Design
The Bay Area Graffiti Paradise Built on an Island of Garbage
The Albany Bulb was allegedly colonized by homeless sailors who covered it with strange art.
Just north of Berkeley, a desolate land formation juts into the San Francisco Bay like a gray, leprous thumb. This is the Albany Bulb, a wonderfully tarnished informal park with a curious history:
The Bulb, like much of the coastline in the Bay Area, is composed of old construction debris and various dreck. But unlike other former landfills that fell into the hands of developers, nature has established a foothold on this crumbling wasteland; scraggly trees, dried-out grasses, and slimy green seaweed give it the look of a Chernobyl wetland. Atlas Obscura explains how it got this way: