Building the Ivory Tower by LaDale C. Winling

Author:LaDale C. Winling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2018-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 39. Free Speech Movement rally. Students surrounded a police car to protest the arrest of Jack Weinberg for canvassing on the Berkeley campus and refusing to show his identification. The protest lasted for thirty-two hours and included speeches and singing. Marcus (Steven) Free Speech Movement Photographs, University of California University Archives, courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Rejecting the Landscape of Modernity

With the FSM land and speech issues settled, the campus and the city administrations turned their attention back to the Telegraph Avenue neighborhood. Roger Heyns, the UC Berkeley chancellor, acknowledged in an oral history the university’s role in creating blight. “[Landlords] didn’t keep it up,” he said. “Sometimes we were slow in tearing down buildings. It was very run down, which means in my view that there was a certain kind of culpability on the part of the University.”87 Student protests and the 1964 Free Speech Movement delayed the plodding renewal effort by distracting university and municipal leaders and diverting staff time and attention.

Urban renewal and the battle over political space were not isolated issues, however. When the campus battle resolved, threats to the comfortable, low-rise character of the Telegraph Avenue neighborhood moved the conflict back off campus. Berkeley was in the midst of the Bay Area’s regionwide reorganization and modernization.88 In late 1965, the city of Berkeley’s urban renewal staff finally put forth an $11 million plan that needed only the political imprimatur of the city council to move forward. The city’s proposal was based on the Section 112 credits program devised by Julian Levi in Chicago. It would set standards for property rehabilitation, demolish buildings for the construction of a new street parallel to Telegraph Avenue, and create new parking lots.89 Administrators were sympathetic to urban renewal efforts throughout the university system, and UC Berkeley’s leaders cooperated with city of Berkeley renewal advocates. University expenditures of $3.87 million for land acquisition would constitute the lion’s share of the $4.02 million local contribution, triggering a two-to-one federal match of $7.05 million under the Section 112 program.90 The city initially estimated the municipality would end up with more than $300,000 of credits that could be devoted to other renewal projects around Berkeley.91 The League of Women Voters, who had brought the policy debate to the fore ten years earlier, led a set of supportive civic groups, but the city’s liberals found fractures in their traditional coalition of supporters.92

The politics of space was key to the disintegration of the liberal political order. By the mid-1960s, opposition to urban renewal had gained a foothold in political and architectural discourse and in cities around the country. Architectural critics like Jane Jacobs and antistatist business scholars such as Martin Anderson objected to the heavy hand of government in real estate, while social scientists like Herbert Gans exposed the vibrant culture and community amid neighborhoods deemed slums. Postmodernist critics questioned fundamental notions of progress that had seemed settled in postwar liberalism.93 “Less is a bore,” architect Robert Venturi wrote, playing off

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