As a center of campus and community life, this section of Telegraph Avenue is home to many restaurants, bookstores, and clothing shops, along with street vendors occupying its wide sidewalks.

Here Telegraph Avenue attracts a diverse audience of visitors, including college students, tourists, hippies, artists, street punks, eccentrics, and the homeless.

The Telegraph Road followed the route of present-day Telegraph Avenue from Downtown Oakland to Temescal, then ran along what is now the route of Claremont Avenue up to the summit of the Berkeley Hills where it became Fish Ranch Road, named some time after 1870, the year the Oakland Trout Company incorporated its fish and frog farm in the vicinity.

The Berkeley end of Telegraph Avenue, along with Sproul Plaza, has been the site of numerous protests and riots beginning in the 1960s.

The 1960s also saw the construction of the Grove Shafter Freeway, which parallels Telegraph Avenue half a block west, between Downtown Oakland and 56th Street.

The freeway created a wall between Telegraph Avenue and present day Martin Luther King Jr. Way (formerly Grove Street), and sliced the Temescal District in half.

Over the next couple of decades the Berkeley end of Telegraph became home to increasing numbers of homeless people and panhandlers, and by the 1990s had become a destination point for runaways from around the United States.

Attempts to change the name of the area to Koreatown have led to controversy, as most residents of the surrounding neighborhoods do not identify as Korean or Korean-American.