The center of student life is Sproul Plaza, opening off Bancroft Way at Telegraph Avenue. It is easily reached from the Downtown Berkeley BART station by walking up Center Street and following Strawberry Creek though the eucalyptus groves to the lower half of the plaza. The plaza’s upper half, fronted by imposing, neo-classical Sproul Hall (the administration building) was the site of the first Free Speech Movement sit-ins. It was here that in October, 1964, FSM leader Mario Savio mobilized a massive, two-day student protest from the roof of a police car containing arrested student organizer Jack Weinberg. In fact, the front steps of Sproul Hall are now called the Mario Savio Steps. Look for the plaque, set into the center of the top step fronting the plaza. Still bustling in these less momentous times, upper Sproul Plaza is filled with recruiting tables at lunchtime. Myriad student organizations (political, religious, environmental and social) enjoy the freedoms won by Savio and his comrades to lobby for political causes of every stripe, as well as to bring their classmates to the Student Christian Fellowship.

Dividing upper Sproul Plaza from lower Sproul Plaza is the King Student Union. In the King basement are bookstores, Cal clothing and gift shops, and a snack bar. Outside, in the lower plaza, pickup drum bands lay down Afro-Latin rhythms on evenings and weekends. On the other side of lower Sproul is Zellerbach Hall, the venue for the many attractions of Cal Performances.

Heading north and crossing Strawberry Creek through Sather Gate, you will pass Dwinelle Plaza, imposing Wheeler Hall and, finally, Doe and Moffitt Libraries. The recently remodeled, colonnaded Doe, on your right, is the campus’ main library. Doe has closed stacks, and its services are for the most part available only to students; however, its hushed main research room, lined floor to ceiling with reference works, is open for study. Doe’s Morrison Reading Room, a regally appointed, club-like setting, allows students and visitors alike to sink into an overstuffed armchair and catch up on a foreign periodical or listen to a CD. Moffit, the undergraduate library across from Doe, has open stacks for browsing through books.

On Doe’s east side is Bancroft Library, worth a stop for those interested in California history. It holds, among thousands of other objects, the plaque left in Marin County by Sir Francis Drake claiming the West Coast (“Nova Albion”) for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I. It is, unfortunately, a fake, but it is still worth seeing. The Bancroft has an extensive collection of manuscripts by Mark Twain, James Joyce and other notable authors.

Outside, Cal’s (and the East Bay’s) most recognizable landmark, the Campanile, offers a panoramic vista from its viewing platform (10am-4pm weekdays; 10am-5pm weekends). The tower is a replica, more or less, of the Campanile at St. Mark’s in Venice. Its official name is Sather Tower—a fact likely unknown by the majority of Cal’s students. At the base of the Campanile stands South Hall, one of the University’s two original buildings, dating from 1873.

Walking north and turning east at Bechtel Hall (the Engineering Department, unsurprisingly), one comes to the Hearst Mining Building, dating from 1907. It is of interest less for its dusty geology exhibits than for its intricate metalwork and glass domes. The Hearst invoked in this and in other buildings and museums around campus (and even the street bounding the campus on the north) is not newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, but rather his mother. Phoebe Apperson Hearst sponsored the competition for the original campus plan (won and thence executed by Frederick Law Olmstead), and was a great benefactress of campus and students alike in its early years.

At this point, if you have the time and the interest, one of the country’s largest collections of fossils awaits you at the Valley Life Sciences Building (on the west side of Moffitt Library), in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. It’s not nearly as dreary as it sounds, particularly if you’ve got kids with you: a Tyrannosaurus Rex, in all its bony glory, guards the hall. On the first floor is a somewhat unnerving seismometer, measuring Bay Area earthquake activity.

Another Hearst bequest worth taking a look at is the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Kroeber Hall. You can reach this museum by walking southeast from the Campanile, through Faculty Glade, and skirting the Music Department’s Morrison and Hertz Halls (campus maps are posted on signboards around campus).  The Hearst Museum’s rotating exhibits are always of interest. Worth looking at, too, are artifacts made by or connected with Ishi, one of the last Native Americans living in the American wild. Discovered in Shasta County and brought to Berkeley by Alfred Kroeber in 1911, Ishi lived out the last months of his life here under a sort of anthropological microscope.

Across Bancroft Way is the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, whose holdings include a handsome collection of works by the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman. The museum plays host to a number of traveling exhibitions, with an emphasis on the 20^th Century (or, to the extent possible, the 21st). For film buffs, the Pacific Film Archive, downstairs, is a shrine to the cinematic arts. Its theater, just across the street on Bancroft shows both new works not in distribution in the U.S. and rarities of years past.

Conclude your tour with a  refreshment either at the PFA’s cafe, at nearby Caffe Strada (corner of Bancroft Way and College Avenue) or down the street at Café Milano, both popular student hangouts.

Telegraph Avenue
To move out of the shadow of Cal’s ivory tower and see the real Berkeley—the fractious, colorful, hippie/radical/Rastafarian soul of the city—one need only cross from Sproul Plaza onto Telegraph Avenue. If you are just coming from the Hearst Museum of Anthropology (Kroeber Hall), then the four blocks of “The Avenue” can serve as a fascinating anthropological museum in which living, breathing specimens of every counter-cultural movement of the last 35 years are on display. Stroll the four blocks between Bancroft and Dwight and you will encounter graying hippies from the late 60s and early 70s rubbing shoulders with punks from the 80s, Rastafarians at their craft tables, and Trotskyites and anarchists arguing dogma over espressos inside the hoary La Mediterranee. And through it all, the classes of 2001-2004 go about their business, by now inured to it all.

Aside from the people-watching and the two dozen places to grab a quick lunch, Telegraph Avenue offers the visitor some unique shopping and a historical landmark or two.

Shopping: The most distinct mercantile feature of Telegraph Avenue are the rows of tables lining the sidewalk where merchants (often more interesting than their wares) sell jewelry, candles, knitware, art and T-shirts whose messages tend, not without humor, towards the legalization of cannabis. On Sundays, these four blocks of Telegraph are closed to motor traffic and given over entirely to street merchants. Some of the goods for sale are actually quite beautiful and well made; none of it is stuff you will find in stores.

The “brick-and-mortar stores” of Telegraph Avenue emphasize the college trade. Frankly, clothing for sale here will not be of great interest if you are over 26. If you are looking for an obscure book or CD, though, you’ve come to the right place, no matter what your age. Cody’s, at the corner of Haste Street, has long been held as one of the Bay Area’s finest bookstores, with fully stocked sections for magazines, children’s books and foreign language titles. Two doors down, Moe’s remains the king of the used bookstores, with four floors, a roomful of exceptional art books and a healthy selection of discounted new material. If you don’t find it at Moe’s, try Shakespeare & Co. across the street and the Cartesian Bookstore around the corner on Dwight Way for more used books. Shambhala Booksellers, a few doors down from Moe’s, specializes in mystical titles, and has its own imprint.

Rasputin Records, between Durant Street and Channing Way, and Amoeba Records, at the corner of Haste, are packed to the rafters with new and used CDs. They specialize in the sounds that stray as far from the middle of the road as possible. Tower Records, around the corner at 2418 Durant Street, has whatever these stores do not, particularly in classical music.

The most violent student protests in the 1960s did not occur on campus. Students tended to flow onto Telegraph Avenue to do battle with police, or, failing that, smash in the windows of the Bank of America (at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Durant Street, long since transformed into a brick and concrete bunker with few windows). As far as landmarks go, little that is distinctive to that period is to be seen on Telegraph itself. Of course, some might say the Avenue has always been more of a state of mind, but in any case, there is People’s Park. A basketball court and a volleyball court have been added in recent years; otherwise, it is the same untidy and unappealing lot it was when students and activists first commandeered it in 1969. In the years that followed, bullets flew, tear gas flowed, and the park became a symbol for our country’s violent cultural divide. People’s Park is, for now, quiet. Its main patrons are still Berkeley’s homeless. The most-used feature of the park is the free clothing box on the Haste Street side. Just around the corner from Amoeba Records, visitors are advised to give People’s Park wide berth at night.

Another way to relive the 1960s is to sip a caffeinated beverage in La Mediterranee, between Channing Way and Haste Street. The place has been there since “back in the day,” and even though California laws have banned cigarettes in cafes and restaurants for years, La Mediterranee still seems smoky. Fascinating peoplewatching abounds—you might catch a Beat poem being scrawled, or an angry tract being drawn up.

Back around the corner on Haste, across the street from People’s Park, a different, gentler kind of history can be glimpsed: the First Church of Christ, Scientist, designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1910 is a real masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts movement. It is only open on Sundays for worship, but its wood exterior is both elegant and clever. Note the subtle use of metal, concrete and asbestos tiles, among other unlikely materials.

The Berkeley Hills
Unless you have strong legs, excellent cardiovascular fitness, and at least four hours to spare, this is a tour to take by car. High and steep, Berkeley’s hills are a spur of the Coastal Range. Whatever mode of transport you use, though, you will be rewarded with sweeping views of the Bay Area, miles and miles of lovely, wild parkland, and a science museum worth the trip on its own.

Starting your tour on Gayley Road, a continuation of Piedmont Avenue at the eastern edge of the U.C. campus, turn onto Stadium Rimway (it only heads uphill). Skirting 75,662-seat Memorial Stadium, home of the California Bears football team, turn left on Centennial Drive. You will soon come to Strawberry Canyon Recreation Area, the main feature of which is a swimming facility. Two large pools (one a 25-yard lap pool, the other a larger, L shaped family pool, open sometimes for laps and sometimes for frolicking) are complemented with a small child’s wading pool, locker rooms and showers. The entrance fee for the “community”— i.e. anyone not a U.C. student or faculty member—is about $5.

A few yards up the road is the trailhead (and small parking area) for Strawberry Canyon itself, a steep and thickly wooded ravine that follows modest Strawberry Creek through groves of oak, laurel and eucalyptus. A dirt trail takes runners and casual hikers through this lovely environmental study area. For the ambitious and the fit, it’s 3.5 miles to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. (Runners prize the seven-mile round-trip, and it’s a badge of honor to complete “The Connector”& dash; a section grueling enough to garner international notoriety.)

Continuing up Centennial Drive, you’ll marvel at how quickly you’ve left civilization. This is all University-owned wild land—wind past the always-locked gates of the high-security Lawrence Berkeley Labs, where federally-sponsored research on particle physics and the human genome project proceeds away from prying eyes. Just up the hill (and open to the public) are the Botanical Gardens, home to over 13,000 species of plants spread out over 13 acres. Said to be one of the largest plant collections in the United States, the Botanical Gardens are particularly noteworthy for their redwood trees, Chinese medicinal herbs and old roses. There is a garden shop there, as well as tables for picnicking.

Past an astoundingly steep curve, Centennial Drive levels off at the Lawrence Hall of Science, a hands-on science museum par excellence. Walk in past a full-scale fiberglass model of a fin whale and indulge in earthquake simulations, dice-rolling games of probability, a planetarium and hundreds of other exhibits for both kids and adults. The younger set will particularly appreciate the Wizard Lab. The view from here (day or night) is about the best you can get in the Bay Area. Both the Lawrence Hall and the Botanical Gardens can be reached by a U.C. Berkeley Shuttle bus, which leaves campus and the downtown Berkeley BART station regularly and costs all of 25¢.

If your car is willing and your schedule allows, make the final ascent up Centennial Drive through a stand of eucalyptus to Grizzly Peak Road at the hill’s crest. Just ahead of you is Tilden Regional Park, one of the jewels of the vast East Bay Regional Park District. One can easily spend a day in Tilden, whether swimming at Lake Anza, teeing up at the Tilden Park Golf Course, or hiking (or mountain biking) the miles of trails which roll over hill and dale into Contra Costa County. If you’ve got kids in tow, you’re in the right place: there is a little farm—called, in fact, the Little Farm—with a petting zoo, pony rides, a miniature steam train and a merry-go-round. Stands with free maps are situated throughout the park.