Memoricide at Memorial Stadium

The following text was given to us by Gray Brechin following his conversation in the Walks

Memoricide at Memorial Stadium

As I finished this, the building shuddered from a quake centered nearby.

Thank you, Ignacio, for getting me and assorted others into these ambulatory seminars without credit or debit — to reconsider and resee what now seems almost a geological fixture in the landscape but which is in fact the product of past political maneuvering, an acrimonious cleavage between town and gown, and violence wrought upon the land 85 years ago in alleged memory of those who perished in the psychopathic violence of a world war. Because our culture does not regard land as constituting a living matrix, we seldom see our alterations of it as acts of savagery and quickly become accustomed to scars and amputations as “natural.” This is what Matthew Taylor refers to as environmental memoricide. But when terracide in the past and present lays the groundwork for potential mass homicide in the future, we must try to recover what has been repressed in memory.

Fortunately, the Bancroft Library and map collections constitute a public memory richly suggestive of how the mouth of Strawberry Canyon once looked, what was required to create the present landscape, and what is in store for the university and its neighbors if a past folly is amplified by ignoring the initial mistake of building Memorial Stadium by expanding its use now.

Matthew and I visited the Bancroft Library where he had called up photographs of the original canyon and the construction of the stadium. One easily understands the anger felt by many Berkeleyans as a promontory ridge to the north was sliced away by hydraulic monitors to make a 60-foot high podium consisting of 280,000 cubic yards of fill on top of the Hayward Fault as well as the steep escarpment since dubbed “Tightwad Hill.”

In The Story of the Stadium, local resident William Henry Smyth enumerated community objections to the Regents’ last-minute decision to site the Coliseum in the canyon. They are almost exactly those of today: “sacrificing one of Nature’s priceless gems to the purposes of commercialized ‘sport,’” traffic congestion and the immense amount of asphalt needed to park cars for games, as well as the danger posed by blocking egress from Panoramic Hill.

That hill is a terrifying case study well suited to Mike Davis’s holistic revelations of the perilous triumph of realty over reality. We saw on our walk the experimental houses built by local architect-engineer Walter Steilberg after the Berkeley hills fire of 1923 demonstrated the folly of building wood frame and shingle-sheathed houses on constricted roads on land fated to burn. Steilberg’s Fabricrete structures —made entirely of concrete and tile — were meant to be not just fire resistant but fireproof. But that was in the 1920s when steep, narrow, and winding Panoramic Road served only a few scattered houses on the hill. As memory of the 1923 holocaust faded and the value of view lots rose, hundreds of wooden houses sprang up in an ever-more bosky landscape. Rising land value aided by memoricide has vastly compounded the danger of constricted egress since Smyth wrote his booklet in 1923.

But he alluded to another danger left unspecified: “And last come the Regents who are interested and will be deemed responsible for the outcome in all its phases and whether of glorious success or of tragic disaster — flowing from the selection of the canyon site.” I can only assume that he meant the faultline which bisected the stadium site, for the immense excavation laid the fault bare, providing a splendid opportunity to university geologists to study it. Were they, I wonder, ordered by General David Prescott Barrows, President of the University, to shut up about what they learned? More digging in the archives will be required to find the answer to that.

On the walk I read a passage that I rediscovered in Lewis Mumford’s magisterial overview The City in History (1961) as he began his survey of medieval urbanism: “As the Church ceased to be the repository of new values, the university gradually took over some of this office. This fact has placed a premium upon the detached pursuit of truth, as the dominating life value, and has ignored in large degree the realms of esthetics and morals. Thus the university has become a classic example of that over-specialization and limitation of function which now curbs human development and threatens even human survival.”

How appropriate, I thought, looking up from the canopy of oaks to the hill where E.O. Lawrence’s 184-inch cyclotron began separating the U-235 needed for the Hiroshima bomb. But there, too, stood the monumental and arcaded flank of Memorial Stadium modeled on the Roman Coliseum. Mumford taught a few classes at Cal but was not offered a position here since he had never received his B.A. and — as a friend who was there told me — the faculty grew tired of his harping upon the danger posed by the superior nuclear weapons the university makes. Here is how Mumford concluded his section on Rome:

"From the standpoint of both politics and urbanism, Rome remains a significant lesson of what to avoid: its history presents a series of classic danger signals to warn when life is moving in the wrong direction. Whenever crowds gather in suffocating numbers, whenever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, whenever a one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure to achieve balance and harmony nearer at hand, there the precedents of Roman building almost automatically revive, as they have come back today: the arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip-tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of senses by sex, liquor, and violence — all in true Roman style. So, too, the multiplication of bathrooms and the over-expenditure on broadly paved motor roads, and above all, the massive collective concentration on glib ephemeralities of all kinds, performed with supreme technical audacity. These are symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come, hangman! Come, vulture!"

Mumford died in 1990. His ecologically-informed writings are considered by some to be dated, and tiresomely preachy.
The fault, meanwhile, strains under a quarter billion tons of hydraulic slickens like a cocked and loaded gun.