People’s Park

Why These Trump Punks Have to Do It in Berkeley

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on April 7th, 2017 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
April 6, 2017


Trump Punks’ Standing Up to Fall. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Why TrumpPunks have to do it in Berkeley may surprise you.

Trumpunks are Trump supporters with balls big enough to demonstrate in the very bowels of lefty Berkeley, like say, Berkeley Civic Center Park.

Civic Center is Berkeley’s core, nestled between old and new city halls, and host to a 1980s peace-wall, a 175 ft. long wall comprised of more than 5,000 hand-painted tiles, each with a plea for peace.


Peace Wall. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Perhaps not the best symbolic site to strut your Trump stuff. And you can be sure the Trumpsters (rimes with dumpsters) are not accepting the Berkeley Visitor’s Bureau’s invitation to out-of-towners: “Come for the Culture; Stay for the Food.”

The Trumpsters came for media attention…perhaps ready to be trounced. Some of them wrestled away the posters of anti-Trumpsters to protect themselves, while others just sucked up the attacks.

Some seemed to flaunt their battle wounds, like blood-red badges of courage.


Red Badge of Courage. Photo by Ted Friedman.

All manner of photographers, and reporters from Bay Area media swelled the crowds at last month’s beat-down in civic center.

All the better for TrumPunks to shame Berkeley into accepting them, at least as wackos, in a town of wackos.

It just may have worked.

As police kept watch, the Trumpsters were beaten with their own signs, maced, pelted, with eggs and lighted cigarette butts, and smoke-bombed.


Photo by Ted Friedman.

There were ten arrests of Black-bloq style masked marauders from around Northern California. This at a time when arrests in such protests declined, as police around the country stood down.

Some Trumpsters bore signs saying, “Blue Lives Matter,” the opposite side of the anarchist Black bloq credo, “off the pigs.”

The arrests were cleverly conceived to pluck-out the worst outside agitators, some say provocateurs, as they arrived—by bus or rapid transit—and as they tried, later, to escape police cordons.


Photo by Ted Friedman.

A re-staging of this force counter-force melee will play out later this month. Same plot; same characters; same peace wall.

Stay tuned.


This piece is dedicated to the memory of Mark Hawthorne, Berkeley’s beloved SouthSide homeless hero (aka Hate Man), and former New York Times reporter, who tried to improve my reporting.

Wide-array of pro/anti Trump demo shots at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/berkboy/

Is Berkeley A Hilton to the Homeless? Part 2

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on May 27th, 2016 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
May 27, 2016


Photo by Ted Friedman

A lot of bedrolls have been unfurled since “Is Berkeley a Hilton to the Homeless?” appeared in the Berkeley Daily Planet five years ago.

That piece, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, suggested that Berkeley was an oasis of homeless services and compassion.
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Southside Perps Get Royal Treatment

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on May 7th, 2016 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
May 6, 2016

A TALE OF TWO PERPS

Home-run head-dent averted. Photo by Ted Friedman.

The sentence “Southside perps get royal treatment” needs some treatment itself. Perps is a cheap shot, and royal treatment an exaggeration.

Yet, in scores of my photos of Southside arrests, there is a theme: our cops treat crime suspects kindly and with protectiveness to match their mottos, “Protect and Serve.” I can’t count the times they yelled at me, “get out of the street.”

Two recent Southside incidents make my case.
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Guide for the Pooplexed

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on April 10th, 2016 by admin – Be the first to comment

By Steed Dropout
April 9, 2016

WHERE TO GO WHEN YOU HAVE TO GO

Former Berkeley Art Museum. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Let’s say you’re Southside, seeking restrooms. Yelp is no help.

We have held off our restroom recommendations for decades, not wanting to cause a stampede at our favorite piss destination.
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Berkeley for Real

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on November 3rd, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
Nov. 2, 2015

REALLY BERKELEY

So Berkeley. Photo by Ted Friedman.

A recent forum on Berkeley’s values left out Berkeley’s Southside transient bums and its Street Crazies. And oh yes, it left out Karl Marx.

Berkeley is full of Karl Marxes. You see them everywhere, slovenly, slouching. To maintain their status as Marxists, they need not fear accumulation of wealth so long as they do not control a means of production, like a factory.
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There’s Gold to be Mined in People’s Park Unless a Bomb Blasts

Posted in People's Park, The Berkeley Scene on October 13th, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
Oct. 13, 2015

Gold in them thar hills. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Dave said he metal-detected People’s Park monthly. He long ago recouped the money he spent on his metal detector, roughly $800.

Reporter commented this isn’t the most lucrative patch in Berkeley. “You’d be surprised,” said Dave. Park people panhandle a bonanza in change, but it falls out of their pockets and becomes buried,” he told me.

Dave said he earns $80 a month detecting.

Once Dave found a rare-cut diamond/ring that was worth thousands. He gave it to his girlfriend.
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Peoples Park Turns 46, April 26

Posted in People's Park, The Berkeley Scene on May 13th, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
May 13, 2015

Hate Man tidies Hate Camp on Birthday Eve. Photo by Ted Friedman.

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Berkeley’s People’s Cop Commands Compliance

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on April 23rd, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
April 23, 2015

Butt-Head outside Caffe Med. Photo by Ted Friedman.

To call one Berkeley patrolman a people’s cop could be misleading, when so many of Berkeley’s cops are people’s cops.

But the Berkeley cop who sees his job as “protecting the people of Berkeley from the police,” and stubbornly refuses to write citations…that cop lays special claim to the title, People’s Cop.

The Berkeley People’s Cop has been rebuked, threatened with re-training, and with suspension by his supervisor for his unproductive citations record, he told Berkeley Reporter, recently.
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Berkeley’s People’s Park Tree-cut Cuts Deep

Posted in People's Park, The Berkeley Scene on March 31st, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
March 30, 2015

Deep Cut. Photo by Ted Friedman.

Michael Delacour, the acknowledged founder of Berkeley’s People’s Park, was worried about Cal’s plans for the park.

He sat through a Cal student council meeting (ASUC) before Spring break to warn students that the university was about to take the park, as it had in 1969.

Under attack, Delacour told me, was the People’s Park trees and the People’s Park stage.

Crying wolf over the park runs rampant in the park. Some one(s) at the park will tell you often and often that the university is engaged in battle with the park, has it under surveillance, and is ready to come in to “take back the park.”

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Beloved Mural Packs It In

Posted in People's Park, Telegraph Avenue, The Berkeley Scene on February 5th, 2015 by admin – Be the first to comment

by Steed Dropout
Feb. 4, 2015

Take-down on Telegraph. Photo by Ted Friedman.

The other Peoples Park Mural; you’ve passed it every time you visit Telegraph Avenue. the mural is the work of Edithe (“Edy”) Boone, 77, who installed it, overlooking the burned-down Berkeley Inn site at Telegraph/Haste, early in the 1990s.

The Berkeley Inn, destroyed by fires in 1986, was a bohemian be-hive on Telegraph Ave.
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