Walking Revelations
The Berkeley Hills are home to hidden staircases which pass amidst homes of wealthy tech elite and aging ex-hippies. I'm adding these paths to Google Street View because nothing should be secret.
The Secret Staircases of the East Bay were constructed so that residents in the early-to-mid twentieth century could access the Key System of street railcars below, and also to provide easy ingress into the hills for first responders and egress for evacuees in the event of fires and earthquakes. For me, they are long skinny portals from which to return with revelatory bits of hidden history and tales — because I’m a gossip — about the lives of others.
What I’ve Heard About Gossip
If you are within spitting distance of me lately, you know I’m reading the Talmud (falling asleep after about three pages).I’ve learned the Rabbis did not take gossip lightly. In Arakhin, Rabbi Ishmael said, “One who engages in gossip is guilty of a sin equal to the three prohibitions for which a Jew must accept death–idolatry, adultery, and murder.” They killed over this! Also from Arakhin.. Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Yosi ben Zimra: “One who indulges in gossip is guilty of denying the existence of God and God’s commands…. Such a one is punished with leprosy.”
These guys…
Why, when gossip is such a useful tool, should it be villainized? The answer is that gossip is used as a pejorative term to describe the secret conversations of marginalized people. Think of the Underground Railroad and resistance movements as gossip. Think of how a woman would come find out her less qualified male counterpart is earning 30% more pay.
I have flashbulb memories from when family would visit at my early childhood home. The men were watching sports, playing sports, smoking cigars, etc. The women were at the kitchen table playing gin rummy and gossiping in Spanish. I always felt this was where my family’s history lived. The women spoke quickly and illegibly to the untrained ear. I couldn’t understand who they were talking about or what, but it always felt like something I should know. It felt like something important I could know if I just asked.
Normal Gossip
A coworker of mine put me onto the podcast Normal Gossip. I’d been explaining to her that my archival research practice came from a place of wanting to know hidden things about everything. Research either subverts or perpetuates mythology. It can expand the architecture of the stories we’ve heard or debunk them.
The Venn diagram of my interests — gossip and research — became a circle in a 2023 episode of Normal Gossip called “When Does Gossip Become a Myth?” The show’s guest was writer, researcher, and host of Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby, Liv Albert. The format of Normal Gossip is typically a conversation on the topic of gossip, including the guest’s relationship to gossip, before diving into listener-submitted tales.
John F. Kennedy would regularly say: “All history is gossip.” Albert tells about how Greek myth was passed down via oral storytelling. Embellishments and exaggerations of lovers and monsters abound. This historical game of telephone is just gossip turned into the foundations of our education.
Atlas Path Character Study
I’ve taken the revelatory aspect of this gossip a step further. When I first moved to the East Bay in 2023, I saw a posting in the Berkeley Path Wanderers newsletter. A fellow by the name of John Ewing was looking for willing participants to strap a GoPro to their backs, follow protocol for recording, and upload those files into Google’s system. The stairs are a public utility and thus should be made widely accessible. The names of homeowners who live on them is public information. I’m not sharing anything that anybody else cannot find — only presenting it in this context. Also, it’s good exercise.
Guided by Charles Fleming’s Secret Stairs: East Bay, I’ve hiked dozens of paths. They all contain multitudes.
For the purposes of this piece, I’ve selected Atlas Path. Here are its characters.
1311 Grizzly Peak Boulevard
Atlas Path begins in the driveway of the home at 1311 Grizzly Peak Boulevard. This opportunity to simultaneously be on private property and a public right of way really tickled my writerly urge for liminality. The people who purchased this home did so knowing they were not quite as enclosed as a home in a gated community might be. The path winds along their driveway before going straight up hill.
Imagine my delight to learn this home was owned by Harold Wilensky until his death in 2011. Wilensky was a lauded professor of political science at UC Berkeley. In a 2010 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell quotes Wilensky from his most famous work, Organizational Intelligence. “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience,” Wilensky wrote,”The less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” A meta jackpot of a find for your dear gossip.
The current owners of the home are a couple who were quoted in a 1986 New York Times article about gender roles. The husband likes to cook! Today, he is the development director of a Menlo Park high school where the tuition is $62,000.
1321 Grizzly Peak Boulevard
This home is currently owned by the scion of multi-generational almond farming family but was once home to a fellow by the name of Jacek “Jack” Romanski, who died in a 2023 plane crash. Romanski was born in a Polish refugee camp in Wales before coming to America and following the Grateful Dead, amongst other things. The only trace of Romanski I can track down is a 2015 letter he wrote, along with nearly 7,000 other Californians to the California Energy Commission against a project known as Hydrogen Energy California. “I just flew over the Sierras,” he wrote, “And they are almost bare of snow. We are in the worst drought I have ever seen and it is just beginning. We can’t waste any water for the next thousand or so years.” Romanski saw the world from tens of thousands of fee up in the sky.
150 Hill Road
Finally, there is the matter of the Atlas Path Little Free Library. Nestled in the center of the path right past a picnic bench from which stair walkers can take a break and enjoy expansive views of the San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate, and (on a clear day) the Farallon Islands, is a bright red magazine rack like would be outside a convenience store or at a bus stop.
The party responsible for the library is Bob Stokstad. How do I know? On his website, he lists both his contact address (home next to library) and also a list of publication credits related to biking and motorcycling. Bob also had a nearly thirty-year career as a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, some of which was spent at the $280,000,000 IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole. In certain online circles, this lab is perceived to be manufacturing Direct Energy Weapons which can control weather akin to HAARP and directly linked to the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. The information about the lab and its work confuses me. Simply put though, Little Free Library Bob worked on Dark Matter.
This seems like enough about Atlas Path for now. The path is a slice of life indicative of Berkeley’s modern history and the types of characters who live and die in these gentle, beautiful hills.
History is Written by the Writers
If I had to examine, yet again, why I’m into gossip and why I dissect archives and present their narrative to you here. In the aforementioned episode of Normal Gossip, Liv Albert refutes the maxim that history is written by the victors and gives the Athenians as an example.
The Athenians didn’t always win but they were the only ones who wrote down their version of what happened.
To write—to gossip—is not just to pass down all of these stories but to deliver them with all of my embellishment and exaggerations so the present can be a future history for my children’s children, decorated with the ornaments of this time and place.
My kinda gossip
Sick dude. Looking forward to more!