The story begins with a hole in the ground. In 1967, the University of California used eminent domain to acquire a 2.8-acre block of residential land near Telegraph Avenue, paying $1.3 million. Bulldozers demolished the houses in February 1968, but the university ran out of development funds, leaving the lot as a field of rubble and debris for fourteen months. On April 15, 1969, a local boilermaker named Michael Delacour convened a meeting of activists to discuss what to do with the vacant eyesore. The Berkeley Barb, an underground newspaper, published a call to action. Five days later, more than a hundred people showed up with shovels, sod, flowers, and trees. A landscape architect named Jon Read donated his expertise. Within weeks, a thousand volunteers had built a park from nothing -- gardens, pathways, gathering spaces -- on land they did not own.

The university's response came on May 13, when Chancellor Roger W. Heyns announced that a fence would go up around the property. Work crews erected an eight-foot chain-link barrier, and roughly 3,000 people gathered at Sproul Plaza to protest. What followed was an escalation that shocked even a city accustomed to protest. Alameda County sheriff's deputies and police used tear gas, then shotguns loaded with birdshot and buckshot. Governor Ronald Reagan had already declared, before the violence, that the park dispute was merely an "excuse" for agitation. He sent in the National Guard, and troops occupied the area for two weeks. The confrontation left James Rector dead, Alan Blanchard blinded, and Berkeley scarred by the realization that its own institutions would use lethal force over a vacant lot. The university kept the fence and posted 24-hour guards. On June 20, the Regents voted to build a soccer field and parking lot on the site. Those plans never materialized.

People's Park became a recurring flashpoint. In 1971, the university tried again to install a soccer field; 44 people were arrested. In 1979, activists tore up a parking lot the university had paved over part of the park. In 1991, the university sent in bulldozers with riot police to build volleyball courts, triggering protests that resulted in over 104 arrests and cost $150,000 per court -- not counting the security needed to protect the courts from protesters. The courts were finally removed in 1997. The park's meaning shifted over the decades. To some, it remained sacred ground -- a memorial to the Free Speech Movement and the price of dissent. To others, it had become what the San Francisco Chronicle described in 2008 as "a forlorn and somewhat menacing hub for drug users and the homeless." Between 2012 and 2017, the university tallied over 10,000 criminal incidents at the site. The park held both truths at once: a symbol of radical idealism and a place where that idealism had curdled.

In 2018, UC Berkeley proposed building 1,100 units of student housing and 125 units of supportive homeless housing on the site, with a memorial to the park's history. The plan had backing from the Berkeley City Council, the mayor, the state assembly, and Governor Gavin Newsom. A contingent of activists opposed it through protests and legal challenges. The confrontation reached surreal proportions. Just after midnight on August 3, 2022, police and contractors fenced the park and cut down 47 trees before protests forced a temporary withdrawal. Then, on January 4, 2024, the university sealed the perimeter with double-stacked shipping containers -- 17 feet of steel topped with razor wire -- in a midnight operation involving at least 100 officers from four agencies. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022, even as it was being walled off. On June 6, 2024, the California Supreme Court unanimously sided with the university. Construction began on July 22. The most fought-over park in Berkeley was, at last, no longer a park.