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Caring for—and Expanding—Berkeley’s Hidden Network of Hillside Paths

Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura

The view from the top of a staircase that helps make up Berkeley's Covert Path.
The view from the top of a staircase that helps make up Berkeley’s Covert Path.

If you want to get from the edge of the city in Berkeley, California all the way up to Tilden Park, you have a couple of options. You can drive there, slowly, switching back every hundred yards or so as the steep roads demand.

Or you can do it the old-fashioned way, and take the stairs.

A series of 10-foot-wide paths and stairways—Covert Path to Whitaker Path, and all the way up to Patty Kates—leads from the UC Berkeley Rose Garden all the way up to the park, with just a few detours on paved streets along the way. It’s one of dozens of such routes that exist around the city, an efficient and exciting alternative to regular old roads.

The stairways may feel furtive, but this hidden network is actually an entrenched part of the city’s infrastructure. “The paths were drawn out on the original city maps,” says Colleen Neff, who, since she moved to Berkeley 17 years ago, has walked all 136 pathways. During an early rush of development in the early 1900s, many of the city’s new neighborhoods were built way up in the hills, with the houses perched practically on top of each other.

A path-heavy section of Berkeley, shown on the latest Path Wanderer’s Association map.

“The streets wind along, and they sort of switch back to get down,” she explains. “The pathways were put in as shortcuts, so that people who lived up in the hills could come down and get the streetcar.” From there, they then could go into the center of town, or catch the ferry to San Francisco—a city with plenty of secret stairs of its own.

Neff is the president of the Berkeley Path Wanderer’s Association, a group of volunteers that first arose two decades ago, after a tragedy pointed out another…

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