The Rhombus

César Chavez Park

The old Berkeley dump and composting area was once located on what is now the site of César Chavez Park.  Rainbow Village was relocated from 5th Street between Cedar and Virginia to a maintenance lot at the dump.  If you go to Google Maps and you look the park from above, you'll see that it looks similar to a rhombus.  For a while I didn't have a clear idea of where the Village had once been, even though I tried to use grainy photos from old newspaper clippings and other images available on the Web to figure it out.  I had a pretty good idea where Von Wendel's Sea Space Station and his flotilla were moored, but I couldn't place the site of the Village.  Nor did I have any idea of where the gate to the dump once was.

A few weeks ago I was searching through newspaper articles that might give me a glimpse of where the dump gate was when I came across two articles from '82 that spurred me to try to figure out its location.  One article from April reported the murder of Ronald Allen, a driver for the Black Muslim bakery whose body was found near the entrance.  Another article from November told of an armed robbery at the office.  Some violent things happened at the Berkeley dump in 1982. 

I decided to reach out to the César Chavez Park Conservancy through email to see if they might have photos showing the location of the entrance to the dump.  Martin Nicolaus at the Conservancy very graciously exchanged a few emails with me and I'm now positive I've got the exact location of the Village.  If you're looking at the rhombus it sat in the upper right hand (i.e. the northeast) corner.  Mr. Nicholaus  wrote:

"Dave Kaplow, one of the members of Design Associates Working with Nature (DAWN) who ran a nursery and greenhouse near the composting place, was working in the park during the Rainbow Village period.  He told me it was located on the extreme northeast corner of the park, which is now occupied by the Burrowing Owl Sanctuary and the Open Circle public artwork.  You can see those locations on this map" (Email of Jan. 25, 2022)

Marty was also kind enough to send me a photo that Mr. Kaplow took in '84, from what looks to be the top of a bunch of compost piles.  The camera's pointed east, toward Berkeley, so in the background you can see the city, and in the foreground, moored in the estuary/lagoon you can see Von Wendel's flotilla with the old sub-chaser and some floating cranes rafted together.  The Sea Space Station's not visible, but it would have been sitting to the right, out of frame, while the future site of the Village would have been out of frame to the left.

Looking at Mr. Kaplow's photograph, one might get an idea of how the piles of compost (assuming that they were still there in August of '85) may have absorbed some of the sound of gunfire on the night of the murders.

Turning back to Google Maps, if you switch over to the satellite view of the park and zoom down a bit you'll see Perimeter Trail running along the right side of the park.  If you zoom down even more to where the image says "Perimeter Trail" you'll see that there are three picnic sites in a bend of the trail.  Near the middle site, there is a drinking fountain, not far from which one would be able to find the plaque that Mary's mother placed as a memorial to Greg and Mary, at the spot she believed they'd lost their lives  She also planted a tree, but it did not survive.