There is a person out there with a sly sense of humor, a way with words, a working knowledge of Berkeley history and a desire to impart pithy observations.
He or she or they has been going around town the past few months affixing round metal medallions with clever sayings to sidewalks around central Berkeley.
“Welcome to Berkeley. Now stop doing that,” reads one medallion nailed into the sidewalk near the Berkeley/Oakland border. The other half of the medallion says: “Welcome to Oakland. We missed you.”
Another states: “On this spot, ….David Kravitz finally thought of a witty rejoinder after that dreadful dinner party a week earlier. Mr. Kravitz had wished to say at the time, ‘Some suffer in silence, but others make everyone suffer each time they open their mouth’ to that loudmouthed Mrs. Pearlman.”
A third located at Delaware and Sacramento streets says, “On this spot, you are directly here. You could have been anywhere else at this moment, rendering this plaque irrelevant, but you’re not.”
No one seems to know the creator’s identity, even though the question has been posed on Facebook and Twitter and even on Tom Dalzell’s Quirky Berkeley website.
“These days, just everybody – tout le monde – is talking about the mysterious medallions that are appearing in Berkeley’s sidewalks,” Dalzell wrote. “You read about them in Berkeleyside, you see them on Twitter, your hip friends are talking about them. ‘Plaque’ might be a better word for what these are, but medallion gives us alliteration with mysterious.”
The person has followers, people who appreciate their use of words and phrases, their deadpan delivery and the unexpectedness of the medallions.
“This miniature plaque is embedded at a bus stop near the Rose Garden,” Natasha Beery posted on Facebook on Aug. 8 with a picture of the medallion. “It is one of a series of mysterious markers turning up around town. Have you seen others?”
Doug Sovern, a political reporter for KCBS Radio, first spotted the Oakland/Berkeley medallion in April.
Colleen Neff, who contributes photos to Berkeleyside and Quirky Berkeley, reported that she first saw one in May. (She noted that the creator misspelled Shattuck Avenue as “Shattack.”)
Karen Flynn, the owner of The Optician on Allston Way just east of Shattuck Avenue, first spotted one of the mysterious medallions in July.
“I was out cleaning the windows and I looked down,” she said. “At first I thought it was something serious but then I read it and thought ‘that’s funny.’”
