The city of Berkeley has opened an 8,000-square-foot dog park and a pocket forest at Adeline and MLK, spending $650,000 on the intersection where the "Here There" homeless encampment stood for six years before being cleared in 2023.

At the corner of Adeline Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in South Berkeley, under the BART tracks, the city last Saturday opened an 8,000-square-foot dog park — as yet unnamed — on the stretch where the "Here There" homeless encampment stood for six years before the city cleared it in early 2023.

The park is one piece of a $650,000 landscaping overhaul at the intersection, funded by Measure T1, the parks tax, and the general fund, according to parks director Scott Ferris. Across Adeline to the south, beside the Buslab auto shop, a Miyawaki pocket forest has gone in: rows of maple and elderberry saplings staked with white signs and yellow tags, densely planted in the style popularized by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which Neelam Patil of Green Pocket Forests describes as growing ten times faster than conventional tree-planting methods. Other additions at the corner include decorative fencing, boulders, benches, and native and pollinator-friendly plantings.

Mayor Adena Ishii cut the ribbon at Saturday's opening ceremony. Over a dozen dogs were on the woodchip floor within minutes.

The intersection carries some history. The "Here There" sculpture — installed in 2005 by artists Steve Gillman and Katherine Keefer as a riff on Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland as having "no there there" — sits at the Berkeley-Oakland border, and the encampment that grew up around it was a deliberate political act: a protest, sustained by a group called First They Came for the Homeless, against the city's treatment of homeless residents. The group sued the city and BART over the seizure of campers' belongings; BART's case was dismissed by a judge, and the city prevailed in a jury trial in 2019. The camp's founders died during the pandemic, conditions deteriorated, and Berkeley closed it in February 2023 with six people remaining. The area had been fenced off since.

Osha Neumann, a retired civil rights attorney who spent years advocating for people without housing, told Berkeleyside what he made of the corner's transformation: "There is no space where homeless people can have a sanctioned place where they can live without being constantly swept and criminalized. So we have dog parks, but not places for homeless people. Places for dogs, but not people."

Ferris, the parks director, framed the investment differently: "These improvements provide the South Adeline area, which lacks appropriate park and open spaces, with long overdue needed landscape beautification, environmental enhancements and recreational amenities."

Patil said the Miyawaki forest is already succeeding — monarch butterflies, California sister butterflies, and ladybugs have moved into the saplings. A neighbor who has lived on the block since 1989 told Berkeleyside she was glad for the attention: "I'm looking forward to seeing this in bloom year after year."

Walking by today, you'd see woodchips, a drinking fountain, and a clutch of young trees across the street — and the "Here There" sculpture still standing at the border, its name doing a little more work than it used to.