Tag: berkeley

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Berkeleyana II

Waving1

Berkeley’s got something of a tradition of sidewalk personalities. It’s a small place, about five miles west to east, if you start at the furthest corner of the old garbage dump in the Bay (now a park) and head to the top of the Berkeley Hills, and about four miles north to south. (In Chicago terms, the whole thing would fit between North Avenue and Lawrence Avenue in the south-north axis and between Halsted and Cicero east to west; Berkeley’s land area would fit in about half that space — North to Belmont and Halsted to California.)

Partly because of the city’s size, partly because it seems to attract characters or engender character-type behavior on the part of normally sane, sedate citizens, you quickly get familiar with the cast members: Pink Man, the flamboyant unicyclist (and Jeremy, a more serious one-wheeled type); the morose or perhaps disturbed Orange Man, who wore orange parka, sweatpants and backpack and was often seen pondering oranges he’d hold at arm’s length and eye level; William, the Polka-Dot Man; Stoney Burke, a somewhat nasty comic/political street performer who has been around town since the late ’70s; and, best known of all, the Waving Man, whose passing in 2002 merited obits from The New York Times and Associated Press among others:

“Joseph Charles, who became famous by being very, very friendly, died on

Thursday in Oakland, Calif. He was 91.

“Every weekday morning for three decades, Mr. Charles stood on a street

corner in adjacent Berkeley and waved to each passing motorist. It made him

a local legend, indeed, something of a national wonder, and attracted

coverage from Charles Kuralt and People magazine.”

Sometime in the past couple of months, I discovered there’s a new Waving Man in town. I don’t know his name or whether he’s generated any media coverage. But I see him every time I go across the bike bridge over I-80: He sets up a camp chair above the northbound (OK, officially eastbound) lanes in the afternoon and waves and gestures to the commuters. I brought my camera on a ride one day last week and saw him on the bridge. At first I rode by — I’ve said hi to him before, but he’s so absorbed in what he’s doing that he didnt’ seem to notice. Then I decided to stop and take his picture.

What surprised me once I stopped was how much response he was getting from the drivers below. Lots of them honked. For his part — I didn’t ask his name — he kept up a continuous litany as he waved and gave the peace sign: “God bless you … peace … peace … peace … God bless you … God bless you … peace.” After I’d taken a few shots, I walked by him and said, “God bless you, too.” He looked up, as if he hadn’t known I was there. He looked surprised and maybe ecstatic and turned back to the road.

Waving2

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Berkeleyana I

Cimg3789

Several years ago, the city of Berkeley built a pedestrian-bicycle bridge over Interstate 80, which runs along the shore of San Francisco Bay. The bridge links the town, to the east of the freeway, with waterfront trails and parks to the west, and you have to give the city and the engineers/designers it hired high marks for doing the project right, both practically and aesthetically.

Before the bridge was built, getting to the west side of the freeway involved riding industrial back streets to a narrow asphalt path beneath the University Avenue overpass, crossing a dark high-speed ramp exiting the highway, climbing a long flight of stairs to a narrow sidewalk across the overpass, scurrying across another exit ramp, and negotiating a busy intersection. You had to be really determined and somewhat foolhardy to make the trip.

The new bridge eliminates all the climbing, crossing, and scurrying. Aside from its beauty, it does something I like about other over-freeway pedestrian bridges, too: It creates a seat to look out over this rushing no-man’s land that’s so much a part of how we live and who we are. All that traffic. All those cars. All those lives tied up in their trip home, or to work, or off across the country somewhere. It’s impressive, amazing, and even a little horrifying to be a spectator to what you’re usually engrossed in yourself, what you take for granted, and watch the surge of activity that’s got a life all its own.

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The Commander in Bondage

Commanderad

The Commander, a battered old Dodge RV that until a couple of months ago was a familiar habitué of local byways, is for sale. Big deal. But here’s the drama: The owner, a Berkeley denizen without fixed address (though not exactly homeless, since he had the Commander), made a reputation for himself in the neighborhood by stowing his vehicle wherever his fancy led him.

Naturally, it led him to park in front of a lot of houses whose residents started out annoyed when the Commander took up station at the curb and soon became irritated, if not hostile, with its owner’s habit of not moving until he’d been parked for the maximum 72 hours and gotten tagged with a warning to move or be towed. If the guy had been a sociable sort, maybe his more traditionally domiciled fellow Berkeleyans would have eventually cottoned to him and his semi-nomadic ways. It’s that kind of town, filled with that kind of people. But his general practice was to avoid all contact with the locals; those who managed to speak to him — your correspondent not being in this elite group — found him defensive and truculent in answer to most inquiries. Without putting too fine a point on it, the guy was a pain in the ass and apparently reveled in it.

Late last year, people from several blocks that furnished some of the Commander’s favorite resting places conferred with the neighborhood beat cop. It turned out that the Commander is big enough it qualifies as a commercial vehicle; under Berkeley ordinance, it was an infraction to park it on residential streets from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. The police, who had a file with more than 50 complaints about the Commander just from this little slice of Berkeley, agreed to come out and cite the vehicle every night that someone complained about its presence. The fine for each ticket is about $30. The bet was that the rapid accumulation of fines would force the Commander — for me, owner and vehicle became one — to find friendlier, or at least less complaining, environs.

Commandertix

He didn’t give up right away, though. He piled up lots of citations throughout November, reportedly went to court to try to get them thrown out, then temporarily departed the neighborhood before Christmas. He reappeared after the first of the year, and the same routine started. He got towed and paid to get his vehicle back. Then one night, after the Commander had been parked in one spot about a block from us for two weeks, the police arrived with a tow truck at about 4 in the morning. They hooked up the Commander — the owner climbed out of the back, where he’d been sleeping — and it was hauled off. Now it’s for sale. As is.

The owner has apparently been taken in by a friend a few blocks away. We’re all wondering if he’ll go to the wrecking yard that’s selling the Commander to try to buy it back.

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Yellow Friendly Merry Cab

Yellowcab_2

Once upon a time, the cab business here in the East Bay was pretty much like it was in other large-ish urban areas. There were a few large taxi companies whose owners leased cabs to drivers. Most drivers paid "gates and gas" — they bought their own fuel and paid a daily (or nightly) rental fee (hereabouts called the "gate"), and they got to keep whatever they earned in fares and tips above those expenses. Some had a simpler arrangement, splitting both the fares and the fuel expenses with the cab owner. That’s the deal I had when I worked for the late, forgotten St. Francis Taxicab Company, which plied the streets of East Oakland in the early 1980s. That arrangement worked out better for the driver on a bad night and better for the owner on a good night.

Merry_2
Over in San Francisco, always viewed as cabbie Shangri La by often-idle East Bay drivers, big companies or co-ops are still the rule. The East Bay business has evolved, or degenerated, into a sort of free-for-all, with a bunch of independent operators scrambling for an individual share of the crumbs. One result is a proliferation of taxis with similar-sounding names, many involving the word "yellow." (Like all the best ideas, the original Yellow Cab appears to have been one of Chicago’s gifts to the world.) The Berkeley telephone book has nearly three pages of agate-type listings, many undoubtedly redundant, for various permutations of "Yellow Cab."

I loved the version spotted above, parked in a long queue at the North Berkeley BART station. It’s not just Yellow. It’s Friendly. And Merry.

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Lonely Vacuum

Vacuum

Kate and I went for a walk after dark. A few blocks from home, we passed an abandoned upright vacuum cleaner, standing forlorn on the corner. Cord unraveled, bag flaccid, partially detached and flopped on the sidewalk. You could almost read its life history: from youthful vigor as a partner in the war on household grit, leaving behind no donut crumb or sinsemilla seed; through wheezing middle age that saw it sometimes leave flecks of granola embedded in the living room carpet, even after half a dozen passes; to tired, inefficient old age in which even wayward Cheetos and carelessly sprinkled Baco-Bits scoffed at its feeble sucking powers.

I saw the discarded appliance and my first impulse was to take it and stand it up in the middle of the intersection. It’s not a busy corner, and I don’t think it would be a significant safety hazard. But I just liked the idea of drivers encountering this thing in the middle of the street. The one flaw I could see in my idea was that I’d have to hang around for a while to watch the fun begin. I didn’t have the patience to wait around for my brainstorm’s possibly Letterman-esque consequences. Also, Kate didn’t wholly approve of the concept.

Her response was to imagine posing the vacuum cleaner on different corners in town; sort of an instant interactive “found art” piece. She thought about hanging a sign on it, asking passersby to pick it up and take it someplace interesting, take a picture of it, and send it to us; then we could publish the pictures online. She spun the whole idea out in about half a block, to the point we were imagining the vacuum cleaner riding BART for the day, appearing in a grocery line, getting set up at a public phone.

We didn’t do it, though. Later, I did manage to go back to the corner and snap the vacuum’s picture.

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Semi-Wild Things

Deer

We had a dry day today, so I walked up to the top of the hills. Early in the afternoon, when I was headed back down, I heard some rustling up a driveway I was passing. I looked up and saw these guys (well, I think, from the way it behaved, that only the one in the center is a guy; the other two are does). Broad daylight. Not fazed in the slightest to see an unarmed barbarian strolling past. In fact, when I stopped, the deer in the center here actually advanced toward me a few feet (that’s why I think he’s a guy). A couple minutes after I took the pictures, a man came walking up the road with two small-ish dogs on leashes. The deer picked up on the dogs right away and took off.

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Morning-After Disassembly Line

Loho

Christmas morning: The usual post-luminaria routine is to wake up, do the presents, then go out on the street to pick everything up: gather the luminaria remove the candles, dump the sand, and fold up the bags so they can be reused next year. But there was a heavy frost last night and the bags were all pretty much soaked this morning, so Piero decided we’d just recycle them and use new ones in 2005. He’s the boss.

Pickup

Our neighbor Kay Schwartz, above, was the first one out this morning, and she pretty much picked up all the bags from the upper block of Holly Street. Then we hauled everything down to the Martinuccis to pull it all apart. Most of the usual suspects were there (below). It probably takes a total of two hours to set the whole thing up on our street — more if you have to get the 600-plus bags ready first — and about the same to take it all down again.

Disassembly

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The Aftermath

Aftermath

11:17 p.m.: The lights are still lit on Holly Street. But the people who came out to walk through the neighborhood, and we had dozens who stopped by our little driveway table to have hot mulled cider, had all gone home. We stopped by the Martinuccis’ place, where all the set up stuff was piled on their front lawn, to hang out a little bit before we went home for our traditional middle-of-the-night gift-wrapping extravaganza.

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Lit Up

Holly

8 p.m.: Between about 6:45 and 8, all the bags and candles were distributed and lit along the length of Holly Street. This kind of forgettable shot is from in front of our place, looking south to Cedar Street. Dozens of people have showed up to walk the streets this year. All the familiar faces from around the neighborhood, and lots of people we haven’t met before. Even the beat cops are coming by to check out what’s going on.