Tag: albany bulb

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Family Day in the Dump

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My brother John and nephew Sean are visiting for a week. As honored guests, we’re taking them to all our favorite local spots. Such as the Albany Bulb–the abandoned landfill on the bay just north of Berkeley. It is part of a state park now and has long since become the haunt of dogwalkers, strollers, postmodern nature lovers, scrap artists, and pagan cultists of various light and dark stripes (to judge from some of the artifacts dredged up from or hauled down to the dumpland).

An artist (artists?) whose anonymous work we see down at the bulb stencils well-known images onto chunks of concrete: Amelie, the French movie character; Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist and pop icon; and Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s girlfriend. Down at the bulb Saturday, John and Sean got right into the spirit of the place. John spotted a piece of likely debris in the underbrush and placed it in suggestive juxtaposition to Mona Lisa; Sean then supplied a piece of performance art.

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Albany Bulb

Albany Bulb

The western tip of the Albany Bulb, about an hour before high tide early Friday afternoon. Not sure where the bulb name comes from, but Albany is the next town north of Berkeley, a little patch of stucco bungalows squeezed between the foot of the hills and the shore. The bulb is the old town dump, and juts several hundred yards into the bay just north of Golden Gate Fields, a working horse track. Unlike Berkeley’s dump, the bulb hasn’t been reclaimed; there’s lots of debris and broken concrete everywhere among the thickets of wild grass and fennel; but it has turned into a park anyway; as you get out to the western end, the terrain becomes more hummocky and overgrown, and people have set up impromptu art installations with stuff that’s worked its way out of the dump (and, by the look of things, with plenty of fresh rubbish and artsy castoffs).

In Memory of Emily Wagner

Here’s a home-made memorial along one of the paths: “In memory of Emily Wagner,” Oakland’s 33rd homicide victim in 2004. I remember hearing about the case briefly at the time — she was run down by a driver who was having a fight with her boyfriend and died a month later.

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And this — you tell me what this is. Out on that spit on the western end of the bulb, there was a rotting carcass of some kind (at least I think it was a rotting carcass; it smelled dead, and Scout was determined to sample it). The part closest to the camera looks like a head and beak to me. But the head and beak of what I can’t tell, and the rest of the “remains” were too gelatinous for me to poke around much to see if I could identify more body parts.

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