GREEN LIGHT FOR BERKELEY DOWNTOWN ECO-PLAZA

At close to midnight Wednesday, March 23, Berkeley City Council voted (8-1) to endorse the Hood proposal for Center Street and directed city staff to work with nonprofit and community partners, Ecocity Builders and Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza, to move the project forward and apply for upcoming funding opportunities. Following a decade of citizen-led advocacy and numerous public processes, the downtown Berkeley project can move forward beyond concept and into planning for implementation.

The project is located at a prime opportunity site along the main pedestrian thoroughfare from the Downtown Berkeley BART station and the UC Berkeley campus, and is likely to attract funding for its myriad social, environmental, economic and infrastructure benefits to residents and visitors.  "This is a key victory in this project's history. Deadlines are coming down the pipeline in the next month, for millions of dollars of potential funding for this project," says Kirstin Miller, executive director of Ecocity Builders. 

The project has gone through numerous rounds of public and planning processes, since it was first proposed to the city in 1997 and is consistent with official City of Berkeley planning and policy documents. The City Council has previously adopted policies in reference to the plaza in the 2001 Berkeley General Plan, 2004 Downtown Task Force recommendations, 2007 Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee recommendations, and the 2009 Downtown Area Plan. 

Award-winning landscape architect, Walter Hood, in 2007 was commissioned to design the plaza, located on Center Street between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Hood was responsible for designing the gardens at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. 

The Hood design calls for closing off this block of Center Street except for emergency and delivery vehicle to create a pedestrian-oriented gathering space tied to the upcoming Berkeley Art Museum/hotel and conference center complex. Strawberry Creek will be partially "daylighted," or dug up from underground storm drains where it is currently buried in the downtown area, for residents and visitors to enjoy and learn about creek ecology and the regional watershed.  The Hood design elements and more project information can be viewed here.

Watershed Weekend

Finally got to meet Pulitzer Prized poet Robert Hass, this past Saturday, at the Watershed Festival in downtown Berkeley's Civic Center Park. What an honor! Ari Simmons, fellow Berkeley geographer and environmental planner, had suggested I consulted with Hass on my Master's thesis, Stewardship Stories for Watershed Justice. I had also heard of him through my work in watershed stewardship, along with the Festival, but never had a chance to go.


The Watershed Festival, co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's English Department where Hass teaches, Poetry Flash, Ecology Center, and Ecocity Builders, is in its 14th (15th? Who's counting?) year celebrating environmental poetry, music and activism. The day started with a ritual: a walk up Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. It was such a luxury to spend a Saturday morning listening to the gurgles of the creek, the strains of the poets, the chit-chats of the birds, and this year, the campus creek steward-in-charge.



Tim Pine from environmental health and safety showed us the latest in campus stormwater management, pervious pavers installed in a parking lot to allow rain to infiltrate and help remove all that crap - motor oil, brake pads, etc - that rain washes off.


Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders executive director, brought along one of the oldest storm drain stencils around. Richard Register had designed one for Derby Creek, a creek in Berkeley that's almost entirely been buried and hardened into storm drains.

Richard's one of a few souls out there who fought early on for creeks to be daylighted, or unearthed from their graves under cities. The urban creek restoration movement started right here in Berkeley, with one of the nation's first daylighting projects at Strawberry Creek Park in the west part of the city.

I got to meet Carole Schemmerling the next Sunday; she was commentator on a creek restoration expedition I co-led, highlighting 30 years of creek restoration in Berkeley, part of the College of Environmental Design's 50th anniversary. Schemmerling was there from way back when, and told us stories of fierce battles and unwitting victories along the way.

Big lesson from Momma Schemmerling: Direct action works! One of the biggest concerns neighbors may have about daylighting a creek is creating a corridor for crime and drug dealing. A landscape architect on the tour asked if daylighting the creek has increased or reduced such illicit activities. Carole recounted how one used to find a line forming on Saturday morning at the porter potty at Strawbery Creek Park, people waiting their turn to buy some drugs. That is, until two teenage girls came along, sick and tired of cleaning up the syringes, paper filters, cigarette packs, and all the crap left behind by drug users at the park. That fateful day, knowing the drug dealer was inside with a client, the two girls toppled over the porter potty, and ran the hell away!

We started at Strawberry Creek Park, daylit in 1985, then hopped on to Codornices Creek by the soccer fields at Gilman and 5th Streets, daylit in 2005, to another daylighting project a couple blocks upstream at University Village completed with just $25,000 and thousands of hours of volunteer labor, and finally at the Blackberry Creek restoration project, completed in 1995, an outdoor science and discovery lab for students and toddlers from the adjacent Thousand Oaks elementary and neighborhood.
Codornices Creek restoration

Blackberry Creek restoration (also post-project appraisal site for my river restoration class -- see my paper here under Alameda County).