The Berkeley Inn. Summer 1980, from People's Park.

Photo by Tom Slattery

THE BERKELEY INN

By Tom Slattery

Some of this article is derived from an article authored by then thirty-six-year-old

Bruce N. Duncan and me that appeared in Duncan's irregular magazine, the Tele Times in
December 1980, pages 117-120. The roughly fifteen-page magazine accumulated page
numbers from issue to issue.

The Tele Times was published from Duncan's room, 414, in the Berkeley Inn. An
article by Charles Sawyer in The Daily Californian, Tuesday, April 29, 1980, calls Duncan's
magazine "an irreverent journalistic compendium grown out of the Telegraph Avenue street
scene."

Duncan had spent time in several psychiatric facilities and was able to survive on
minimal monthly SSI checks due to the relative low cost of rooms at the Berkeley Inn. He
was only one of many residents on either retirement Social Security or its SSI disability
offshoot. Others lived on welfare checks. And a few received the G.I. Bill for college.
Except for a few occasional itinerant construction workers, the only ones who worked were
the hotel employees, and most of them worked without pay in exchange for free rooms. I
believe that only the maid and the manager received actual paychecks.

Today we would characterize the Berkeley Inn as an SRO (Single Room

Occupancy) hotel. My calculated estimate three decades after living there is that there were
about seventy-five rooms. At any given time some were empty. But balancing that out, some
of the rooms were occupied by couples living together. Transient guests paid competitive
nightly or weekly rates and kept the hotel full or near full.

Their overnight or weekly stays subsidized the permanent residents who paid low
monthly rates. These low-cost single rooms with baths and toilets down the hall gave elderly
residents and other residents who had physical and mental disabilities a degree of freedom
to live their own lives. A few residents were students working on degrees at the University
of California five blocks down Telegraph Avenue. Occasionally others were men in varying
stages of divorce proceedings who might have suddenly found themselves homeless except
for the availability and low cost of the Berkeley Inn rooms.

Like virtually all old SRO hotels, the Berkeley Inn tended to be self-policing.
Permanent residents had low tolerances for drug dealers and heavy drug users who tended to
be trouble or make trouble. They did not want blatant prostitution and potential violent
situations or callous selfish noisy parties that accompany prostitution. They looked out for
one another. And they reported threatening situations. The hotel was a town unto itself, and
the residents sought to make the town as livable as possible.

In 1980 the four-story red brick Berkeley Inn had been standing at the corner of
Haste and Telegraph for sixty-nine years. Along with some other old Bay Area hotels built
about the same time, it was run by the Pacific Hotel Management Corporation.

Its turn-of-the-century – turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century – glory days
were long gone by 1979 and 1980 when I lived there. Token reminders of its history and
elegance, however, were there for anyone who paused to note them.

The Berkeley Inn had been designed and built in 1911 by famed San Francisco
architect Joseph Cather Newsom (1858-1930), ancestor of the present early 21st century
mayor of San Francisco.

Joseph Cather Newsom and his brother Samuel designed and built elegant houses
for wealthy people and many public buildings in California. The Berkeley Inn would thus
have been a stately structure for the well-to-do traveling citizens of the day.

Today (in 2009) there is another structure not far away called the Berkeley Inn. That
was also the case while the Berkeley Inn at the corner of Haste and Telegraph was being
built in 1911. The earlier Berkeley Inn stood near the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft
where the University of California Student Union Building stands today.
 The sixty-year-old daughter of the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Willey, one of the founders of
the University of California, then called the College of California, leased the Berkeley Inn
from Newsom when it became ready for occupancy in 1912. Her distinguished father was in
his nineties in those days prior to the Social Security Administration. Apparently requiring
care from his daughter, the elderly educator moved into the Berkeley Inn, lived there for two
years, and passed away there in 1914 just short of his ninety-third birthday.

People of this level of distinction, with means and quality education, were the early
residents and guests of the Berkeley Inn.

The first floor of the east wing of the Berkeley Inn had once held an elegant
restaurant. The restaurant had its own separate entrance and probably also served as a
ballroom. Its kitchen held a giant black cast-iron stove and oven for cooking a multitude of
fine meals.

But the restaurant was shut down, probably in the 1940s. In 1980 the space was used
for storage of hotel maintenance materials such as ladders and scaffolding. But a glance up
at the white-painted Art Metal ceiling could remind one of guests in fine fabrics dining on
expensive delicious morsels while chauffeurs waited outside in new-fangled horseless
carriages and motorcars.

By 1980 it was indeed rare to see a person dressed in a suit and tie enter or leave the
Berkeley Inn.

The single elevator may have been a novelty in the early 20th century. In 1980 it still
ran on direct current that had to be rectified by large vacuum tubes from Pacific Gas and
Electric's normal alternating current. The elevator no longer reliably stopped even with the
floor levels. Its walrus-hide brakes were worn and could not be replaced.

The Berkeley Inn used the original telephone system installed in the early twentieth
century. A large white oak telephone connection console stood behind the desk clerk's chair.
Desk-clerking involved using an early 20th century white oak telephone switchboard with
brass plug-in pegs like out of a 1920s silent film.

In most of the 1960s and 1970s the Berkeley Inn was under constant police and
government surveillance. It was located almost directly across the street from People's Park,
seen of several violent student demonstrations. It was also a cheap place to stay in
anonymity.

Moreover its proximity to nonconformist People's Park and the Telegraph Avenue
scene, as Duncan put it, "offered a certain business convenience to the illegal drug
community."

New management hired by the hotel corporation got tough with the dealers and
users and cleaned up the lobby and access areas. At the same time, the number of paid hotel
maids dropped from two to one.
 All of the desk clerks and the lone maintenance worker received only free rooms as
pay. All of them had some college, and most of them had college degrees. It was a way of
life. Most had salable skills to sell for adequate income to survive and live the casual
California life in tolerant and intellectual Berkeley. Surviving meant illegally cooking on hot
plates in their rooms, as did most of the people receiving Social Security and Welfare.

This, in turn, created a cockroach problem not unlike the prevailing cockroach
problem in many older Berkeley buildings. The hotel management sprayed the hotel with
insecticide every week. But it helped only minimally.

Seeing that the insecticides accomplished little if anything, one long-time resident
woman took to spraying the nooks and crannies with Lysol.

Duncan recorded her practice and its results this way.

"Does Lysol kill them," I asked.

"No, but at least I know they're clean," she replied.

There were nooks and crannies for people, too. In the mid-1970s a Berkeley "street
person," a euphemism for homeless person, found his way into a blocked-off spiral stairway
and made it his home. He slept there almost vertically for some months.

Alas, he was a careless smoker. Smoker of what Duncan does not tell us. But he set
his sleeping bag on fire in the blocked-off staircase. He put it out and left. But it continued to
smolder.

People smelled smoke. People living close together in old hotels like this become
very sensitive to the life-threatening smell of smoke. But no one knew where it was coming
from. Enter an elderly long-time resident for decades whom everyone affectionately called
"The Colonel." Duncan describes him as "a hearty, robust, bibliophilic old man who had
lived in the Inn for decades."

The Colonel remembered that the entrances to the spiral staircases had been
plastered over decades earlier. He pointed to what appeared to be a continuous wall.

"There used to be a stairway over there – been covered over for years," The Colonel
said.

The firemen hacked through the wall and discovered the smoldering sleeping bag.

When The Colonel died it is claimed that his body lay dead in his room for days
before, as Duncan put it, "it was discovered that he had died." He had been working on
some autobiographical writing, rumored to be about his military career. Duncan and others
felt that it been thrown out with most of the rest of his worldly possessions. No one else
much cared what he had done on the wartime or civilian battlefields of his life.

Not long after that there was another fire. I am closer to this one because it resulted
in my being granted a fine room in the quiet back of the Berkeley Inn with a view of the
eucalyptus-covered hills from my window. Rooms on the opposite side overlooked the
people and traffic noise and commotion of busy Telegraph Avenue. For a year I would have
a mellow place to live and write on an old Hermes portable typewriter.

When the fire happened I was living in a miserable noise-accumulating room above
Telegraph Avenue. An unstable young man with a history of drug use was living in the fine
and mellow room in the back.

Early one morning a long time resident was returning from a night on the town when
he smelled a whiff of smoke in the Berkeley Inn. A quick examination of empty early
morning corridors brought him to a room where smoke was seeping out from under the
hotel room door.

The all-night carouser aroused the desk clerk on duty. The desk clerk got hold of the
maintenance man who had a passkey. They hurried to the scene of the smoke. There was a
brief discussion as to whether they had a right to violate the young man's privacy by opening
the room door.

During the discussion the all-night carouser, the desk clerk, and the maintenance
man made one another aware that unstable young man had been seen earlier throwing food
around a nearby hamburger palace named Kip's. Later he had thrown water on the door of
the room of a hotel neighbor. When asked why, he said he wanted to make the door
transparent so he could watch the television inside.

Smoke continued to flow out under the door and into the corridor. The discussion
ended quickly. The passkey was used to open the door. Through the haze of smoke they
could see unstable young man sitting on his bed coolly smoking a cigarette and watching his
mattress burn. He had put residents in grave danger. He was summarily evicted on the spot.
City social services tried to get him back into his room the next day. They failed.

I got the room, and I quickly fixed it up. There were rolls and rolls of new uncut rug
in the Berkeley Inn basement that the corporation may have gotten at a sale. They had not,
however, gotten anyone to replace carpet in the rooms with it. I cut a measured piece of it
and installed it in my new room. Then I painted the walls. And then I lived a mellow year in
that room.

Life in the little walled-in town of the Berkeley Inn was like life everywhere. There
were tragedies, comedies, crimes, successes, losses, comings, and goings. Old residents
could recall rapes, robberies, assaults, scams, and the filming of a few pornographic loops
that had occurred in this or that room. But these were remembered as gossipy news items
because they were rare and had happened only a few times over decades of living there.
 As Duncan pointed out, in 1980 residents of the Berkeley Inn had included: a
champion chess player, a nuclear physicist working on his Ph.D., some poets, writers, and
artists good and bad, a magazine publisher, a variety of "working stiffs," and various and
sundry individuals on the social fringe.

To quote Duncan: "The Berkeley Inn has a lived-in, funky charm that differs greatly
from the cold artificiality of many new buildings. Despite some inconveniences and
shortcomings in service, the resident who likes an independent life can have lots of freedom
here. The Berkeley Inn is to a significant extent a haven for those who have happily dropped
out of a disagreeably bourgeois pattern of life."

I moved out of the Berkeley Inn in the summer of 1980 and went on to live in a
couple other states and one foreign country. I returned to Berkeley for a quick visit in the
late summer of 1985. A new desk clerk who did not know me was on duty at the Berkeley
Inn. I could see the keys hanging on room-numbered hooks and saw that my old room was
unoccupied.

I convinced the desk clerk to let me see the room. I suspect that he thought that I was
a possible transient renter. I took the key and headed up the ancient elevator with the walrus-
hide brakes and then to my old room. The carpet that I had put down six years earlier was
still there. The walls had not been painted since I had painted them. And the room was
empty and hollow like a ghost.

In 1986 the first of two major fires struck the Berkeley Inn.

When I visited Berkeley from Ohio on two research trips in 1987 and 1988 to write
my novel End of the Road, the Berkeley Inn was a vast vacant derelict with a chain-link
fence around it to keep out squatters.

A second serious fire in 1990 damaged the historic structure too badly to be
considered for restoration. The building was found to be unsafe and was demolished in 1990
and 1991.
END