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The Albany Bulb

Jutting out into the Bay by the Albany Hill is the nearest piece of post-modern wild land to Berkeley. Part temporary autonomous zone, part dog park, part autorevegetative experiment, the Albany Bulb is home to fennel forests, jutting concrete tumbles, wild rebar tangle scultpures, skunks, owls, curlews, and vividly color-splashed murals. In many ways it is a free space, an embodied outlet of creativity and a place to make firey noise late into the night. It is a place to take refuge from the rectilinear city, perched atop its crumbled body.

In 1919, the State of California granted the City of Albany a portion of the San Francisco Bay tidelands for use as a harbor to promote commerce and navigation. In 1963, the City awarded a contract to a previously small dump to dispose of construction debris -- which they supplemented with plant debris, which created methane fires. There was opposition almost immediately, but not until 1987, after more than 10 years of litigation, was the landfill released back to nature's whim.

Since then, whatever plants and animals which were able to establish themselves took over. The Bulb's flora is a collection of every hardy, adaptable plant that people ever brought to this city, with a few similarly-minded native plants mixed in. Acacia from Africa rub shoulders with eucalyptus from Australia and date palms from the Middle East. South African sourgrass grows amongst European fennel and our own California Poppy. The Bay has not forgotten that it is the original proprietor of the land, and it laps constantly at the Bulb's edges, creating mudflats rich with shorebirds.

A community of people also established themselves in makeshift cabins at the Bulb. Artists followed, working with whatever the tides and storms brought in. In 1999, the people living there were removed, and their village was destroyed, a story told in the movie Bums' Paradise. The public art survived, and continues to this day.

Among the artists is a team that calls itself Sniff. Sniff paints or builds sculptures every Saturday morning. "We are eminently approachable," they say. Most of the other artists who work at the Albany Bulb work alone, anonymously and at irregular intervals. They sculpt. They paint. A few even write poetry. Some people say that some of their work should be seen in a museum. Other people say that it already is. All agree that the art is alive, an inseparable part of the soul of the Bulb.

Two other groups of frequent Bulb users are the dogwalkers and the birdwatchers. The Bulb is one of the few places in the East Bay where it's possible to let your dog run off-leash. It also encloses a lagoon that often shelters thousands of waterfown and wading birds.

The future of the Bulb is still uncertain. Although a recent attempt to build a ultra-ritzey mall in place of the racetrack was recently beaten back, there are still many eyes on the pricey real estate that it occupies. The Bulb itself is scheduled to become part of the growing Eastshore State Park in an indetermined number of years. Only time and active public participation will tell: will the Bulb become one more overmanaged expression of the rift between today's City and Mother Nature? Or will it continue to evolve as an organic expression of development from below, finding new ways to welcome nature into the City?

In the meantime, come make it your own.

You can find the Albany Bulb here