|
Parking's the Prize For Most Bay Area Nobel Laureates
Winners from UC Berkeley, UCSF get free lifetime passes -- Stanford doesn't
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
It's sure a lot easier to park a car in San Francisco and Berkeley
after winning a Nobel Prize.
It may even be the best thing about winning one.
Now that it's Nobel Prize season again in faraway Stockholm and the $1
million award checks are being cut along with the gravlax, the campuses
of the Bay Area are trying to figure out how much more difficult it
will be for everyone else to park if any of their faculty members wins
mankind's highest honor.
Both the University of California at San Francisco, home to new Nobel
laureate Stanley Prusiner, and UC Berkeley grant free reserved parking
spaces for life to their Nobel laureates. Winners say the endless
parties and backslapping that accompany the prize are a nuisance, but
the parking pass makes all the years of hard work worthwhile.
"Reserved for NL," proclaim the blue signs scattered around the Cal
campus. The "NL" is parking shorthand for Nobel Laureate -- there are
so many of them at UC Berkeley that everyone knows what it stands for.
Lesser mortals, such as tenured professors, department chairs and vice
chancellors, have learned to keep their distance from the exalted
rectangles of asphalt.
"I've gotten a bunch of tickets over the years for parking in those
spots," said a non-Nobel biology prof, pointing out his window at the
four Nobel spaces in front of Stanley Hall on the east side of campus.
"Every once in a while, if the lot is full, I take a chance. The
tickets cost $26 apiece. That makes it a real perk for those guys."
By those guys, the prof meant the likes of Charles Townes, Glenn
Seaborg and Yuan Lee, whose cars are entitled to park in NL-1, NL-2,
NL-3 and NL-4.
There are two more NL spaces behind the physics building and another
one in the perpetually jammed and double- parked lot in back of
Dwinelle Hall. That one is reserved for poet Czeslaw Milosz, who said
after winning in 1980 that the parking perk was as exciting as anything
else about the honor.
At Cal, a central campus parking permit costs $61.50 a month and
entitles the bearer to park in a place only if he or she can find one
first. At UCSF, similar permits costs from $65 to $104 a month.
Stanley Prusiner, the UCSF biochemist with a fondness for mad cow
disease who won his Nobel just last week, is now entitled to a prime
spot on the south side of Parnassus Avenue and need no longer fight for
stalls in the maddening cattle call inside the Irving Street garage. He
will get a spot like the ones granted to Mike Bishop and Harold Varmus,
even though Varmus preferred to get around by bicycle.
At Stanford University, Nobel Prize winners have it tougher. There are
no parking perks for Nobel winners or anyone else. This may be why
Stanford lags behind Cal in Nobel laureates, 16 to 15.
"We're egalitarian," said Stanford parking manager Diego Terneus. "At
Stanford, everyone pays, even the president. It's an issue of fairness.
Besides, we have so many Nobel prize winners that we'd go bankrupt if
we gave them all free parking."
Cal parking director Nadesan Permaul said some Nobel winners have
agreed to share their spots with other members of their departments,
but they are not obliged to. Milosz is a poet of such sensitivity that
he cedes his spot to the Slavic Languages department when he is out of
town.
Permaul says you have to win a Nobel to get free lifetime parking at
Cal. Pulitzers, Congressional Medals of Honor and presidential Medals
of Freedom don't count.
Last year, U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass was granted a temporary
parking pass, good only for the one-year length of his appointment.
"When the year was over, I wrote him a letter reminding him that the
pass must be returned," said Permaul. "He understood. Now he is back
among the mortals."
|
