Update 8/24/24: This article has been updated to include the name of an activist negotiating for the tree.
At around 1 a.m. Jan. 4, UC Berkeley junior Connor Green was stuck in the last redwood of People’s Park as campus police brought in a demolition crew with CAT trucks, tractors and hardhats. He quickly realized there was no saving the whole park, but he watched as Nicholas Alexander, an activist, negotiated for the redwood to remain unharmed by construction.
Once out of the tree, Green opened Instagram, searching for campus’s development plans for the park, only to find himself staring at a map with a building right where the final redwood stood.
“Trees have been a symbol of the park for decades,” Green said. “It represents the growth of the community and the tree of life, trees have been on our murals and our buttons and our pins. We’ve long used trees to symbolize the growth of the community and the strong roots that we have in the community.”
On July 25, 2024 the redwood tree was cut down, according to a People’s Park Instagram post. It has been six years since campus announced their plans to develop on the park and the hope remaining among activists has started to wane.
With the falling of the final redwood came the death of an entire ecosystem of flora and fauna which had been supported by the tree, says Whitney Sparks, a People’s Park ecologist and Southside neighbor.
Lisa Teague, a People’s Park activist, has been a member of the community since 2011. They were there in 2018 when campus announced its plan to develop on People’s Park.
“The park, it always made (campus) nervous because it’s a wild card,” Teague said. “You don't know what’s going to happen there. They don't have institutional control.”
Teague said there had been a shift in the intensity of the campus actions toward People’s Park since 2022 when students and community members blocked the attempted build. They said the unexpected resistance led to the increased “frustration and the money” campus has poured into construction.
Increased tension between students and campus led to the current climate surrounding the park’s development in the last year, according to Teague.
Green said District 7 no longer has any public green space that is not under university control. For Sparks, the lack of a park makes her neighborhood feel less like a home. She said the park had served as a gathering place where oral histories and records were collected and shared.
For Green, the closure of the park meant disruption for the community.
Since the construction of shipping container walls, Green said the common sentiment among activists has been “they can take the park, but they can’t take the people.” He added that, regardless of what is on the site, people will still fight to reclaim it from campus.
Despite this conviction, Green admitted that the park community has been fragmented into separate Southside groups with the Chess Club, the Free Store and more “underground groups” looking to retake the park — each with a different opinion on its future. As construction on the park continues, it has been hard to organize people across ideological lines, according to Green.
“People who would be on the same general side are now being divided by personal and ideological differences because there is just not enough hope going around to unite them,” Green said.
Community members continue to gather in Dwight Triangle. The People’s Park Council holds meetings and an open mic every third Sunday of the month, Teague said. With the recent attempt to officialize Dwight Triangle as public open space, Teague said they still wonder why there is resistance to creating this space.
According to Teague, the park has been like “a patient on life support” and the community has been trying to cope.
“I guess it's a testament to the power of overwhelming force,” Teague said. “And it probably says something about institutional power, ultimately, and stuff like that but they really f---ed us.”
A previous version of this article stated that Connor Green negotiated for the People's Park redwood to remain unharmed by construction. In fact, other activists took part in that negotiation.
