Albany Bulb

When I was a kid, I lived across the street from a wooded area that had a stream with a dam built by beavers. With direction from my father who knew about such things, my brother and I erected a fort in those woods but the law came and put its foot down.

When we moved to a new town, our property abutted a huge open space where a local nursery grew plants but the bulk of the space remained fallow most of the time. We built another fort. This one being underground was less likely to be detected. It was a low budget project with a hole straight down and a subterranean chamber burrowed off to the side. When my parents learned about it months later, they found it structurally deficient and red-tagged it. It was in that hole in the ground that I got the lassie across the street to give me my first passionate kiss.

Once upon a time we set the land on fire but prompt action and a garbage can full of water effectively doused the flames. No fire department needed to appear. We took care of things ourselves.

Now that open space has been gobbled up by jumbo million dollar homes each vying to out-grotesque the rest. I suspect 2.3 people live in each one even those with the four car garages.

Nowadays, a favorite pastime of mine reminscent of these childhood fantasy landscapes is to take my dog swimming at Albany beach and then go to the adjacent Albany Bulb, a spit of land that juts out into San Francisco Bay. It's a mid twentieth century landfill. Overgrown with weeds, native plants, irregular concrete slabs and twisted rebar, it's not just untamed but has a post-apocalyptic feel made more convincing by the --artful or not-- paintings brushed and sprayed onto the concrete.

It's fun to trapse through the Bulb on its irregular trails and even blaze my own trail through the high grass and uneven terrain. Many places are impenetrable to me but my dog gets to them just fine. He loves the place.

On the southwest corner stands an un-permitted user-built castle overlooking the Bay with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The castle used to have a circular staircase but sadly it's been destroyed. No use brooding. Impermanence is the nature of things here. On the north side of the Bulb, sculptors busily construct and deconstruct pieces of work that the art police could never envision or accept. Imagine, for example, the one pictured here garnering approval from the same people who stifle the spirit of more typical parks with all of their do's and don'ts.

Detractors of the status quo complain that the Bulb is dangerous. But it's perfectly safe for people who don't stray from the trails. People who cherish safety as the paramount value have plenty of other places to go. If you're looking for a ten on the safety scale and want to go off-trail, don't come to the Bulb.

The City of Albany, clearly lacking pride of ownership, tried to give away the eight-acre Bulb to the East Bay Regional Park District but the District wanted the City to mitigate the property first. Translated from bureaucratic lingo, this means the ingrates wanted the City to haul out the concrete and rebar as a condition of accepting the gift.

The gift having failed, the City then paid a hideous sum of money (hundreds of thousands) to a corporation to come up with a "vision" for the Bulb. When I hear city officials and corporate profit-makers talk about vision, I get scared. I start to think about where the tennis courts will go and whether I'll get busted for letting my dog run free.

Keep Albany Bulb just the way it is.