It is certainly presumptuous for me to refer to Howard Zinn’s masterwork in this context but I will try to claim the excuse that I hope this post will trigger the contribution of more history from us locals—Albanians and neighbors— about the checkered past of our city’s shoreline on San Francisco Bay. I have gathered the following patchwork story from a couple of obvious sources, primarily Images of America: Albany (Arcadia Publishing, 2007) by Karen Sorensen and the Albany Historical Society (AHS), as well as Ms. Sorensen’s more complete account of the Albany Origin Myth on the AHS website. Please post or send me your own corrections or contributions to the story.
A City Created Out of a Fight over the Privately-Owned Waterfront
As every schoolchild in Albany knows, our city was born out the Garbage Wars of 1908. We now have a new historical plaque to lend official gravitas to this Origin Myth, as reported in the Patch by Peggy McQuaid of the Albany Historical Society. The plaque says “armed residents … (mostly women)” blocked wagons trying to go down Buchanan Street “to protest Berkeley's dumping of garbage in Ocean View.” But who did we really fight this war against? When you look a little deeper it turns out that history foreshadows the present. The more complete story is that the birth of our city grew out of the outrage of local residents at the abuse of our waterfront by a foreign-owned corporate land-owner. Funny, it doesn’t say anything about that on the plaque.
Why were those garbage wagons going down Buchanan Street on April 1, 1908? Because someone in the unincorporated Ocean View district was happy to take $250 a month from the burghers of Berkeley for the privilege of accepting that city’s municipal waste on their property. That someone was the San Francisco Chemical Company, which surely resided on Fleming Point (currently the Golden Gate Fields grandstand) and was surely accepting the garbage for disposal into the slough that separated Fleming Point from the rest of Ocean View (these details can only be surmised from the sources). This would be just across the railroad tracks at the base of Buchanan Street—down which the wagons were proceeding when intercepted by the pistol-packing mamas. (Who knows what this British phosphate-mining company was already dumping into the slough and Bay?) When it appeared there was no other way to assert their right to ban a garbage dump in their neighborhood, our predecessors voted to incorporate. Thus, the City of Ocean View was born, soon to be renamed Albany (because the former was not original…).
Bottom line: corporation wants to do things with its land on the waterfront that their neighbors can’t abide; local residents take legal control of the fate of their waterfront. Sound familiar? (Hint: the current owners of Golden Gate Fields are Canadian.)
The New City Then Ignores What the Private Owner Is Doing with Its Waterfront
After incorporation our shoreline consisted of the railroad tracks north of Buchanan, an arc of tidal beach protecting the mouth of the slough heading from just south of Buchanan Street west toward Fleming Point, and the beach stretching south-southwest from the Point into Berkeley (see map). Fleming Point and the slough, the only part of town west of the railroad, was apparently always owned by corporations, from explosives manufacturers in the pre-incorporation era to the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1930s. It was Santa Fe who decided to commit the next major crime against our waterfront: the dynamiting of the summit of Fleming Point (previously named El Cerrito del Sur) and dumping of the resulting rubble into the bay to create a parking lot for a horseracing arena. Unfortunately, they built the track on fill that was dumped into the slough, where the drainage apparently wasn’t well accommodated so the track tried to revert back to its origin as a slough in the winter of 1941. The racetrack quickly went under, literally as well as figuratively, less than a year after being opened.
Luckily for the racetrack owners World War II came to California. The former racetrack was commandeered by the military and used as a massive parking lot for amphibious vehicles. I will bet you…dollars to doughnuts, or something, I’m not really a betting man…that the Army Corps of Engineers improved the fill for the racetrack area, because after the war the newly reborn racetrack apparently no longer had drainage problems. Score another one for public subsidies to private enterprise.
Racetrack changes owners a few times; owners want to build crazy things like casinos; voters enact Measure C in 1989 to gain veto power on any major change on waterfront; blah, blah, blah—we all know this part of the story, including: current owners propose massive shopping mall and get an environmental slate of City Council members elected instead. That’s about where I came in.
The Maturing City Bucks the Environmental Trend and Insists on Filling the Bay
North of the racetrack, a different struggle has evolved over the last 50 years. In the early 1960s the City fathers decided to finally act on the 1919 State Lands Commission grant of the Albany tidelands to the city for the development of a harbor. Emeryville, Berkeley, and Richmond were already well underway filling their granted tidelands for sanitary landfills, marinas, and parks from long before this. Albany now wanted its own marina and heliport (at one point an international airport was proposed) and so the City contracted for a landfill operator to create new land from discarded sidewalks, buildings, and other concrete and masonry rubble. The Albany Landfill was born.
Unfortunately for the landfill operators and the dreamers of waterfront development, the Save the Bay movement was started by three women from Berkeley and El Cerrito, right after the filling started. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) was thus created in 1965, and I’m not sure if the Albany Landfill was a major impetus for this act, but it sure qualified as a poster child for the movement. Consequently, it took twenty years of lawsuits between the city, the landfill operator, and the BCDC to finally stop the filling around 1984.
Perhaps due to the contentious nature of the closure, the landfill was left incomplete, mostly uncapped, and abandoned. Between mounded slabs of concrete with protruding rebar, exotic and “ruderal” vegetation took hold and now, more than 25 years later, the westernmost portion of the landfill known as the Bulb is a wild mix of park-like landscape, industrial wasteland, and shoreline revetments of rubble. Because the City of Albany has done virtually nothing to maintain or secure the land, probably from the first days after it was closed the former landfill has been attractive as a site for the encampments of homeless people and has also become a renowned location for “outsider” art using landfill materials and bay flotsam. This true waste-land—virtually a brown-field projecting into the center of one of the most scenic urban waterscapes on the planet—was a void quickly occupied by some of society’s more marginal activities and lifestyles. I will post future entries in this blog regarding the long history of all the “off-leash” activities on the Bulb, including the folks who call it home; here’s good start written by a current resident. Until then…
The History of the Bulb Continues to Unfold and YOU Can Influence It
In 2002 the Eastshore State Park was created and all bay-front land in Albany outside of Golden Gate Fields Racetrack was slated to become part of it. However, the Bulb portion, owned by the city, is unacceptable for use as a state park (or anything else) in its current condition and there are no plans (or money) for improvements to it. Closer in, the older landfill areas are gradually being improved as open space by the East Bay Regional Park District, which manages the park, now named McLaughlin Eastshore State Park after one of the three founders of Save the Bay. Indeed, the beach area and the “Neck” leading to the Bulb are in line for significant enhancements in the next year or so, and any encampments here are quickly removed by Park District police. The lower unpaved roadway that leads from the beach to the Bulb will be landscaped into what should be a beautiful half-mile shoreline promenade with world-class views and easier access to the water (we hope—plans are still “fluid”). In the meantime, the future of the Bulb remains uncertain, caught between the conflicting uses of conservation and “informal urbanization.”
The continuation of this story can be determined by you. As noted in my last post, the Albany City Council voted on May 6, regarding the Bulb, “that the Mayor, Vice Mayor and City Manager [shall] meet with East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) and State Parks to begin a process to make the area a park” (after the homeless folks have been cleared out by our police in October). This Monday, June 3, the City Council will officially appoint Mayor Peggy Thompson and Vice Mayor Joanne Wile to negotiate with EBRPD and the state. This is your chance to tell them how you want them to represent you. What is your vision for the Bulb? How should they deal with hazards like rebar and concrete? Will it all be “capped” like the Berkeley landfill? What happens to the art? What about dogs?
You have a chance now to influence things before they happen rather than just reacting to it when it has already happened, unlike with the original decision at the May 6 meeting, which included a fast law-enforcement response to the homelessness situation that was slipped in unannounced. Click on the item in the City’s calendar for June 3 and check the agenda for Monday’s City Council meeting. There will be a public comment section. Participate in this crazy thing we have called democracy; it actually sometimes works.
