Featured events- 03/10/2012 - Ton Koopman & The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir
- 02/27/2012 - Classical at the Freight: Rossini Birthday Celebration
- 02/23/2012 - Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future, How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
- 02/23/2012 - 2012: a Turning Point? And If So, Which Way?: A Talk by Robert Reich
- 02/19/2012 - Takacs Quartet
Category Archives: Berkeley History
Codornices Creek: Happy ducks in place of concrete
Update, 01.31.12: Susan Schwartz, President, Friends of Five Creeks, provides an informative clarification on the history of this section of Codornices Creek. (This is why we love the Berkeleyside community so much — our expert readers always bring the latest intelligence to the table!):
We’re always delighted to see articles about nature, but the Codornices Creek reach between 6th and 8th referred to was not in a pipe, nor were the reaches downstream.
Since 2000, three projects have carved new channels … Continue reading »
Tagged Berkeley nature, Codornices Creek
A latchkey kid roams Berkeley ghost town full of promise
By Greg Fuson
Nostalgia, like politics and real estate, is local.
Which helps explain how a 40-something man returns to the Berkeley California School for the Deaf and Blind (Clark Kerr Campus, as you know it today) and becomes the 11-year-old boy of his childhood.
I spent the better part of two years at that school, daydreaming in its classrooms, kicking a football across its playing fields, climbing its rooftops when adventure or mischief (or both) swelled up in me, but mostly just wandering its hallways in idle search of who knows what.
I confess: I broke some things. Windows. Drywall. Light fixtures. Toilet paper dispensers.
No teachers ever told me to stop. How could they?
The place was abandoned. … Continue reading »
The “before” pictures: Berkeley Art Museum/PFA
Call it “beautiful decay”: these stunning photographs, taken by David Stark Wilson, show the interiors of the future home of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA).
Just as with the new Magnes, which unveiled its new space on Sunday, BAM/PFA is to be housed in a 1920s-era 1939 building originally designed as a printing plant for UC Berkeley. It is located at 2120 Oxford Street at Center Street, in the heart of downtown.
Is it not fitting that, as the demand for printed thesis, documents, books and monographs has waned, the engine rooms that produced these volumes are now being put to good use while remaining in the cultural realm?
Berkeley’s new Magnes building to be unveiled on Sunday
On Sunday, the doors will open to a new cultural institution in Berkeley. The many thousands of books, paintings, prints, textiles, and photographs that make up The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life – which was formerly located in an early 20th-century family home on Russell Street in the Elmwood neighborhood — will now be readily accessible to the public in a beautifully renovated, centrally located 25,000 sq ft space at 2121 Allston Way.
The building, which was designed in the 1920s as a printing plant for UC Berkeley, was most recently used by UC’s Bancroft Library, with whom the Magnes now partners. Before that, the Berkeley Public Library occupied the space. Marks left by book stacks on the stained, maple-colored concrete floors bear the stamp of the building’s history.
The building has been transformed by San Francisco architects Pfau Long in collaboration with local design and fabrication company Picassa Studios. The goal, said the museum’s Director Alla Efimova, was to create a warm, inviting place with an emphasis on transparency.
“We wanted an open space with a good flow where the community could spend time discovering the collection,” she said. … Continue reading »
Snapshot: Doris Moskowitz, owner, Moe’s Books
By Pete Rosos
Doris Moskowitz was born in 1966, the youngest daughter of Moe and Barb Moskowitz. After graduating from Mills College 1990 with degrees in English and Music, she began working with her dad, Moe, at the legendary Berkeley store he founded in 1959 on Telegraph Avenue. Now it is Doris who owns and operates Moe’s Books, keeping her father’s legacy alive. In 2003, she and her husband, Johnny Williams, opened Boss Robot Hobby on College. Their son, Eli Williams, is a freshman at Berkeley HIgh. She is a proud resident of Berkeley, graduate of Griffin Preschool, Walden School and Berkeley High, and a member of an elite class of those who attended the Berkeley Co-op’s popular “Kiddie Corral.”
When did you arrive in Berkeley?
I was conceived in Berkeley on McGee street. I was born at the French Hospital in San Francisco because my dad, Moe, wanted to be a part of my birth on his birthday in 1966. I grew up on the most beautiful street, Lewiston, near College and Woolsey.
What’s your ‘hood?
I am most often found on The Ave or in the Elmwood… where I grew up.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
For a while a wanted to be a vet, but I don’t handle blood very well. Then a forest ranger. Then a great writer. Then a torch singer. I still wish this were true! … Continue reading »
LeRoy Steps: Source of pride and local controversy
Five years ago the steps leading from Hilgard Avenue down to LeRoy were a tangled mess, ill lit, broken in spots, and dotted with graffiti. Scraggly trees and brambles grew unrestrained along the steps’ borders.
Then a group of neighbors got together, and, with hard work and the assistance of funding from the city and UC Berkeley, transformed the steps into an inviting path. New lights now illuminate the walkway, and every March hundreds of daffodils push their way to the surface, creating a yellow burst of color.
“Several years ago it was just a dump,” said City Councilmember Susan Wengraf. “It was overgrown, strewn with garbage, basically abandoned by the city. Over time it really became transformed from a very unattractive place to quite a beautiful place.” … Continue reading »
The Sequoia Building: At heart of Berkeley’s rich heritage
By Steven Finacom
Telegraph Avenue’s Sequoia Apartments building, seriously damaged in a fire on Friday, November 18, 2011, is a stately and historic edifice that helped define the character of Telegraph Avenue in both the early 20th century and in the 1960s.
Constructed in 1916, the 96-year-old, 39-apartment, building was part of an early 20th century development boom that transformed Telegraph Avenue into a bustling business and residential district.
When the Sequoia was built, Berkeley was one of most populous cities in California, riding a wave of suburb development and urbanization that had started with the construction of streetcar lines around the turn of the century, and accelerated after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. … Continue reading »
Tagged Amoeba Music, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, Berkeley Cinema Guild, Berkeley civil rights, Berkeley counter culture, Berkeley Historical Society, Cafe Intermezzo, Cody’s Books, Edward Landberg, Garden Spot, Lucky’s market, Mario’s La Fiesta Restaurant, Pauline Kael, Raleigh’s, Sequoia Building, Telegraph Avenue
A tribute: Edward Gong, the man who moved 7,000 pianos
By Miko Lee
This past week my beloved Uncle Ed passed away at the ripe age of 85. He died peacefully at the Veteran’s Home of Yountville where he spent the last year.
Edward Gong was known by various names throughout his life: Eddie, T-Shirt Ed, Private, Head Usher, Artist, Old Workout Guy, The One Man Piano Mover and Unc.
As a child, growing up in Madera and working in the laundry with his nine brothers and sisters he was known as “Eddie.” He gained the moniker “T-Shirt Ed” at Cal, (where he attained a degree in physics and a teaching credential) because he never wore a jacket no matter what the weather was. He was called “Private” when he worked in the Army at the Presidio Hospital during World War II. They called him “Head Usher” because of his many years as an usher at San Francisco Ballet, Davis Symphony Hall, and Cal Performances. He was called “Artist” because he was constantly taking classes in ballet, life drawing, opera, French horn, saxophone, clarinet, piano, and cello. At 24-Hour Fitness and the Y they called him the “Old Workout Guy” because he could bench press for hours on end. … Continue reading »
Tagged Edward Gong, Miko Lee, The One Man Piano Mover
The lives of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe in Thousand Oaks
Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood and its environs are not only regarded as a swell place to live — they have a rich history too. No doubt the two are connected. Tomorrow night, Alan Leventhal, a tribal ethnohistorian specializing in the Ohlone will speak at the invitation of the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association about the lives of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe who lived in Thousand Oaks.
The TONA General Meeting, which will feature the talk and an accompanying slideshow, takes … Continue reading »
A fancy hat is the star of the show at Fountain celebration
Many people turned out on Sunday for the 100th anniversary celebration of the Fountain at the Circle in north Berkeley. But, despite the beloved landmark being the center of attention, it was a hat which threatened to steal the show.
Shirley Dean, the former Mayor of Berkeley, was wearing the broad-brimmed velvet hat which is decorated with clusters of appliquéd flowers and leaves. Dean also wore the hat to the 1996 ceremony held to mark the fountain’s restoration. And — most remarkably — her husband Dan Dean’s grandmother, Margaret, wore the very same hat to the inauguration of the original fountain in 1911.
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