Berkeley council seeks solution for displaced chess club while property owner faces fines

Local business owner Ken Sarachan is at a loss as to how to comply with Berkeley’s Code Enforcement office demands and avoid fines for unsanctioned tables on his property and the surrounding sidewalk. His bill now totals over $148,000.

Sarachan says that the code enforcement office presented him and the property’s co-owner, Laurie Brown, with two options for their 2454 Telegraph Ave. property: pay a $9,000 application fee to have his property’s use permit changed to allow a chess club he has no association with — with unlikely approval — or file a “No Trespassing” letter, post “No Trespassing”‘ signs and call the Berkeley Police Department to cite and arrest the chess players as they would in any trespassing case.

“Of course we chose the second option,” Sarachan wrote in an October letter to his local city councilmember, Rigel Robinson. Over the years, Sarachan founded Blondie’s Pizza, Anastasia’s Vintage, Rasputin Records — for which 2454 Telegraph serves as a warehouse — and a variety of other stores along Telegraph Avenue. 

“The chess club is not ‘ours.’ We have no relationship whatsoever with them,” he wrote. In fact, the “chess club” just appeared on their corner one day.

Now the city is working to promise the informal chess club a legal home as one of the last public spaces in the area, but months of fines still remain for Sarachan and Brown on the property that was once a landmark of the Free Speech Movement.

“When I came down, I didn’t ask anybody’s permission,” self-proclaimed chess club chairman Jesse Sheehan said. “I just set up the tables, and we all started playing chess. And it grew more and more.”

The chess club originally played in People’s Park but, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to wind down and Berkeley’s chess players returned to their boards in the park, things were not the same. For the first time in the park’s long history, semi-permanent tent settlements were allowed to remain under the park’s looming redwoods, their inhabitants’ sleep schedules in direct contrast to the chess club’s earlier risers.

For weeks, if not months, the chess club — people like Sheehan, Roosevelt Stevens and a variety of the other regulars — shouldered the discomfort of the mounting feeling of being unwelcome in the park, while doing their best to keep their voices down at all hours so as to not wake their new neighbors. 

Soon, a man’s body was found inside of a tent a few feet from where the chess players played, and Sheehan did not need any more justification for moving his games out of the park. He took his chess board and table to the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way, across from the cafe Romeo’s Coffee.

“I knew it would be controversial,” Sheehan said. 

About six chess tables in total accumulated by the time the city of Berkeley began construction in the middle of them — prompting Sheehan to move once again, landing on Sarachan’s doorstep.

Inescapable fines

Although Sarachan says he followed the city’s orders, the fines against his property continued to pile up as a result of what he said was a lack of police enforcement of trespassing laws. 

“After the letter was on file and the signs posted, we called the [Berkeley Police Department] numerous times to have the trespassers cited and removed … But they did not cite him or treat [Sheehan] like a trespasser,” Sarachan said.

After declining to cite Sheehan for trespassing, BPD officers had Sarachan’s employees move Sheehan’s furniture off of his private property and onto Berkeley’s sidewalks. 

“Even while BPD was still present, Jesse began moving his stuff back onto the property, yet BPD would not cite and arrest him even though they were standing right there and we asked them to now do their part,” Sarachan said.

After once again declining to cite Sheehan for trespassing and not intervening when he returned his furniture to Sarachan’s property, Sarachan alleges the Berkeley Police Department “required us to actually hire a junk hauling company and have all of the chess club stuff junked and disposed of.”

“The city [does] not want to be involved.” Ken Sarachan, property owner

Sarachan once again obeyed the city’s orders, hiring a company to remove the chess tables, chairs, boards, and lights in the early hours of Sept. 29, as BPD officers stood by.

“We were assured directly and unequivocally that if we hauled the stuff away, then BPD would surely cite and arrest the people who trespassed,” Sarachan said. “As soon as Jesse and the chess club arrived later in the morning, we called for the enforcement action. Once again, BPD refused to do so.”

“The city [does] not want to be involved,” are the words Sarachan says BPD officers told his staff while refusing to cite Sheehan.

Berkeley Police Department Public Information Officer Jessica Perry confirmed some decisions regarding law enforcement surrounding the chess club have been made at the city level, but referred to the city for further comment. 

Berkeley’s charter prevents council members from being involved in administrative decisions; city administration is carried out by the city manager’s office. Representatives from the city manager’s office did not comment on the situation despite repeated requests.

‘One of the last places’

Within a few hours of the moving crew taking their things from Sarachan’s property, the chess players had already accumulated and replaced a great deal of the tables, chairs, chess boards and pieces.

By that afternoon, they were playing comfortably again. 

The following Monday, Sheehan was hospitalized with a concussion, and a group of young players — Gerard Markham, Jonathan Farbman and another young man who asked not to be named, among others — took over his watch at Sarachan’s corner By Oct. 3, word of the chess club’s clearing had made its way around Berkeley. At the City Council meeting that night, chess players, residents and University of California, Berkeley students staged a sit-in in support of the club. 

If you take something like that away from this entire city, I feel like you guys are putting the seats that you currently sit in in jeopardy. Gerard Markham, resident

On Oct. 7, while much of Berkeley prepared for a Cal football game day, chess club supporters prepared for a protest at noon. Chess players, student groups and one City Council member, Kate Harrison, were in attendance. 

“[The chess club is] one of the last places in Berkeley where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and also cultural backgrounds can converge and have conversations with one another,” Markham said at the Oct. 10 City Council meeting. “If you take something like that away from this entire city, I feel like you guys are putting the seats that you currently sit in in jeopardy,”

By Oct. 10, Berkeley’s City Council members — even those who previously opposed the chess club — had begun searching for solutions.

Robinson, whose district includes Sarachan’s property, was the first to present a potential solution, suggesting the city reopen “Dwight Triangle” and provide chess tables there.

“Dwight Triangle,” a patch of grass in the middle of the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way, was historically called Chuck Herrick Peace and Freedom Memorial Park. Trees and flowers were planted at the site by Herrick’s friends in 1968 after the young eco-activist was killed in a car accident. 

At a Dec. 11 meeting focusing on the chess club issue, Robinson did not make a proposal for chess at Dwight Triangle, saying it is something that should be handled within other construction plans for the road under the Telegraph Avenue Multimodal Corridor program.

In 2019, the area was redesignated as a median — criminalizing spending any time longer than it takes to cross the road there — fenced and its bench, one of the last on Telegraph, was removed. 

‘Everything worthwhile in Berkeley’

Councilmember Sophie Hahn proposed a series of parklets surrounding Sarachan’s corner in a meeting with representatives from the chess club and student body at Caffe Strada on Oct. 18.

At the meeting, Hahn reached out to a park planner to meet at the chess club the following afternoon, to plan a potential parklet near Sarachan’s corner; the planner quickly replied that Sarachan was already looking into a parklet plan for the area. The surprise on Hahn’s face was visible.

At the Oct. 10 City Council meeting, someone in the audience yelled out that Sarachan is responsible for everything worthwhile in Berkeley.

Robinson chuckled, almost under his breath, but loud enough to be heard across the room. 

Sarachan’s store, once the mothership of Rasputin Records, is one of the last places with 99-cent price tags that still mean it. It has “Rasputin’s rock ‘n roll store” printed on its shopping baskets and walls decorated with musicians Sarachan has hosted there over the years — everyone from E-40 to Cage the Elephant, Metallica and Janelle Monae.

‘We are losing public space’

Berkeley’s City Council Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee met on Dec. 11 to discuss possible solutions for the chess club. 

One proposal, which Harrison mentioned in an Oct. 26 interview, called for allowing unused areas of Berkeley’s sidewalks for public recreation such as chess, legalizing the chess club’s current position. 

Another proposal, from Hahn, called for setting aside $50,000 for permanent chess tables, for the city manager to explore the potential of building a parklet near Sarachan’s corner, for establishing a city-wide chess program, and for fines against Sarachan to cease — although the players already managed to get the fines to end on their own by moving their tables off of Sarachan’s corner and onto public sidewalks.

 “Neither of [the proposals] get to the root of the issue, which is that the fines were put on a property owner for something he had no part in,” chess club member and UC Berkeley student Jonah Gottlieb said at the Dec. 11 meeting. “As it’s been made abundantly clear to the council, the chess club had no legal or formal relationship with Mr. Sarachan.”

The council members agreed that fining Sarachan is not in the public interest, and directed City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley to explore the possibility of lowering Sarachan’s fines in exchange for him making repairs to the building. Williams-Ridley agreed to explore the city’s fee waiving process in this case.

Public comment from chess players and community members echoed past claims that the Dwight Triangle site would not be suitable for chess.

As recently as 2018  People’s Park, Dwight Triangle and Willard Park were completely open to the public. 

In early 2024, People’s Park will still be defunct, Willard Park is set to be under construction to expand its clubhouse, and Dwight Triangle — although now without a padlock — will still be fenced in.  

 “The activists are right,” City Councilmember Ben Bartlett said. “We are losing public space.” 

Chess at Oakland’s Last First Friday 

On Nov. 3, familiar faces drifted through the chess tables at what was meant to be Oakland’s last First Friday street fair until April 2024, near the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Sycamore Street. 

Despite their usual spot still being open, some of the young men who play at the corner of Haste and Telegraph in Berkeley — like Markham and Farbman — were happy to switch it out for the bright lights of downtown Oakland each month.

Sometimes, in the daylight a few blocks away, old men and little boys gather on the side of Lake Merritt in Adams Point, playing strangers in chess on top of what are often just boxes. Chess players spring organically from the foot traffic of the neighborhood there, when the weather is fair, to play in the grass alongside West Grand Avenue.

With chess at First Fridays gone for at least the next few months, and the chess players at the corner of Haste and Telegraph constantly concerned about their equipment being confiscated once again, players are concerned that free chess spaces in the East Bay aren’t being seen for the value they have.

“It brings stability and it brings consciousness and it brings people together here, where normally they wouldn’t, and they would play chess, not using needles, or doing drugs,” said Stevens, one of the chess club regulars. “It takes a different kind of person to sit down and play chess with someone they have never met and they become friends. I think that’s beautiful. That’s what the world needs. We need that type of energy.”