Southside community members met in the basement of Moe’s Books Thursday night for the first meeting of the Telegraph Livability Coalition to suggest possible changes to improve the Telegraph Avenue atmosphere in terms of business, cleanliness, safety and tourism.
UC Berkeley juniors and ASUC Senators Andrew Albright and Anthony Galace facilitated the meeting attended by about 25 community members from the surrounding area, who raised concerns ranging from drug problems associated with People’s Park to consistent store vacancies. Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington was also present to share his ideas and show support for the coalition’s goals.
Doris Moskowitz, owner of Moe’s Books, suggested the idea for the meeting to Worthington and asked him to recommend people who might be interested.
She cited dwindling foot traffic and declining sales for Telegraph businesses as her primary concern.
“We need help getting people to come here,” Moskowitz said. “Our stores are empty, and we’re terrified.”
Worthington suggested Albright and Galace, who are both active in Southside-related issues like student housing and pedestrian safety — Albright has advocated for the development of the perpetually vacant lot on the corner of Haste Street and Telegraph, while Galace has held demonstrations trying to encourage that a stop sign be installed at the “slip lane” on Dwight Way and Telegraph.
“Everyone has their own ideas, but we needed to find a way to bring all of them together,” Galace said.
Worthington said he supports a stronger police presence on Telegraph as a way of decreasing crime and making people feel safer.
He also mentioned that the city is already applying for grants to install more pedestrian lighting, something that many agree would greatly improve the nighttime atmosphere. A suggestion that the Telegraph area between Bancroft and Dwight Ways be turned into a historical district was met with enthusiasm.
After public discussion of the many issues facing Telegraph for business owners and residents alike, the facilitators asked for positive suggestions to be consolidated into an action plan, which they eventually hope to submit to City Council.
Albright and Galace said they would formulate the plan within 10 days and email it to the people who attended the meeting, adding that they hope to publicize it to more of the community.
Adelyn Baxter covers city government.
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It’s very simple. Drive them away with pepper spray.
As a local, I have a few important points in the discussion:
1) “street culture” and street people will always be a part of Telegraph. They made it special, and they still do. I grew up skateboarding and hanging out on Tele as a teen, and later graduated from Cal with 2 Masters Degrees. Telegraph is a very special and unique place to us locals. What made Telegraph so special back in the day was it’s LOCAL-NESS. LOCAL stores, and neighborhood people, meeting there, eating there, and contributing there. When local citizens are part of the equation, then Telegraph really thrives. If you leave it up to chain stores, redundant bong shops, transient students and criminals to be the only ‘stewards’ of the space, then Telegraph will continue to lose its cultural value and its unique resources that made it a draw in the past.
2) It’s also about Design (or lack of)
Shoppers need places to sit, ideally in the sun. What makes 4th street successful is not its shops only, it’s the comfortable design of the street…benches in the sun, low seat walls, landscaping, and wider sidewalks at certain key moments. If we can make Telegraph a more enjoyable street for EVERYONE, with a better design, it will flow with life again, for all of its diverse users. We need better places for vendors and pedestrians(i.e no parking on Tele, public-transit only), and wider sidewalks. We need better places for street performers and audiences. We need less traffic on Telegraph, and more affordable, accessible , easy-to-find parking in off-street in garages.
3) People’s Park is a wonderful place and resource. It looks scrappy, and you may not be used to sharing a park with homeless people, but once you actually get over the scray idea that they are different or dangerous, then you too can enjoy the grass and the sun at People’s Park. It’s for all of us, and it does very well at accommodating this democratic idea.
4) Berkeley is full of Local artisans, entrepreneurs and innovators. Telegraph should be the place to showcase all of Berkeley’s diverse talented culture. Bookstores, vintage clothing, alternative retail, local entertainment, local cultural goods, local crafts, and local food are all part of the essential equation to saving Telegraph. Simply “cleaning it up” and enticing successful chain stores is NOT a solution, it’s a failure. If Telegraph ever begins to look like Emeryville or 4th Street, we have failed to capitalize on the amazing assets that make Berkeley the world famous place it is.
Anthony Galace & Andy Albright you’re doing it big! You’re both doing a wonderful job!
Beast,
Your Fan
Amsterdam runs fancy cleaning trucks through the red light district every single day. It picks up all the trash which is manually swept into the street in front of it with brooms. It shoots a huge amount of steaming disinfectant all over the place and uses very heavy duty brushes. There are also hoses for the steaming hot disinfectant spray that are used to manually spray the sidewalks. If you are on the street at 4 am when this is happening you must dive out of the way to avoid getting drenched!
When was the last time you saw a City of Berkeley employee using the power washer system that we own?
Having walked from A’dam Centraal Station through the Walletje on the way to various points on many occasions, and witness some of the local activity firsthand (drug dealers, drunk tourist puking in the street) I fully understand why the Dutch, with their penchant for cleanliness would understand the need for such an approach. Unfortunately we have too many people here who believe that filth is somehow a contribution to “diversity” and local color…
Some of the Telegraph Avenue merchants contribute significantly to the problem. If you try to attract customers for rap music, body piercing, tatooing, and drug paraphernalia, what results can you expect?
To blame street people for the problems on Telegraph is classic scapegoating. The streets are filthy because of all the fast-food outlets and students who dump their lunch remains on the street. Check out Telgraph and Bancroft or Sproul Plaza on a monday morning. Broken glass, soiled panties, feces, urine, pizza boxes, yogurt cuops and all the other crap is left by ignorant students, not the homeless.
[To blame street people for the problems on Telegraph is classic
scapegoating. The streets are filthy because of all the fast-food
outlets and students who dump their lunch remains on the street.]
If that were the case, then People’s Park would be the cleanest spot in Berkeley, given that no student in his or her right mind would go near the place. But it’s not…
A start would be to not have street vendors set up on Telegraph every day of the week. With the vendors on the sidewalk next to the street and the riff raff panhandling, sitting, lying against the buildings, it makes for a daunting experience for many to essentially have to navigate a human obstacle course to simply walk down the street. A variety of streets in Berkeley should be designated for one day a week of street vendors: Telegraph, Solano, Fourth Street, College, Shattuck Downtown, North Shattuck, Claremont or maybe combine the street vendors and Farmer’s Markets and designate the above named streets one day a week. The riff raff sitting, lying, panhandling on the streets should then be detained until there is a busload, whereupon they will be loaded up on a chartered express bus and whisked seventy five miles out of town and dropped off at the steps of the State Capitol, Downtown Sacramento. Berkeley needs tighter controls on organizations that facilitate a street lifestyle and thereby act as a magnet to draw riff raff to Berkeley. As long as these organizations are allowed to operate wherever and however they wish in Berkeley, there will always be a riff raff problem. Under no circumstances should any such use be permitted within easy walking distance of Telegraph. Converting the UC owned plot of land bounded by Haste, Dwight and Bowditch to a much needed university use such as athletic fields, will also greatly improve the quality of life on Telegraph. The city should also work with the landowner to bring an anchor tenant back to the property formerly occupied by Cody’s Bookstore. Cody’s and Moe’s together were a regional draw. Since Cody’s has shut down, Telegraph seems to have really taken a dive. The vacant property at Haste and Telegraph would have great use as a
multi level parking garage with anchor retail on the fist two floors. Once the street vendors and riff raff are gone and with added parking, Telegraph could have sidewalk dining in front of restaurants and cafes and become a regional draw that a respectable crowd will want to visit, much like 4th Street except so much better.
[A start would be to not have street vendors set up on Telegraph every
day of the week. With the vendors on the sidewalk next to the street and
the riff raff panhandling, sitting, lying against the buildings, it
makes for a daunting experience for many to essentially have to navigate
a human obstacle course to simply walk down the street. A variety
of streets in Berkeley should be designated for one day a week of street
vendors:]
I vote for the eastbound lanes of I-80 during the Friday PM rush hour.
What Telegraph Avenue needs is a sprinkler system on a timer that releases a biodegradable disinfectant over the sidewalk followed by a high pressure stream of water some time after 2 AM. Those local homeless people who are actually willing to work instead of beg (all 3 of them) can put on swampers and rain slickers, grab heavy duty push brooms, and scrub down the sidewalks starting up to at Bancroft down to at least Dwight Way, one side then the other. Give them about 30 minutes on each block and a 20 minute snack/potty break halfway through work, and they should have the whole mess completed by 7 AM. Win-win for everyone concerned…
There is no cleaning Telegraph w/o ending PP.
Why would anyone ever go to Telegraph? It’s dirty, it closes early, the shops are spread out, there’s no cohesive idea or theme behind the shopping district, there’s nowhere to park, and anywhere you go you’re going to be harassed by aggressive street people and sidewalk vendors.
Emeryville doesn’t seem to have any trouble luring shoppers to their new mall or any of their other shopping districts. Maybe Berkeley could try learning something from its neighbors instead of just constantly complaining.
Get rid of the homeless bums and the gutter punks.
All the drunk/tweaked out homeless people who sit on the sidewalk and yell at passerby probably don’t help this problem…