Halcyon Commons

Halcyon Commons is a community-designed and -initiated park dedicated in the summer of 1996 in the neighborhood southwest of the Ashby-Telegraph intersection in South Berkeley. Once a 28-space parking lot, and decades earlier part of a streetcar line, the site of Halcyon Commons was transformed into a public green space following a four-year process of community involvement led by Halcyon Neighborhood Association (HNA) starting in 1992. 

HNA consistently used a community-based approach, involving neighbors from the planning and design phases through actual construction and planting, following a lengthy neighborhood-centered and then public city process. The planning process was led by John Steere (environmental planner), Nancy Carleton (former organizer for the United Farm Workers), the late Michael Lamb (landscape architect and at the time a project coordinator for the East Bay Regional Park District), and an active Steering Committee including architect Bruce Wicinas and chef Susan Hunter among others, and entailed polling neighbors regarding their preferences among alternative park footprints, neighborhood-guided hands-on design workshops, mockup parties of the future park in the then-parking lot, committees engaging in “preemptive concern addressing” (Bruce’s term) to cover areas of potential concern, frequent communication with neighbors via detailed printed newsletters and flyers, followed by many commission and City Council meetings once we’d secured neighborhood consensus.

The park design was approved by the City Council in 1994, and we won a seed grant of $109,000 in funding from the City. We were able to complete the park for such a modest sum because we kept the community involved, leveraging the seed funding with our sweat equity; we helped break up the macadam (pavement), lay the sod, and plant every tree and plant in the park. We arranged for in-kind donations of professional services from our talented neighbors (key among them the late landscape architect Michael Lamb, whose design drew together elements from the two hands-on design workshops, and presented them in a form that would pass muster with the city and later win a design award) and nearby businesses (notably Whole Foods Market and Alta Bates Medical Center).

Other neighbors contributed their professional talents by building a unique bulletin board (Bruce Wicinas) and an arbor (Jeff Altmann and Lorin Hill). Trees in the park (including a redwood planted across the street on the Model School entry hill) were purchased through a grant Nancy Carleton secured that paid for all the trees in the park (except for  a couple of apple trees donated by a neighbor who wanted to be sure at least one example of a fruiting tree was included). Other neighbors helped us save money by using their professional knowledge to write the first draft of the project’s CEQA “negative declaration” (an environmental assessment document), indicating that no toxins were expected as we dug up the site of a streetcar line that once ran through Halcyon Court, which had competed unsuccessfully with the Key System lines. One of those neighbors worked for the EPA and was qualified to do the bore that proved our assumption was valid; fortunately for us, the streetcar line was built before treating wood with arsenic-containing creosote became common.

We finished planting and laying sod in the park in the spring and summer of 1996, after landscape contractor (and former Woolsey Street neighbor) Scott Parker had laid out the key infrastructure, including irrigation, under contract with the City of Berkeley, making 2026 the thirtieth anniversary of the completed park (with later additions of the steel cutout entryway at the north end by artist Amy Blackstone and the boulder garden near the southeast entrance added through a UC Chancellor’s Community Partnership grant). John Steere’s family funded the Father-Sun bench on the southwestern side of the park, made of recycled white pine from a deconstructed bridge in Santa Cruz County. Sadly, the Halcyon Bird Sculpture in the oval near the bench, the icon of the park planned from the beginning and dedicated at the 20th anniversary of the park and created by neighborhood artist Nina Lyons, with recycled bridge cable nest by Bruce Wicinas, was destroyed during the first months of COVID shelter-in-place, likely by an act of meth-fueled rage, a sad loss after years of fundraising, community process, and artistic labor. We hope to recreate the sculpture once funds and an artist are identified.

Led by Friends of Halcyon Commons, neighbors remain involved in the ongoing maintenance of the park through periodic work parties, supplemented twice a year by volunteers from Cal students’ Berkeley Project. Beautiful redwoods, a stately now 30-year-old live oak, and a chestnut tree ideal for climbing edge a lawn that invites both rest and play. An annual Ice Cream Social for National Night Out, picnics, potlucks, and occasional musical events foster neighborly relations as Halcyon Commons continues to serve as the heart of a vibrant community.