Produced by the
Preservation Institute

Overview

My Focus

The Key Change

Shattuck/Univ Corner

Berkeley Way/Shattuck

Berkeley Way Sidewalk

Walnut St.

Replacing the State Health Dept Building

For me, there is a strong symbolic resonance to replacing a modernist highrise with a fine-grained urban fabric of walkable streets. It is a rejection of modernist urbanism that reminds me of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, shown above. But it is even better, because the modernist urbanism is being replaced by an urban fabric created in a piecemeal way, like traditional urban fabrics.

Widen the Sidewalk
of Berkeley Way

One change that I have suggested in addition to the proposals already in the SOSIP is to widen the sidewalk of Berkeley Way and plant trees there.

Berkeley Way is unnecessarily wide between Shattuck and Oxford, next to the Public Health Building site - wider than it is west of Shattuck. 

We should widen the sidewalk and plant trees when the new buildings are constructed on the Public Health Building site. The sidewalk usually must be rebuilt after this sort of large construction, and it costs little extra to widen it. UC would probably widen the sidewalk and add trees as part of its construction projects on the site, if the city requested it.

The sidewalk was already widened and trees were planted along a short stretch of the east end of the block (shown below) when the Berkeleyan apartment building was constructed.  The private developer of that building paid for it as part of his project. The same could easily be done for the entire block when the Public Health Building site is redeveloped.

Tree planting on this block of Berkeley Way is already included in the SOSIP. Sidewalk widening is the added suggestion on this page.