access to spatial citizenship. UC Berkeley and its allies framed the park’s history

as one in ongoing decline that begs closure by the state for the sake of the students. With

discourses of collaborating and healing erased in these contended territories, the visual culture of

48 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering

(University of California Press, 1997): p. 10. 49 Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 12. 50 Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 20. 51 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 8.

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fear and displacement as told through these images of war and now the images of homelessness

have become a lasting medium for dealing with the trauma of loss and displacement.52

Situating Berkeley’s People’s Park within a broader movement of insurgent park creations

reveals the breadth of political placemaking within the late Cold War era, with newspaper

headlines on dozens of parks leaving a trail of how a variety of people shifted their understanding

about their lack of access to the urban environment as an injustice of spatial inequality. While the

violence of Berkeley’s People’s Park and the white male bodies of its creators captured the media

spotlight that have shaped the historical memory of this movement, dozens of takeovers, tent

villages, and squats reveal a growing movement of people resisting spatial disempowerment.

Created by the poor, women, immigrants, and people of color, the radicalism of these community-

based renewal projects rested in their rejection of stereotypical depictions of their neighborhoods

as blighted, their bodies unkempt. Often characterized as isolated incidents on disconnected lots,

People’s Parks impacted economies, personal relationships, the media, political organizing, urban

design, and methods of protest in the late Cold War era. People’s Parks captured the attention of

activists at the same time that the police violence regulating them shaped how apolitical moderates

understood their own spatial citizenship. Because dozens of parks and gardens were insurgently

created in this era without media fanfare or police harassment, further investigation of their origin

stories will better reflect how this movement of agrarian reformism was not only diverse but

regenerative.

Examining People’s Parks as mediums of experience rather than merely sites of protest

within a chronological narrative opens a window on the ways in which current political

placemaking projects employ labor, materiality, and food culture to demonstrate histories and

52 For more on the 1980s-1990s turn toward lamenting homeless occupants of Berkeley’s People’s Park, see Don

Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (Guilford Press, 2003).

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ongoing practices of institutionalized violence and to challenge them in prolonged public view.

Political place-makers in the twenty-first century similarly employ discursive tactics to create

mythohistorical spaces where protestors can ally transnationally and cross-culturally.53 While

historical contexts have shifted, insurgent park creators continue to struggle with structural

inequalities within these radical community-building projects, that shed light on how activists are

understanding their own spatial citizenship as beyond a binary between violence and innocence,

capitalism and socialism. The movement’s 99% coalition-building rhetoric attracted a range of

activists who attempted to collectively build a new, more egalitarian community on the sod of

Zuccotti Park and other sites around the globe. Many patterns emerged similar to those at People’s

Parks: groups of elderly women joined together in “soup brigades” to bring warm corn chowder to

Chicago’s Occupy movement stationed in Hyde Park.54 One reporters described the food served in

Zuccotti Park’s makeshift kitchen, from homemade vegan casserole to Katz’s Deli sandwiches,

was “free-form, eclectic, improvisatory and contradictory.”55 Sourcing their meals and their

ingredients made many of these occupiers think critically about the American food system as a

form of environmental sustainability. While respecting laws prohibiting open flames in New York

City public parks, park dwellers washed their plates and utensils on site in a water filtration system

embedded within the landscape. Occupiers received truckloads of food donations; Liberatos Pizza

reported receiving numerous calls from around the world paying for deliveries to be sent to the

53 For examples see Jeffrey Hou, ed., Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary

Cities (Routledge, 2010); Jeffrey Hou and Sabine Knierbein, eds., City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public

Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (Routledge, 2017); Jeffrey Hou, ed., Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing

and Placemaking (Routledge 2013); Louisa Martín Rojo, Occupy: The Spatial Dynamics of Discourse in Global

Protest Movements (John Benjamins Publishing Company 2016); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope:

Social Movements in the Internet Age (Polity 2015); Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong, eds., Taking the

Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). 54 Dawn Turner Trice, “Soup’s on for the Occupy Chicago Crowd,” Chicago Tribune (November 7, 2011): 1.4. 55 Jeff Gordinier, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting,” NY Times (October 11, 2011):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/dining/protesters-at-occupy-wall-street-eat-well.html.

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park. 56 Food helped make Occupy Wall street a shared global experience. Various media outlets

critiqued the culinary abundance within occupations, circulating rumors that the Occupy kitchen

staff planned to protest “freeloaders” by only serving brown rice for three days. Organizers

responded that the simple meals were an attempt to give the culinary team a break from operating

spontaneously on abrupt donations and to organize their meal structure. They were overworked.

“Winter’s coming,” food committee member Megan Hayes told The Wire.57

Yet Occupy could not exist in a political vacuum. Because the park and the lives of its

creators were still embedded within the power structures of the “outside” world, microaggressions

quickly developed within the park. The media played on these growing tensions. The NY Post ran

a story that the Occupy kitchen staff was revolting, publishing a photo of a sweatband-wearing

middle-aged white man walking through the free food line at the encampment; the caption read

“Tummy Trouble,” and claimed that professional homeless eaters were disappointed that cooks

would be taking a brief hiatus from serving “fancy feasts.”58 Megan Hayes expressed the

frustrations with the media shared by many: “The Post first says we eat like kings, then their

restaurant critic says our food’s horrible. They need to make up their mind about us.”59 The NY

Daily News reported that Occupy Wall Street was quickly becoming a campground for vagrant, ex-

cons, and “takers.” 60 At the same time that occupiers built coalitions celebrating shared services

and more egalitarian decision-making structures and methods of communication, theft, violent

56 Ibid. 57 Adam Martin, “Occupy Wall Street Kitchen Denies Starving Out Freeloaders,” The Wire (October 27, 2011),

reprinted in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-kitchen-denies-

starving-out-vagrants/336256/. 58 Selim Algar, “Occupy Wall Street Kitchen Staff Protesting Fixing Food for Freeloaders, New York Post (October

27, 2011): https://nypost.com/2011/10/27/occupy-wall-street-kitchen-staff-protesting-fixing-food-for-freeloaders/. 59 Martin, “Occupy Wall Street Kitchen.” 60 Christina Boyle, “Occupy Wall Street campground becoming spot for vagrants, ex-cons, and ‘takers’ to call home,”

NY Daily News (October 23, 2011): http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/occupy-wall-street-campground-spot-

vagrants-ex-cons-takers-call-home-article-1.965773.

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disagreements, and police harassment caused some consensus within the park to collapse.61 Police

departments spent millions of dollars on riot control equipment, surveillance officers, and

operations to shut down park occupations.62 Although denigrated by the media, the movement

started conversations on the structural inequalities of a capitalist democracy within a worldwide

revolutionary placemaking movement.63 One person who had worked in an Occupy kitchen

collective described in an online comment how the internal bureaucracy governing meal

preparation and dispersal had been frustrating. He remained hopeful, having left New York City to

work on a farm as part of the newly-created Occupy Farms working group: “Looking towards the

future we hope to find a sustainable way to feed the movement using little or no money but rather

labor exchange. There are a lot of exciting things happening on this front….”64

Even when focusing on smaller case studies of contemporary political placemaking, such

as Chicago’s Freedom Square, many of their ideas for societal improvement as well as conflicts

were the same. Freedom Square had been created spontaneously after a civil disobedience action

on July 20, 2016 protesting violent police discrimination of people of color. The Guardian at that

time had reported that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) had unlawfully and indefinitely

detained more than seven thousand people of color in an undisclosed warehouse in the West-

61 For examples see Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (It

Books, 2012); W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt, and Michael Taussig, Three Inquiries in Disobedience (University

of Chicago Press, 2013); Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed

America (Haymarket Books, 2012); Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Grief, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick,

eds., Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011). 62 Bernard Harcourt describes state violence against occupiers using the example of the Chicago Police Department

whose mobilization against protestors captured what some have called a new movement in military urbanism. See

Bernard Harcourt, “Political Disobedience,” Three Inquiries in Disobedience, by W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt,

and Michael Taussig (University of Chicago Press, 2013), sp. pp. 78-83. 63 Ibid. 64 Eric Alexander, Online comment, (December 14, 2011) in response to Alyson Young, “Identity, Consumption, and

the Politics of Food in the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” Food Anthropology: The Society for the Anthropology of

Food and Nutrition (December 12, 2011): https://foodanthro.com/2011/12/12/identity-consumption-and-the-politics-

of-food-in-the-occupy-wall-street-movement/.

310

Chicago Lawndale neighborhood.65 For the #LetUsBreathe Collective, the radical takeover of the

lot across from CPD’s Homan Square facility was a visible rejection of the police state that the site

embodied. Challenging the powerlessness of displacement within their own community, the

collective began the park creation with six small tents and a grill. Freedom Square grew over the

course of forty-one days, serving hundreds of meals daily, teaching children’s art and

revolutionary history classes, roasting marshmallows, and planting basil. The collective struggled

with many of the same conflicts that plagued Occupy Wall Street and the People’s Park

movement: “Women were silenced and verbally abused. So many phones were stolen it’s dizzying.

And maybe, most tragically, core organizers were so physically and mentally fatigued from multi-

day shifts of physical and emotional labor that we failed to successfully value and offer structure to

the many contributions of volunteers and fellow organizers.” After forty-one days, the organizers

chose to take down the camp and begin different projects at their newly-opened headquarters

around the block.66

The experience left many of the organizers with questions about how to regulate anti-racist,

anti-capitalist political placemaking: “How do you enforce consequences without replicating the

punitive power structures you’re there to oppose? How do you keep teenage boys from throwing

rocks on what used to be a vacant lot where they always threw rocks before you got there? How do

you ban someone from a space you don’t own?” Although Freedom Square park closed, their

project continues—metaphorically moving the park’s borders beyond the lot, outward into the city,

and expanding into new political issues. Looking back on their park as a learning experience rather

than a failure, the group remains prideful of their accomplishments. “In every moment, we stood

65 Spencer Ackerman, “Homan Square Revealed: How Chicago Police ‘Disappeared’ 7,000 People,” The Guardian

(October 19, 2015): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-

thousands. 66 #LetUsBreathe Collective, “Freedom Square Phases Out Overnight Occupancy after 41 Days of Loving Lawndale

and Imagining a World Without Police,” (2016): https://www.letusbreathecollective.com/freedomsquare.

311

for love, no matter how violent or chaotic things became,” they stated. “Building a world without

police is hard work…The occupation did not end because we ran out of energy or we were

overwhelmed by the logistics of the site. It ended because it illustrated the tension between the

world as it is and the world as we imagine it to be.”67

Taken together, People’s Parks as placemaking projects used insurgent, community-based

urban ecological design as a form of civil disobedience. Their creations as well as their

transformations not only reveal the ways in which activists attempt to realize worlds without

displacement. In these worlds of “more process than product,” more direction than destination,

activists used placemaking to explore and resist how forces of urban renewal, police brutality, and

institutionalized discrimination impact the spatial power of social justice movements within the

urban realm.68 By opening a window onto this method of protest within the United States, I hope to

expand the discussion of how insurgent park creation as a tactical form of aesethic and spatial

communication translated beyond U.S. national borders. This research begs broader interrogation

of the parameters of spatial citizenship: When is an urban dweller a protestor, and when is the

occupation of space political? How does the displacement of urban renewal, police brutality, and

environmental racism shape political identity formation and activist community building? When

activists use their bodies and the texture of the environment to create a political culture of

resistance, do these performances carry the same meanings across gender, racial, ethnic, class, and

political borders? And, as historical contexts shift, how do the cultural memories of spatial protest

methods take on new meanings?

67 #LetUsBreathe Collective, “Freedom Square Phases Out.” 68 Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Introduction,” Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the

1960’s and 70’s (Routledge, 213): p. 10.

312

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Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford

University Press, 1992).

Judy Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam

Era (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left

(Duke University Press, 2006).

Laura Zanotti, Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó’s Fight for Just

Livelihoods (University of Arizona Press, 2016).

Frank Zelko, Make It a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (Oxford

University Press, 2013).

Carl Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (NYU

Press, 2017).

Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (University of California

Press, 1993).

Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford University

Press, 2010).

Journal Articles

Meredith E. Abarca, “Authentic or Not, It’s Original,” Food and Foodways, vol. 12, no. 1 (2004),

pp. 1–25.

Peter Allen, “The End of Modernism?: People’s Park, Urban Renewal, and Community Design,”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 70, no. 3 (September 2011): pp. 354-374.

Peter Allen, “Violent Design: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism, and Urban Renewal,” ISSC

Working Paper Series 2005-2006.21, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, (University of

California, Berkeley, May 11, 2007), reprinted online:

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vz4s7jj?query=violent;hitNum=1#page-3.

341

Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (Jan. 1988), pp. 3–24.

Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, and Kathryn Gleadle, “Introduction: Space, Place, and Gendered

Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn,” Women’s History Review vol. 21, no. 4

(September 2012): pp. 523-532.

Wini Breines, “Sixties Stories’ Silences: White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power,” NWSA

Journal vol. 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): pp. 101-121.

Michael Buser, Carlo Bonura, Maria Fannin, and Kate Boyer, “Cultural Activism and the Politics

of Place-Making,” City vol. 17, no. 5 (2013): pp. 606-627.

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and

Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal vol. 40, no. 4 (December 1988): pp. 519-531.

Angela Carone, “Chicano Park Murals Get Facelift,” Fronteras Desk (January 13, 2012):

http://www.fronterasdesk.org/content/chicano-park-murals-get-faceliftout=metadata.

Michael Carriere, “Chicago, the South Side Planning Board, and the Search for (Further) Order:

Toward an Intellectual Lineage of Urban Renewal in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History

vol. 39, no. 3 (2013): pp. 411-432.

Michael Carriere, “Lessons of People’s Park for the Occupy Movement,” History News Network,

reprinted in Truthout (June 6, 2012): http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/9634-the-lessons-of-

peoples-park-for-the-occupy-movement.

Jon Cash, “People’s Park: Birth and Survival,” California History vol. 88, no. 1 (2010): pp. 8-29,

53-55.

Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet,”

Places Journal (October 2015): https://placesjournal.org/article/hippie-modernism/.

Eva Cockcraft, “The Story of Chicano Park,” Aztlán vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1984): pp. 79-103.

Steven Conn, “Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and Antiurban Pastoralism at the

End of the Sixties,” Journal of Urban History vol. 3, no. 6 (2010): pp. 831-848.

Susan Cutter, “Race, Class and Environmental Justice,” Progress in Human Geography vol. 19,

no. 1 (March 1995): pp. 111-122.

Douglas Henry Daniels, “Berkeley Apartheid: Unfair Housing in a University Town,” History

Research vol. 3, no. 5 (May 2013): pp. 321-341.

Kevin Delgado, "A Turning Point: The Conception and Realization of Chicano Park," Journal of

San Diego History 44, no. 1 (1998): pp. 48-61.

342

Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 1, Special Issue: Myth, Symbol, and

Culture (Winter 1972): pp. 61-81.

David Farber, “New Wave Sixties Historiography,” Reviews in American History vol. 27, no. 2

(June 1999): pp. 298-305.

Kathy Ferguson, “Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors,” Theory & Event vol. 11, no. 4

(2008).

Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a

Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations vol. 23, no. 2 (Summer 2011): pp. 26-

53.

Jo Guldi, “The Spatial Turn in History,” Spatial Humanities: A Project of the Institute for Enabling

Geospatial Scholarship (University of Virginia Library, Scholars Lab):

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/the-spatial-turn-in-history/index.html.

Charles Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial

Dominance in Central America,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review vol. 28, no. 1

(2005): pp. 10-28.

Simon Hall, “Framing the American 1960s: A Historiographical Review,” European Journal of

American Culture vol. 31, no. 1 (April 2012): pp. 5-23.

Stuart Hall, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History

vol. 43, no. 4 (2008): pp. 655-672.

Joel Handler, “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,” Law & Society Review

vol. 26, no. 4 (1992): pp. 697-732.

Stephanie Hartman, “The Political Palate: Reading Commune Cookbooks,” Gastronomica: The

Journal of Critical Food Studies vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring 2003): p. 29-40.

Chang-tai Hung, “A Political Park: The Working People’s Cultural Palace in Beijing,” Journal of

Contemporary History vol. 38, no 3 (July 2013): p. 556-577.

Judson Jeffries, “From Gang-Bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago,”

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 96, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): pp. 288-304.

Ralph Kingston, “Mind Over Matter?: History and the Spatial Turn,” Cultural and Social History

vol. 7, no. 1 (2010): pp. 111-121.

Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, “At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to

the ‘Spatial Turn,’” History and Theory vol. 52 (October 2013): pp. 305-318.

343

Jacques Lacan, “The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (W. W. Norton & Company,

1973): pp. 67-78.

Rachel Laudan, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed

Food,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 36–

44.

Jacqueline Lazú, “The Chicago Young Lords: (Re) constructing Knowledge and Revolution,”

Centro Journal vol. 15, no. 11 (Fall 2013): pp. 28-59.

Bradford Martin, “‘Unsightly Huts: Shanties and the Divestment Movement of the 1980s,” Peace

and Change: A Journal of Peace Research vol. 32, no. 3 (July 2007): pp. 329-360.

Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal

Multiculturalism,” Social Text vol. 24, no. 4 89 (2006): pp. 1-24.

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism:

Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,

1999): pp. 833-844.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “The Look of Sovereignty: Style and Politics in the Young Lords,”

Centro Journal vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 2015): pp. 4-33.

Brian Norman, “The Consciousness-Raising Document, Feminist Anthologies, and Black Women

in Sisterhood Is Powerful,” Frontiers 27, no. 3 (2006): pp. 38-64.

Brian Norman, "Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early

Essays," Women's Studies 35, no. 3 (2006): pp. 241–264.

Jeffrey Ogbar, “Puerto Rico en mi Corazón: The Young Lords, Black Power and Puerto Rican

Nationalism in the U.S., 1966-1972,” Centro Journal vol. 18, no. 1 (Fall 2006): pp. 149-169.

Suleiman Osman, “Gentrification Matters,” Journal of Urban History vol. 43, no. 2 (2017): pp.

172-179.

Suleiman Osman, “‘We’re Doing it Ourselves’: The Unexpected Origins of New York City’s

Public-Private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Planning History vol. 16, no. 2

(2017): pp. 162-174.

Monica Perales, “The Food Historian’s Dilemma: Reconsidering the Role of Authenticity in Food

Scholarship,” The Journal of American History (December 2016): pp. 690-693.

Michelle Reeves, “’Obey the Rules or Get Out’: Ronald Reagan’s 1966 Gubernatorial Campaign

and the ‘Trouble in Berkeley,’ Southern California Quarterly vol. 92, no. 3 (Fall 2010): pp. 275-

305.

344

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs vol. 5, no. 4

(Summer, 1980): pp. 631-660.

Russell Rickford, “‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism,

and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of American History vol.

103, no. 4 (March 2017): pp. 956-980.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, “Riot and Remembrance: Puerto Rican Chicago and the Politics of

Interruption,” Centro Journal vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall 2016): pp. 204-217.

Martin Rosen and James Fisher, “Chicano Park and the Chicano Park Murals: Barrio Logan, City

of San Diego, California,” The Public Historian vol. 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001): pp. 91-111.

Suzana Sawyer and Arun Agrawal, “Environmental Orientialisms,” Cultural Critique, no. 45

(Spring 2000), pp. 71-108.

Joshua Sbicca and Robert Todd Perdue, “Protest Through Presence: Spatial Citizenship and

Identity Formation in Contestations of Neoliberal Crises,” Social Movement Studies vol. 13, no. 3

(2014).

Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning vol. 38

(2006): pp. 207-226).

Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,” Antipode:

A Radical Journal of Geography vol. 34, no. 3 (July 2002): pp. 427-450.

Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not

People,” Journal of the American Planning Association vol. 45, no. 4 (1979): pp. 538-548.

Jeremy Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960-1975,” The American

Historical Review vol. 114, no. 1 (February 2009): pp. 45-68.

Stephan Thernstrom, “Reflections on the New Urban History,” Deadalus vol. 100, no. 2 (Spring

1971): pp. 359-375).

Nato Thompson, “Contributions to a Resistant Visual Culture Glossary,” The Journal of Aesthetics

and Protest vol. 1, no. 3 (2004): pp. 167-178.

Brian Tochterman, “Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard

Florida to Jane Jacobs,” Radical History Review vol. 2012, no. 112 (2012): pp. 65-87.

Michael Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text no. 29 (1991): pp. 3-17.

Allan S. Weiss, “Authenticity,” Gastronomica, 11 (Winter 2011), pp. 74–77.

Rosalind Williams, “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological

Systems,” Science in Context vol. 6, no. 2 (1993): pp. 377-403.

345

Charles Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,” Journal of the

History of Ideas vol. 70, no. 4 (October 2009): pp. 637-658.

Dissertations

Michael William Doyle, “The Haight-Ashbury Diggers and the Cultural Politics of Utopia, 1965-

1968,” (PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 1997).

Rachel Drzewicki, “Seize the Press, Sisters: The Influence of Women in the Underground Press of

the 1960s,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996).

Stanley Irwin Glick, “The People’s Park,” (PhD Dissertation, State University of New York at

Stony Brook, 1984).

Maria McGrath, “Food for Dissent: A History of Natural Foods and Dietary Health Politics and

Culture since the 1960s,” (PhD Dissertation, Lehigh University, 2005).

Mary Potorti, Food for Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle and the Politics of Food (Ph.D.

Dissertation, Boston University, 2005).

Margaret Rose, “Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana

Participation in a Labor Union,” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990).

Michal Staudenmaier, “Between Two Flags: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Formation in Puerto

Ricans Chicago, 1946-1994,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2016).

Chelsea Stripe, “Roads of Rebellion: Cultural Contributions by Women of the Beat Generation”

(PhD Dissertation, Purdue University, 2014).

Local, State, and National Government Documents

A Place to Live, Film, directed by DeWitt Beal (Department of Urban Renewal, City of Chicago,

1968), DeWitt Beal Collection (F.2012-01-0026), Chicago Film Archives, archived online:

http://www.chicagofilmarchives.org/collections/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/11481.

Berkeley Census 1940-1960, Bay Area Census:

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Berkeley40.htm.

City of San Diego, City Planning and Community Investment, “Barrio Logan Historical Resources

Survey,” Unpublished document (February 1, 2001):

http://www.sandiego.gov/planning/programs/historical/pdf/2013/201304blhistoricsurvey.pdf.

346

Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives Ninety-First Congress Second Session,

Black Panther Party Part 4, National Office Operations and Investigation of Activities in Des

Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska (U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1971).

Congressional Report no. 1787, “Child Nutrition Act of 1966” (July 29, 1966), United States

Government Document.

Department of Urban Renewal, “General Neighborhood Renewal Plan” (lp.lpca.dur.0005), (1962),

Lincoln Park Neighborhood Collection, Special Collections, University Library, DePaul

University, reprinted online at: http://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/cdm/ref/collection/lpnc6/id/1041.

Tom Foran, Closing Arguments, United States of America vs. David T. Dellinger, at al.,

Defendant. (No. 69 CR 180), Folder 89-3, Box 89, Series 1, Subseries 1, Richard J. Daley

Collection (MSRJD_04_Series1), Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University

Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago.

House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session, “Disruption of 1968 Democratic

National Convention,” in Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington

D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 30-May 2, and May 22, 1968).

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (The Office of Policy

Planning and Research: United States Department of Labor, 1965).

Office of the Governor, State of California, “The ‘People’s Park’: A Report on a Confrontation at

Berkeley, California,” (July 1, 1969).

Interviews

Bettina Aptheker, June 3, 2017

Nacio Jan Brown, September 19, 2017

Liane Chu, September 18, 2017

Carol Denney, April 17, 2017

Terry Furchgott, May 31, 2017

John Jakobson, September 4, 2017

Paul Glusman, September 19, 2017

Judy Gumbo, November 23, 2016

José Jiménez, February 28, 2016

Stephen Shames, October 5, 2017

Wendy Schlesinger, March 15, 2016; April 10, 2016; November 13, 2016

347

Printed Primary Sources

Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation, 2nd Edition

(San Francisco: Times Change Press, 1970).

“The Berkeley Liberation Program,” Flyer, reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America:

The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Pilgrim Press, 1970).

Bettina Aptheker, How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel

(Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006).

Eldridge Cleaver, “On Meeting the Needs of the People,” reprinted in Modern Black Nationalism:

From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L. Van Deburg (New York University

Press, 1997).

Terri Compost, ed., People’s Park: Still Blooming, 1969-2009 and on (Ann Arbor: Sheridan

Books, 2009).

Alan Copeland and Nikki Arai, eds., People’s Park (New York City: Ballantine Books, 1969).

Belva Davis and Vicki Haddock, Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in

Journalism (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011).

Todd Gitlin, “The Meaning of People’s Park,” reprinted in The Movement Toward a New America:

The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, ed. Mitchell Goodman (Pilgrim Press, 1970).

Barbara Mehrhof and Pamela Kearon, “Rape: An Act of Terror,” (1971), reprinted in Radical

Feminism, eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (Times Books, 1973).

Kay Potter, “Rape Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” (1971) ,reprinted at the CWLU

Herstory Project: https://www.cwluherstory.org/classic-feminist-writings-articles/rape-means-

never-having-to-say-youre-sorry.

Adrienne Rich, “Rape,” (1973), reprinted in Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W. W.

Norton & Company; Reissue edition, 1994).

Bobby Seale, Barbeque’n with Bobby (Ten Speed Press: 1988).

Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, reprinted at http://www.sds-

1960s.org/documents.htm.

Lois Wickstrom, The Food Conspiracy Cookbook: How to Start a Neighborhood Buying Club and

Eat Cheaply (San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1972).

Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America

(Haymarket Books, 2012).

348

Unpublished Sources

Nancy Bardacke, Personal communication with author (October 21, 2016).

John Jakobson, Diary entry (April 20, 1969), From author’s personal archive, Courtesy of author.

Jack Radey, Personal Correspondence with Bettina Aptheker (June 3, 2017), Courtesy of author.

Wendy Schlesinger, “The Creation of the People’s Park (and other political events)—a love story

from a Leader’s point of view,” Unpublished Manuscript (ca. 1969), Courtesy of author.

349

VITA

Kera N. Lovell

Lecturer in American Studies, University of Hawai‘i

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in American Studies, Purdue University 2017

Dissertation: Radical Manifest Destiny: Mapping Power over Urban Green Space in the

Age of Protest, 1968-1988

Master of Arts in American Studies, Purdue University, magna cum laude graduate 2011

Thesis: The Men’s Issue: Men’s Countercultural Consciousness-Raising in Mid-Seventies Magazines

Bachelor of Arts, Agnes Scott College, cum laude graduate 2009

International Coursework

East China Normal University in Shanghai, China: Transnational American Studies graduate course 2010

La Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain: Intensive Spanish language program 2007

Research and Teaching Fields

American Studies Post-1865 U.S. history

Postwar U.S. social movements Urban environment and spatial studies

Race and ethnic studies Food studies

Women’s and gender history Visual and material cultural studies

TEACHING/CURRICULUM DESIGN

Lecturer Positions:

University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, School of Architecture

Lecturer in Global Track Program with Tongji University in Shanghai, China

ARCH 699: Readings in American Cultural Studies Fall 2017

ARCH 699: Readings in American Cultural Studies Fall 2016

University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu Community College

Lecturer in American Studies, Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard Apprenticeship Program

AMST 202: American Cultural Studies: Colonialism and Resistance in Pu’uloa and Hawai‘i Spring 2017

Ball State University

Lecturer in Master of Urban Design Program, College of Architecture and Planning

UD 690: Urban Design Capstone MA Thesis-Writing Course Summer 2016

Purdue University

Lecturer in American Studies Program, School of Interdisciplinary Studies

AMST 201: Blood, Bones, and Brains: History of American Bodies in the Twentieth Century Spring 2015

AMST 201: Youth Conformity and Rebellion Summer 2015

350

Curricular Positions and Certifications:

Southern New Hampshire University

Center for Online Education, Intensive Online Training Course July 24-Aug 13, 2017

University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

Center for Teaching Excellence Summer Institute Certificate July 11-13, 2017

Harrison College, Lafayette, IN, Educational Assistant to the Dean Jan 2011-Jan 2012

Grant writer, curriculum program designer for undergraduate programs in Business Management and

Fireground Operations, and coordinator of faculty professional development workshops

Teaching Assistant Positions:

Spring 2016 – HIST 371: Society, Culture, and Rock and Roll, Dr. Michael Morrison (80 students)

Mar. 25, 2016 – Guest Lecture Title: “Gender, Sexuality, and Rock and Roll in the 1970s”

Fall 2015 – HIST 152: US History Since 1877, Dr. Nancy Gabin (60 students)

Fall 2014 - HIST 304: America in the 1960s, Dr. Nancy Gabin (60 students)

Oct. 1, 2014 – Guest Lecture Title: “Peace vs. Power: Rethinking the Symbolic Divide in the

Counterculture”

Spring 2014 – HIST 375: Women in America Since 1870, Dr. Nancy Gabin (60 students)

Apr. 17, 2014 – Guest Lecture Title: “Feminist Consciousness Raising and Women’s Liberation”

Fall 2013 - HIST 151: US History to 1877, Dr. Dawn Marsh (50 students)

Oct. 17, 2013 - Guest Lecture Title: “Gender and Labor in the New Republic”

Spring 2013 - HIST 371: Society, Culture, and Rock and Roll, Dr. Michael Morrison (80 students)

Fall 2012 - HIST 152: US History Since 1877, Dr. Susan Curtis (82 students)

Nov. 1, 2012 – Guest Lecture Title: “Conformity and Rebellion in 1950s and Early 1960s America”

Spring 2011 - HIST 383: Recent American Constitutional History, Dr. Yvonne Pitts (48 students)

Fall 2010 - HIST 152: US History Since 1877, Dr. Susan Curtis (90 students)

Invited Lectures:

October, 15, 2015 – Title: “James P. Danky Fellowship Lecture: Radical Manifest Destiny: Urban

Renewal, Colonialism, and Transnational American Identity in the Urban Spatial Politics of the Postwar

Left” – Award Reception: Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

August 13, 2015 – Title: “People’s Parks: Tracing Radical Environmental Activism from Berkeley to

Michigan” – Award Reception: Michigan Tech University’s Van Pelt and Opie Library, Houghton, MI

May 13, 2015 – Title: “From World’s Fairs to World Expos” – Class: “CAP (College of Architecture and

Planning) Italia: Study Abroad,” in Milan with Professor Tim Gray, Ball State University, Muncie, IN

October 18, 2013 - Title: “American Studies and Urban Design” – Class: “Urban Design Studio” with

Professor Simon Bussiere, at Ball State University in Muncie, IN

GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND AWARDS

Graham Foundation, Citation of Special Recognition, Carter Manny Award Fall 2017

Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship, Purdue University 2016-2017

Purdue Graduate Student Association Research Grant Summer 2017

351

Annette K. Baxter Travel Grant, American Studies Association Fall 2016

American Studies Travel Grant, Purdue University 2017, 2016

Semi-Finalist, Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship Spring 2016

University of Illinois, Chicago, Short-Term Travel Fellowship Summer 2016

National Science Foundation-Funded American Society for Environmental History Travel Grant 2016

Silas Palmer Fellowship, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University 2016

Bordin-Gillette Researcher Fellowship, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan 2016

James P. Danky Fellowship, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin 2015

Chester E. Eisinger Research Award, American Studies Program, Purdue University 2015

Chester E. Eisinger Paper Prize, American Studies Program, Purdue University 2015, 2013

Michigan Technological University Archival Travel Grant, Van Pelt Library 2015

Promise Award, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University 2017, 2016, 2015

Incentive Grant, Graduate School, Purdue University 2016, 2015

$10,000 Global Synergy Grant, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University 2015

Lynn Fellowship, Purdue University 2009-2011

Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Programs’ Research Award, Purdue University 2013

Berenice A. Carroll Feminism, Peace, and Social Justice Award, Purdue University 2014, 2013

Travel Grant, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Boston University 2014

American Studies Community Service/Social Justice Award, Purdue University May 2010

Mary-Lou Tippet Award for Spanish Achievement, Agnes Scott College Spring 2007

Villavieja Award for Spanish Achievement, Agnes Scott College Spring 2007

Dana Leadership Scholar, Agnes Scott College Fall 2006

PUBLICATIONS AND CURRENT PROJECTS

Select Publications

Lovell, K. (accepted, under revision). “Free Food, Free Space: People’s Stews as a Lens into Spatial

Identity Politics of People’s Parks in the Postwar Era.” American Studies Journal.

Lovell, K. (Fall 2017). “Writing as Resistance: Teenage Feminism Decades before ‘Girl Power.’” Black

Perspectives. (African American Intellectual History Society).

Lovell, K. (June 2016). “Girls Are Equal Too: Education, Body Politics, and the Making of Teenage

Feminism.” Gender Issues, vol. 33.2, pp. 71-95.

Bussiere, S. and Lovell, K. (2016). “Design and Experiential Learning in Post-Industrial Landscapes.”

Landscape Research Record, vol. 5, pp. 213-222.

Lovell, K. (December 2016). “Review of Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, John

Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson.” Historical Geography, vol. 44, pp. 151-153.

Lovell K. (2016). “Review of Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism, Brian Hoffman.” The

Journal of Popular Culture, 49.4, pp. 941-943.

352

Lovell, K. (2015). “Review of Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941-1961,

Dawn Spring.” The Journal of American Culture 38.2, pp. 148-149.

Lovell, K. (2014). “Review of Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives, eds. P. Nadell

and K. Haulman.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 112.4, pp. 713-715.

Lovell, K. (2014). “Review of Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales,

James Karales and Julian Cox.” JHistory, H-Net Reviews.

Lovell, K. (2012). “Review of Tomboys, Pretty Boys, and Outspoken Women: The Media Revolution of

1973, Edward Miller.” JHistory, H-Net Reviews.

Lovell, K. (2013). “National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS).” Encyclopedia of Domestic

Violence and Abuse, Ed. Laura Finley. Santa Barbara: ABL-CLIO.

Lovell, K. (2013). “History of U.S Domestic Violence before 1970.” Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence

and Abuse, Ed. Laura Finley. Santa Barbara: ABL-CLIO.

Lovell, K. (2013). “History of U.S. Domestic Violence Developments, 1970s.” Encyclopedia of Domestic

Violence and Abuse, Ed. Laura Finley. Santa Barbara: ABL-CLIO.

CONFERENCES ORGANIZED

Organizer, “Global Food: Local Perspectives,” Purdue University Oct. 22, 2015

Featuring a roundtable and food tasting by local chefs of international cuisine paired with keynote Dr.

Simone Cinotto, University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy

Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies

Organizer, “Sexual Violence on College Campuses,” Purdue University Dec. 2, 2014

Featuring an interactive seminar with undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and administrators from

Purdue University along with a keynote by Dr. Stephanie Gilmore

Sponsored by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the American Studies Program

Chair, Organizing Committee, “Academics IRL: Taking Scholarship out of the Ivory Tower”

38th Annual Graduate Conference, American Studies Program, Purdue University Apr. 17-19, 2013

Featuring graduate student and faculty research panels in American Studies as well as three

interdisciplinary keynote speakers

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Society for American City and Regional Planning History 10/2017

“Cartographies of Resistance: Mapping Power and Identity in the Interdisciplinary Classroom”

Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities 6/2017

Plenary Session Organizer, “Beyond Ecofeminism: Women and their Environments”

Paper Title, “The Rape of Mother Earth: Gender, Race, and Nature in Environmental Justice Protest”

Roundtable Participant: “The Position of Liberal Arts Faculty in Community Colleges: Canaries in the

Coalmine?

353

American Studies Association Annual Conference 11/ 2016

“(Activist) Regeneration Through Violence: The Occupation of Green Space as a Postwar Protest Tactic”

Urban History Association Annual Conference 10/ 2016

Panel Organizer, “Shades of the Green Economy: Sustainability and the Re-Imagining of Post-Industrial

Landscapes in a Consumer Society”

Paper Title, “Radical Environmentalism: Labor, Consumption, & the Alternative Economics of Guerrilla

Gardens”

American Society for Environmental History 4/2016

“Tracing the Transnational History of Environmental Direct Actions, from Berkeley to Johannesburg”

Society for American City and Regional Planning History 11/ 2015

“Radical Manifest Destiny: The Image and Impact of Berkeley’s People’s Park on a Transnational

Environmental Justice Movement”

Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities 5/ 2014

“Parallels of Purity and Protest: Young White Women’s Sexuality in the Making of the New Left (1965-

1978) and New Right (1998-2013),” co-presented with Jaime Hough

Organization of American Historians Annual Conference 4/2014

Panel Organizer, “Crossing Borders in Second Wave Feminism”

Paper Title, “‘Sisters of the World’: The Cultural Borders of Second Wave Consciousness Raising”

Symposium – “A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s” – Dept.

of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Boston University 3/2014

“Girls Are Equal Too: High School Activism and the Second Wave Women’s Movement”

Social Science History Association Annual Conference 11/2013

Panel Organizer, “Complicating Sisterhood: The Power of Crossing Borders in Women’s Liberation”

Paper Title, “Power and Difference in the Evolution of Feminist Consciousness-Raising Groups”

National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference 11/2013

“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Gender, Race, and Ability in Freaks (1932)”

History Graduate Student Association Conference 3/2013

“The Changing Face of American Bodies: Teaching HIST 152 through the Lens of the Body”

Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium 4/2013

“Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Social Media and the New University,” co-presented with Jaime Hough

National Popular Culture/American Culture Annual Conference 4/2011

“Kissing Mick Jagger: Debating Homosexuality and Homophobia in Rolling Stone’s Men’s Issue, 1975”

Symposium – American Studies Graduate Research Symposium 4/2011

“Men on the Ropes: The Successes and Failures of Men’s Consciousness Raising in Rolling Stone, 1975”

Southern Regional Popular Culture/American Culture Association 10/2010

“‘The Men’s Issue’: Male Consciousness Raising in Rolling Stone, 1975”

354

National Pop Culture/American Culture Association Conference 4/2010

“Reading Between the Lines: Women’s Liberation and the ‘Hidden Injuries of Sex’ in Rolling Stone, 1975”

National Association of Communication Centers Conference 3/2009

“Gender and Communication: Empowering Women Through Speaking”

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Lecturer, Wabash Area Lifetime Learning Association, West Lafayette, IN 10/2011

Participant in a free public history workshop and Q&A series titled, “American Identity and Culture,”

organized for local senior citizens; Lecture title: “Exploring Modern Masculinities 1890-2010”

Intern, YWCA Domestic Violence Program, Lafayette, IN 2010-2011

Caseworker and Graphic Designer for the YWCA’s Fresh Start transitional housing program

Digital Archival Intern, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA 5/2008-8/2008

Assisting the Lead Digital Archivist in scanning photographs of local history as part of their larger

digitization process; required knowledge in properly handling archival materials and scanning software

Curatorial Intern, Marietta Museum of History, Marietta, GA 5/2008-8/2008

Assisting the Curator in cataloguing backlog of donated items; required knowledge of properly handling

archival materials and data entry via archival software

LEADERSHIP POSITIONS/UNIVERSITY ENGAGEMENT

Coordinating Council for Women in History, Campus Representative and Conference Liaison 2016

Treasurer & Grant Writer, American Studies Graduate Org., Purdue University 2015-2016, 2012-2013

Interdisciplinary Graduate Program Student Association (IGPSA) Committee Member 2012-2013

-American Studies Graduate Program Representative

-IGPSA Graduate Research Conference, Rubric Subcommittee Chair

Special Issue Reviewer, American Men’s Studies Conference Publication, Men and Masculinities 2011