People's Park — the 2.8 acres east of Telegraph Avenue bounded by Haste, Bowditch, and Dwight — is one of the most politically loaded pieces of vacant land in American history. In April 1969, student activists claimed the empty lot owned by UC Berkeley and turned it into a community park. Governor Ronald Reagan's response was to fence it off and call in the National Guard. The resulting confrontation killed one person and injured over a hundred.
The park spent the next fifty years as a genuinely contested space: part memorial, part drug market, part homeless encampment, depending on who was describing it and when. UC Berkeley finally won California Supreme Court approval in 2024 to build student housing on the site, and construction is now underway.
As a visitor in 2026, the park is largely gone — surrounded by construction fencing. But the story of what happened here in 1969 is an essential piece of Berkeley and California political history, and the site itself is worth a pause on a walk down Telegraph Avenue.