stacy farr and corey schnobrich
settlement | informal by corey schnobrich + stacy farr
alternatives autonomy opportunity community invention
private dwelling in public space life on the Bulb
The gate to the compound emerges in between a row of low hedges and is almost entirely covered by a sign reading NO TRESPASSING. The admonition seems out of place in a public park, but almost everything about this park is out of place. The gate is really just a propped up piece of plywood and the compound it protects is an assortment of tarp-covered spaces. The low hedges are possibly non-native species, growing amid a surface marked by the industrial garbage of broken concrete and exposed rebar. And the person that placed the sign is a squatter, a semi-permanent resident trying to carve out a private space and a private life in the middle of a public park. This park is the Albany Bulb, a 12 hectare (30-acre) land mass extending a kilometre into the San Francisco Bay, almost directly across from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Bulb is isolated from the City of Albany itself by Interstate 80, a freeway which hugs the bay’s edge on its way between Oakland and Napa County. As a future piece of the growing Eastshore State Park system, the site attracts an odd collection of Bay Area visitors including off-leash dog walkers, non-commercial artists, nature-lovers and the homeless. Since the early 1990s the latter have used the site as an informal, self-developed campground – an alternative to
and refutation of the shelters and streets of nearby municipalities. Journalists Chris Thompson and Faith Cathcart, writing in 1999, described the Bulb’s resident community in poetic terms not too different from its condition today: ‘Everyone had an acre of peaceful open space to themselves, living a strangely rural existence surrounded by the stunning vistas of an urban metropolis’. Though often described as a sort of no man’s paradise, the Bulb began its relatively short life as an afterthought, a space of discard and abandon. Created largely by industrial dumping, the site started to take shape during the construction of the Golden Gate Fields, a horse-racing track built during the 1930s to the south of the modern Bulb. In the early 1960s the City of Albany and the Santa Fe Railway, the owner of the land, signed an agreement to use the site as a landfill; the subsequent dumping created the amorphous form from which the Bulb derives its name. Due to illegal dumping of toxic materials, high methane levels, and sporadic fires, landfilling ceased in 1984 and, after site clean-up, the Bulb became city property. By 1993 squatters had established a presence in the park and in 1999 the city expelled the growing resident population. A smaller eviction followed in 2005 and the city issued a never- executed threat to do the same in 2007.
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