Roughly 90 to 100 cargo containers, stacked two high, surrounded People’s Park in Berkeley Friday, following the closure and clearing of the contested property a day earlier.

As protests subsided, construction on the university’s makeshift border wall ramped up. Workers in bucket trucks welded 10-foot steel plates to the containers to seal the open spaces between the boxes.

There was still a heavy police presence throughout the area. All roads leading toward the park remain blocked, including Haste Street, Bowditch Street and Dwight Way.

Thursday’s protests resulted in the arrest of four people by Berkeley Police for moving barricades, resisting arrests and assaulting an officer. None of those arrested remained in custody late Friday.

Welders install 210 foot steel plates to block the openings between cargo containers in the wall surrounding People’s Park on Jan. 5, 2024. The wall marks the end of a nearly 55-year effort by the University of California at Berkeley to reclaim the park property for planned student housing. (Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News)

The park, which is owned by the University of California, took shape in 1967 as a spontaneous beautification of a vacant industrial lot by thousands of volunteer activists.

For 56 years, it has been occupied by various residents, who built their own shelters, playgrounds, kitchens and stages. A countercultural symbol of ecology over power, it existed as a micro-village with no hierarchy.

The university began its long battle to regain the site on May 15, 1969, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan authorized state troops in riot gear to fire on park supporters, resulting in one death and multiple injuries.

A history of protests

The legacy of violent protest has become synonymous with the park, followed by a string of legal challenges to save it from development.

On May 24, 2022, People’s Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In a statement issued Thursday, the university said it counted 25 people living on the site as of November and that it has relocated 21 of them to paid housing.

It described the current state of the park as a risk to public safety, saying that unhoused people at the site have far too often been the victims of criminal activity. A hyperlink opens a record of crime at the park in recent years.

“In the past 3 years, there have been 18 rapes, 19 robberies, 110 aggravated assaults, and 48 drug and 6 weapons arrests,” the university site says.

The site will be the location for new student housing with more than 1,100 beds. Permanent supportive housing for very low income and formerly unhoused people will be built by a nonprofit developer on a portion of the site the university is providing, the statement said.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.