When a ‘showy canopy’ falls down on the job
Hoodline provides all sorts of neighborhood information online, and, from time to time, botanical and anatomical bulletins. A story that appeared last week was centered on the Castro Street block between Market and 18th streets, and was accompanied by an image that seemed particularly vivid because of a setting particularly known for neighborhood friskiness.
The king palm just outside the Castro Coffee Co. was in a row of trees first planted along the street in 2014. A replacement for one of the originals, planted on April 30, was supposed to stand tall, spreading “wide, verdant-green plumes in a showy canopy,” according to one garden catalog description.
But this particular tree had flopped, its “showy canopy” drooping on the sidewalk like a silver-haired Romeo with the kind of problems mentioned delicately in TV ads.
“We are aware of the palm failure,” Carla Short at Public Works told Hoodline. “It must have succumbed to transplant shock.” The palm broker from whom the “sad palm” was bought had agreed to replace it, “recognizing that it should not have failed so quickly,” said Short.
In addition to the heartbreak of sagging, this tree was on display for all to see. But if everything goes according to schedule, in two weeks, its replacement will stand tall with a big satisfied grin on its face. ⏩ Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow scholarship benefit is on Saturday, May 12, at the amphitheater in Danny Scher’s Berkeley backyard. The camp is 42 years old, says founder Gravy, and 15 to 20 percent of the kids who attend are on scholarship, he says. This event — at which performers who teach circus arts at camp will perform — is to raise money for homeless kids to attend camp. Meanwhile, last week’s Tipping Point benefit raised more than $14 million to alleviate poverty.
⏩ Thanks to Arthur Poretz, who noted the president’s allergy to all-things Wolf (Michelle, Michael, Blitzer), but his terminology is a little off. “Vulpine,” according to several correspondents, means related to foxes; “lupine” refers to wolves. But Darleen Dhillon adds to the discussion. She says the president doesn’t have a vulpine allergy; he has a vulpine affinity, “given his devotion to Fox & Friends and its ilk.” As to last week’s story about UC Berkeley’s plans to build housing on the site of People’s Park, Tom DeVries, who was at KQED and later at KRON, recalls covering it from the time of the original conflicts, in 1969. In the early 1990s, he says, the university planned to put sand volleyball courts on the site. He was on the site the morning construction was scheduled to start, observing on Dwight Street “lines of helmeted cops, batons ready” facing “lines of scruffy park defenders.” Also on site, “hundreds of people, helicopters, signs and chants.”
DeVries was there with Ray Colvig, the university’s public information officer, who said, “I told them, if you build it, they will come.”
Today, he says, “I always figured that UC would never be able to build on that ground until everybody alive in 1969 was dead, all the adults at least.” He’s guessing, mordantly, that they’ll name the hall after James Rector, who was killed by police during the 1969 demonstrations.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING
“Humility, I wear it beautifully.” Man in the Castro district, overheard by Nhu Miller