The Care and Feeding of an Urban Waterfront Park

Albany and East Bay Parks can’t maintain their current waterfront park; now they want expand it to include the Bulb?

I returned to the Albany waterfront on a recent Saturday after a month’s absence from the Bay Area. The expected changes had occurred, primarily the browning of the annual groundcover flora, but many things were the same. On such a welcoming early summer day, scores of people were using the former landfill for recreation: the parking lot was full, the beach was populated by families with small children, and, of course, dog-walkers were everywhere, as well as many other canine-less strollers. I was struck once again by the sheer quantity of human activity that takes place on this bit of dry earth stolen from the bay and how very little is done by any public agency to maintain it.

Compared to any other easily accessible piece of waterfront along the highly populated “inner” portion of the San Francisco Bay, the Albany landfill is a public space that has been profoundly neglected by its managers, who are the City of Albany and the East Bay Regional Park District. Nevertheless, this “park” remains a vibrant attraction to folks from a wide area well beyond Albany and is informally tended by a devoted cadre of individuals who cherish the quirky, unplanned, and anarchic nature of this wisely abandoned attempt at bayside development. Despite the overflowing trash bins that are far too few in number, the beach and the pathways of the plateau and “Bulb” were largely free of litter and the pathways themselves are well maintained.  This land is very well cared for by a variety of people—residents and visitors—as best as they can, almost completely without the help of the infrastructure usually required for a heavily-used urban park.

 However, there is now a clamor for the Bulb portion of the waterfront to be managed as part of the “official” park by the EBRPD, specifically by the renewed enforcement of the nominal laws against camping. This clamor, instigated by a small but organized group of supposed “environmentalists,” has been translated into a demand by the Albany City Council (more than one of whom was helped into office by these very “environmentalists”) for a police sweep, scheduled for October, to remove the not-so-transient residents living in makeshift structures and tents on the bulb. Even disregarding the problematic aspects of this order, as detailed in a previous post, and presuming all residents can be off the Bulb by then, there remains a glaring deficiency in the planning for this transition to an “official” park. That is, there has been no planning whatsoever. How will this largely unrehabilitated landfill be managed as such a park? The lack of management of the already “official” park lands (the Buchanan Street “strip-park” approach, the beach, the plateau, and the “neck”) does not bode well for what will happen when the East Bay Regional Park District takes over the Bulb as well.

To be fair, both the City and the park district have plans to improve the beach and neck areas. The park district is well along in its plan to spend some Measure WW funds on enhancement of the beach area and improvement of the neck’s southern shoreline as a promenade and for better protection from erosion by waves. The beach area will have a new parking area and better bathrooms, as well as a more natural (we hope) dune system, and there will finally be a real trail along the shore for our portion of the SF Bay Trail. Ironically, this project has been held up by two different CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) lawsuits, one by some of the very “environmentalists” mentioned above, and the other by that paragon of environmental consciousness, Golden Gate Fields (a subsidiary of Magna Corporation, Toronto, Canada). (This delicious display of improbable bed-mates will be the topic of a later post.)  For its part, the City is spending a small $50,000 grant from (Measure WW?) to improve the area just north of the beach, the so-called “Cove” area. (The Cove is the sculpture/structure of stacked recycled concrete slabs, “urbanite,” shaped like a tiny amphitheater on the city-owned Buchanan Street right-of-way.) New trash and recycling receptacles have been ordered, the ugly wooden “bollards” will be removed, and new bike racks donated by Albany Strollers and Rollers have already been installed. Much credit should be given to my colleagues on the Waterfront Committee, Francesco Papalia and Claire Napawan (now emeritus), for spearheading this project. But beyond these improvements, which have pretty much consumed all the available funds for the greater waterfront “park,” there remains a woeful lack of resources, attention, and will in keeping this public space up to any reasonable standard for an urban park.

Let’s take a tour of what isn’t being done at the Albany waterfront “park.” The strip-park along the Buchanan Street extension along with the current parking area is a woeful introduction to our waterfront. The entire management program for the vegetation consists of a once- or twice-a-year crude mowing of the weeds surrounding the natural, volunteer shrubbery (coyote bush). Litter is constantly blown into the strip and illegal dumping is frequent in this highly accessible but mostly unmonitored “park.” To its credit, Golden Gate Fields is usually diligent in sending out workers to pick up the many racing forms and food wrappers blown from their property after races. The parking lot itself is a miserable stretch of potholed pavement constantly littered with broken glass and visitors’ detritus (typically late-night deposits of fast-food remains, just like I used to find on residential streets in Oakland when I lived there).  Several attempts at painting lines for parking spaces have faded and conflict with each other.

Moving on up to the Cove area, we find the ever-overflowing trash receptacles and graffiti everywhere, even on the asphalt pathway leading to the Cove. (I distinguish here graffiti on park improvements from the ubiquitous artwork on the landfill rubble.) I am hopeful that the upgrades mentioned above will attract more attention from our Public Works department. After repeatedly and specifically mentioned the pathway graffiti at Waterfront Committee meetings for over a year with no result, I have now directly reported this to Public Works, which I probably should have done all along. I am pleased to report that the City quickly came and blacked out the graffiti with their own spray paint, a crude but effective response.  Regarding the trash; clearly, more receptacles are needed. There are no receptacles further out on the neck and bulb—a vast amount of heavily-used acreage—while the plateau area has several, which seems adequate for the dog walkers (not that all of them are adequately employed by the dog-walkers: lots of “missed” dog poops underfoot). The City has Waste Management (WM) place a dumpster out at the Bulb as part of its contract covering all city-owned public spaces, a rare acknowledgement of the reality of people living out there, but this service is limited to a few weeks four times a year. When the dumpster is not out there, the trash receptacles near the cove are especially overburdened. It should be noted that responsibility for garbage collection is fragmented between the city, which has WM empty the receptacles along Buchanan and at the Cove, and the park district, which is responsible for the beach and everywhere else. I have also taken it upon myself to report dumped materials to East Bay parks and they too have responded quickly (thanks, Bruce!) It makes me wonder why there is ever any graffiti or piles of dumped material left there. I entreat my fellow waterfront users to contact the City and the Park District on their neglect of maintenance duties at our park. Use these website reporting systems whenever you see something unsightly. Then the message might get through to these agencies that more attention is required for this particular urban oasis. Memorial Park and Tilden are not allowed to get into such a deplorable state as our waterfront.

So now the City Council has moved to “discuss” with the East Bay Regional Park District the transfer of responsibility for the Bulb from the city to the park district. This is said to be in the spirit of honoring Save the Bay pioneer Sylvia McLaughlin, the namesake of Eastshore State Park, which EBRPD manages for the State (remember that the City spat in Sylvia McLaughlin’s face for more than 20 years until it closed the landfill in the 80’s). However, the State has made clear it wants no part of a chunk of land with entrenched issues of informal urbanism (that’s the correct term for what many of us call a “homeless encampment”), a tradition of impromptu art, and its popularity with dog-walkers. The general plan for McLaughlin Eastshore State Park calls for the Bulb to be designated for “conservation,” whenever the State deems it is ready for such. This is what the “environmentalists” call for as well, but a very significant question has been ignored: conservation of what? If the location were to be restored to its original natural state, it would be six feet underwater as part of the Bay. If they want it to be converted to a typical shoreline upland (think of Brooks Island just offshore), then thousands of cubic yards of clean fill would be needed to “cap” the landfill, which would destroy all current vegetation on the Bulb and leave it looking like Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park (bo-o-oring). If, as they probably would maintain, they want to just “let it be” (ha ha!) as what it has evolved into since being abandoned as a landfill—that is, letting nature take its course—then I would maintain that the informal urbanism has been part of the natural evolution of the site all along. Homeless folks have camped there ever since the landfill closed in the late 80s, excepting the early 2000s until the last experiment in enforcement failed. There is a growing realization that a true environmental outlook needs to stop ignoring the reality of the existence of human beings. Homo sapiens is a resident species of the San Francisco Bay region, at least it has been for the last few tens of thousands of years.

At any rate, if the campers are peremptorily evicted in October, who’s going to keep them from coming back? The East Bay Regional Park District police are currently unable to prevent camping in the plateau and neck area. There are at least two persistently occupied campsites in this part of the currently “official” park. Furthermore, this police force has no protocol in place to deal with the social consequences of when they do evict a camper. Every local police force, including Albany’s, has procedures to refer those in need of social services to the proper provider. I tried to get help to one of those plateau campers, a man known to regular visitors at least by his frequent high-volume ranting (he’s otherwise harmless and will go quiet when he’s aware of someone nearby), but the park district police had no protocol to accompany the Berkeley Albany Mental Health District’s outreach person. The mental health crisis team requires this and the police departments of both Berkeley and Albany will do so, but not EBRPD’s, who had jurisdiction. They simply give the camper a citation and make sure that he leaves, which has happened repeatedly with this particular man; but he keeps coming back, year after year.

The simple reality is that it is would be very expensive to maintain such an accessible unoccupied piece of urban land as the Bulb for “conservation.” The East Bay park district does an excellent job at maintaining relatively inaccessible pieces of wild land for conservation, such as Tilden Park, because it is impractical for homeless individuals to reside there. Bay-shore properties such as Alameda’s Crown Beach and Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park are heavily developed, and expensively maintained, urban parks. The only comparison to the ideal of conservation for the Bulb is the Berkeley Meadow area of Eastshore State Park. This piece of habitat restoration on former landfill took five years and $6,000,000 to achieve and it is yet to be determined how successful this restoration actually is. Currently, access is very limited to this fenced-off garden and it would appear that it also requires considerable ongoing maintenance. If this is what the park activists envision for the Bulb, then they should explicitly say so and tell us how much money it will cost and where we will get it, before the informal urbanists are rousted. If the Bulb is cleared of residents (i.e., “cleaned up,” like the humans there are so much dirt), then the current reality predicts that there will be a continual cat-and-mouse game of preventing new campers, a game that East Bay parks is already losing on the smaller parcels of Albany waterfront that it now controls. And if these “environmentalists” want their “park” expanded to the Bulb, then why don’t they advocate for the proper maintenance of what is already there and why in heavens are some of them delaying our segment of the Bay Trail with a CEQA lawsuit (I’m looking at you Norman Laforce)?