Historical Emotions

It didn’t get nasty until Commissioner Greene, who looked at least four decades younger than most of the meeting attendees, told everyone that landmarking the Elmwood retail corridor would be the same thing as preserving the history of redlining. 

After that, she had to restart several times, after being booed and hissed (actually hissed!). Someone yelled “shame on you!” Eventually someone else stood up and told everyone to shut up, or they would “undermine their cause.” They all had yellow signs, two dozen-plus of them, “Yes to the historic district.” The room was standing room only, until the vote came out, 5-4, “No.” (Then it thinned out)

Before it all started, Chair Crandall had told everyone, “if you have some emotion about the proceeding, talk to the person next to you.” She was trying to keep everything moving. The man next to me covered his face and cry-wept during a presentation about gut-renovating the Amoeba Records building on Telegraph Ave, a “streamline moderne” building which was originally a Lucky’s grocery. “Eight stories” he said to himself. Eight stories. The new Amoeba will be bigger and better, says the designer, with a mezzanine for live music performance, like there used to be.

Moonlight-haired husbands and wives in elegant clothes trickled in alongside others in folk art garments and practical shoes. I was wearing a linen sleeveless dress and a hoodie borrowed from my friend because her dog had spilled water all over my jean jacket at a pizza pop up across town, before the meeting. My straw hat was tucked under my chair. As the night wore on, people began to fan themselves and the commissioners’ faces grew redder. The room was heating up, and we didn’t get out early enough for me to get a cone at Melt Me afterwards. 

The proposed building was up for design review because one of its sides (“façades”) has a mural about the free speech movement, which has been Landmarked. The artists were in the room. One of them shuffled up to the microphone, sharp and hunched, refusing the option to have it brought to him. He reminded us that the mural was created for the American Bicentennial in 1976, and “is still the only record in Berkeley of this radical history.”

If they had landmarked everything fifty years ago, as Commissioner Gordon commented later, new beloved things could never have been created. 

“This building,” said the artist, “is the only chance we have of keeping this mural.” (Overheard from the audience: “The mural will be there long after we’re gone.”)

A commenter on Zoom was cut off after a long preamble (“wait, that was one minute?”) but seemed to want to say something about People’s Park. Most people struggled to stick to one minute comments, because they nearly always began with an accounting of how long they’ve lived in Berkeley, and how and why they got here. Some people’s voices shook with the frantic effort of trying to get through their testimony. A woman in a mask, reading prepared remarks from her smart phone, spent precious seconds telling the audience of her invisible disability, but it didn’t buy her more time to tell us the story of her fierce Rosie the Riveter aunt who hung out on Telegraph in the hippie days, and why the city was becoming the corporate greed that her beloved aunt had fought against. A Zoom caller with a younger voice trembled through her speedy, precise statement that “we cannot use this commission to block housing.” I pictured her at home, like I usually am at 7:30pm on a Thursday evening, splitting her attention between the screen and her children’s bedtime.

The mics kept going off, and when commissioners turned to look at each other, the sound didn’t catch and they had to repeat themselves facing into the mics, at the audience. Another man sitting next to me filled the back of his yellow sign with elegant geometric doodles. 

Commissioners Montilla and Finacom proposed “friendly amendments.” Montilla (mispronounced “Montoya” a number of times) seems to like to weigh both sides, and to propose new ideas that were outside the scope of the original application, to make things better. From last meeting to this, he changed his vote from No to Yes. Commissioner Finacom spent the time in the archives, and spoke far more than everyone else. He also wrote a long memo. He likes to set the record straight, about facts, about the role of preservation in a city. 

“This is not radical or un-American in other cities,” he said.

When I sold the home that I had lived in for over a decade, there was no ceremony. Instead, there was a form. When I had my son, I knew he existed because I got him a birth certificate. When I got married, the foundational ritual of our bond was the signing of our marriage license. In our culture, we mark our important personal transitions with paperwork. 

In a city, we mark important transformations in our landscape with statute numbers, preservation criteria checklists, and we keep testimony to one minute. This is the obituary a building gets. These are the eulogies we speak for what we let go in our city. 

A man dressed as Indiana Jones said that landmarking the historic district is NIMBYism cosplaying as historic preservation. “Berkeley is a living, growing, live city, he said, “that doesn’t belong in a museum.” But it’s not growing, several audience members hissed at him after he left the floor. Change gets harder and you get slower, as you grow older. It takes courage to face it.

(If you have an emotion about it, talk to your neighbor.)