Today is our last day in the Bancroft Avenue building of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
Old:
New:
The staff is frantically packing and doing a lot of recycling, shredding, and what-the-heck-is-this-ing.
(It’s a cap, a jaunty Pinocchio cap missing its feather.)
At the end of the day, we turn in our keys and head off into the Berkeley sunset. The offices at the new building at Center and Oxford Streets downtown aren’t quite ready for us, so it will be later next week before I can post The Beginning of a New Era. In the meantime, I will be working from an undisclosed off-site location (art storage warehouse).
It is bittersweet leaving this place. I have been here 10-1/2 years now (yikes), and never thought I’d still be working here when we finally moved. It’s been in the works for a long time! Moving an art collection and an entire university department are not easy feats. We started an inventory and packing of the art collection back in February. That has actually gone fairly well; the office packing, on the other hand, is, shall we say, bringing out the grump in even the sweetest of us.
So, this morning was my last morning parking in the stinky Underhill parking garage (stairwell = urinal);
taking a shortcut through the College Avenue student housing complex between Channing and Durant, with it’s pretty dogwood trees and occasional stray cats;
approaching the building from the loading dock entrance;
seeing the old building next door slated for demolition; I thought it would come down before we moved, but no such luck!
And picking up my keys on the loading dock, which is now a “freecycling” trade area as people empty out their spaces.
My route to the Registrars office takes me through the almost emptied out administrative offices on the second floor:
past our preparators’ workshop, looking deserted:
and down the hallway where the work-study student schedule is looking a little off, somehow.
The gates are locked, the museum store is packed up.
We will no longer be in our own office when we move, but on an open floor. It’s going to be an adjustment. Here in the old building, I was able to barricade myself behind file cabinets in our office, which was down a hallway on the public level so other than fielding requests by visitors looking for the restrooms, we were pretty much left alone. Now with the last minute packing, I am really barricaded in for the day!
For now, I’ve got my coffee, most of my things are packed, and I don’t have to shut down the computer until later this afternoon. So, until next week!
Next up: I am going to backtrack and write some posts about my recent trip to Chicago. It was awesome!
le monde de geneviève 