Live Oak Park is a public park and recreation area of the city of Berkeley, California, it lies in the center of several North Berkeley neighborhoods, 5.5 acres of nature juxtaposed with facilities that form the beating heart of the area. It's a place where play areas, basketball and tennis courts, an indoor theater and the Berkeley Art Center share space with native oaks and California Bay Laurels, quiet shady picnic areas, a spacious grassy knoll and the lovely Codornices Creek, which flows through the park. Live Oak Park is one of Berkeley’s oldest and most naturalistic public parks.GeographyLive Oak Park sits along both sides of Codornices Creek like a narrow green belt in 1301 Shattuck Avenue, at Berryman Street between Shattuck Avenue and Oxford Street. Walnut Street runs through the middle of the park as Codornices Creek meanders through its grove of native oaks, accented here and there with big, old specimen trees originally planted in the original gardens that preceded the park. Live Oak Park is situated here because of the many little creeks that flow from the Berkeley Hills the short way down to San Francisco Bay. These little creeks are more powerful than they look. As rising sea level filled the current Bay at the end of the last Ice Age, the creeks basically built what are now the flatlands, by carrying rock and soil eroded from the earthquake-riven, still-rising hills. Codornices Creek is one of these original creeks which run out of the Berkeley Hills in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In its upper stretch, it passes entirely within the city limits of Berkeley and further downstream, it marks the city limit to the adjacent city of Albany in its lower section. The name of the creek derives from the Spanish word "codornices", meaning "quails". California valley quail were once common in the area. The name was given by one of the family Peralta, once owners of the vast Rancho San Antonio.
