The peiord of the early 60's was crap too. You were just too young to have noticed. I graduated from HS in '56 and lived in Berkeley during the late 50's and '60s first as a UC student, then as the wife of a student, and finally as a young mother of four.
We took our children and fled in 1968 when we couldn't take any more crap from demonstrators. They made the town impossible to live in and impossible to raise children in. First we moved to a neighboring town often ridiculed as a "white Republican enclave" by the media intelligentsia and ultimately to Texas when we could no longer stand what was going on in California.
My husband was caught one day in a stand off between rioting demonstrators and the National Guard with rifles to their shoulders just because he tried to deposit his pay check in the local bank. (I moved the bank account the next day.)
Another time I got caught in the middle of a "march" because I had chosen a route around campus and the unwashed spewed profanities at me as they pounded the back and sides of my station wagon as I tried to drive down the street to the grocery store. I had my youngest child with me and I was petrified.
Every night windows were broken and fires set along main street. Usually these people were whipped into a frenzy over silly things -- such as a vacant lot owned by the Universitiy and slated for a dormitory. Somehow the unwashed decided that it should be "Peoples Park" where they could camp and smoke dope, and copulate and defecate and urinate without restriction.
They rioted and paraded for years over that vacant lot until the University finally gave in and gave it to them. The hippies had no prior claim on this land. There had been a couple of houses on it which the University had purchased and razed with the intent of providing more University housing, always in short supply. for a while they grew communal gardens there (which always were a disaster), and it was abandoned and all grown up in weeds the last time I saw it. Disgusting.
Anybody who thinks the 60s was a glamorous period either didn't live it, or lived it in a drugged haze. It wasn't pretty then, and I hold no fondness for it now.
Your descrition of Berkley sounds rather like Bloomington, Indiana in the early 70's. Not fun at all, and I totally agree with you.
RE: "Peoples Park" where they could camp and smoke dope, and copulate and defecate and urinate without restriction.
Some things never change. That "park" still serves the same functions. Of course, I do still like a few restaurants and pubs in Berzerkeley and some of the shops. I lived in Albany and El Cerrito for a few years while still single (part of the 90s). However, glad to have moved to the "boring" Peninsula, albeit, still surrounded by Volvos and John F'n Kerry bumperstickers. Someone needs to hold down this fort, after all! LOL! ...