This story aired in the May 12, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Albany bulb is a beloved fixture of the East Bay shoreline. People visit for kite flying, dog walking and the culture of renegade art making.
But if you roll back the decades and dig below the topsoil, you will find the story of a community that made the bulb a home while planting the seeds of creativity that continue to grow there. Today, we go out to the bulb with some former inhabitants to hear their story.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: The park at the Albany Bulb was once a landfill. And it’s still made of trash, if you dig down deep enough.
AMBER WHITSON: I found a whole set of World War II dog tags. I found bullets, I found shotgun shells, uh, empty ones....
REPORTER: Amber Whitson lived at the Albany Bulb from 2006 to 2014. During her time there, she did a lot of digging, and she discovered that the landfill contains an untold number of emblems of Bay Area history.
AMBER: I dug up some antler beads… I found, um, teeth of some random ruminant… I found, uh, an amazing collection of antique marbles…
REPORTER: Part of this local history are the unhoused people, like Amber who made their home at the Bulb. After the landfill was closed in the 80s, birds fertilized the land, and a wild, untamed park sprung up out of the concrete and rebar. Plants like Pampas grass, fennell, eucalyptus trees, and chamomile created shelter for rabbits, garter snakes, barn owls, and numerous other species. Like the plants and animals that built their homes before them, it was an out of the way place where homeless folks could rest.
AMBER: The variety of plants and stuff out here, it really shows that nature really will find a way. Always, nature will find a way, if you just gotta give it a little bit of room.
REPORTER: In March, I had the pleasure of going there with some former residents to take a tour of the past.
REPORTER: Alright, it’s Tuesday, March 11, and here I am walking on the Albany Bulb, looking for Jimbow.
REPORTER: I’m walking around the Bulb with Amber, looking for James Lee Bailey—better known as Jimbow the Hobow—so he can show me the place where he used to live. But, I can’t find him. So Amber shows me the way.
We walk straight through a bush and through the center of what felt like a mini-wilderness.
Amber has cropped, dark hair tucked beneath her signature black leather ball cap. She wears a black mesh shirt, tactical pants, and a large steel nose ring.
Amber had been homeless in Berkeley for six years when she secured housing for herself and her newborn son back in 2003. She enrolled in school and started getting CalWORKS benefits while studying cars at the College of Alameda.
But after a bout of serious illness, she had to drop out of school. She lost her benefits, her home, and then her son, to Child Protective Services.
Back out on the street, she was sexually assaulted. And, she says she was constantly harassed by the police.
Seeking refuge, she found her way to the Bulb. And she got to know every inch of the place.
AMBER: You can just go on the left side of it, past Pope’s old place, and then down into the Amphitheatre, and out through the side to the library.
REPORTER: Okay, sounds simple. I couldn't find him earlier, but…
AMBER: Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta have a map!
REPORTER: The map I need lives in Amber’s mind. She can remember every tree that was the scaffolding for a makeshift structure, and which rocks laid the foundation for living room floors. And of course, she knows where Jimbow used to live.
REPORTER: JIMBOW!
REPORTER: Success. We found him.
AMBER: They couldn’t find you, I found you!
REPORTER: At 71 years old, Jimbow has lived many lives. He was born in Southern Ohio with a crossed eye and a cleft lip, and when he learned to write, he was left-handed. His mother believed these things made him the spawn of the Devil, and she neglected and abused him.
So, at 16, Jimbow ran away with the circus and joined Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. He’s a classic American vagabond. Later he rode freight trains, broke his nose on 33 occasions, and in his own words, cheated death more times than there are days in the year.
REPORTER: What, what brought you out here to the bulb?
JIMBOW: Uh, re-treat, haha.
REPORTER: Jimbow was homeless in Berkeley in 1997 when he landed on the Albany Bulb. He says the local police told him to go to the former landfill. So, he set up a home and lived there on and off for 17 years. During this time, his home became a community library that housed more than 400 books.
JIMBOW: This was the front of it right here…a tree grew through the roof. We built the roof around the tree…And they would come up and sign there and donate books. It was a beautiful way to live, at the time. We were away from what we call society over there.
REPORTER: Society can be a painful place to live for people who have been cruelly rejected by family or circumstance. But the Bulb was peaceful, and offered something Jimbow had struggled to find elsewhere.
JIMBOW: You build your character and you build your community around you, who you want to associate, and pretty soon, it might take a longer for some, or for me, whatever, but pretty soon you got a community, and you feel at home.
REPORTER: Jimbow’s library is just one of the landmarks the unhoused community built at the Albany Bulb. Perhaps the most famous is Mad Marc’s castle—a concrete bunker with trivets, windows, and a spiral staircase, which is coated in colorful graffiti art that changes almost weekly. The castle is still a popular hangout spot today.
MARC: Oh, my name's Mark and, uh, I built this castle here. Gosh, I guess it's been 25 years ago now.
REPORTER: “Mad Marc” is Marc Mattonen. He has the compact, muscular body of a builder, and a mind that runs at impossible speeds. If you ask him about his castle, soon you will be traversing a maze in which skunks communicate telepathically with possums, and the freeway speaks along the shoreline.
MARC: It was really alive and he would laugh and stuff like that.
REPORTER: The freeway?
MARC: Yeah, the freeway. Like it doesn't do it anymore. It did it for like months though.
REPORTER: From the laughing freeway, he salvaged bags of wet, concrete discard and brought them over to the Bulb on the handlebars of his bike. He used the concrete to construct the castle.
MARC: I thought, well, I can't own anything. You can't have anything if you're homeless 'cause somebody will steal it from you. And so I thought, well if I, if I connected to cement, 'cause I've done cement work, I thought maybe I could build something, and lock it so I could have things that couldn't be taken from me.
REPORTER: Marc lived in the castle. And, it kept him grounded—feet cemented to the earth.
MARC: I thought…I need something to do. And I wound up doing this out here, you know.
REPORTER: Over time, as homelessness crackdowns continued along the nearby railroad tracks and at People’s Park, the group grew. At its peak, about 70 people lived on the Bulb.
So, the City of Albany decided the encampment had to go. Here’s a 2014 news report from KPFA:
KPFA: The city of Albany is continuing its efforts to remove homeless campers from the Albany Bulb near the Golden Gate Fields, racetrack Bowl. Activist Orion told KPFA what happened this week.
May 29th, the police came in. Uh, Alameda Sheriffs, Berkeley Police, Albany police had vans. They had dirt bikes, they had assault weapons. Uh, they surrounded two of the residents. And one supporter…
REPORTER: Encampment residents fought back with a lawsuit. There was a settlement: In exchange for $3,000 each, most of the plaintiffs agreed to vacate the landfill with a 12-month stay away order, among other restrictions. Amber and her then-partner Phyl did not accept the settlement. They were the last two to leave the Bulb.
AMBER: We knew we weren't gonna be able to stay there forever… we just knew we were gonna take it to the limit. Yeah. We were going to, you know, take it, you know, roll to the wheels, fall off.
REPORTER: I’ve spent a lot of time at the Albany Bulb over the years. But in the past, it felt like a park: A sanctioned space where I could go to be with nature. Now though, after talking with Jimbow, Amber, and Marc, I see it differently.
I’m more aware of the layers of history beneath the soil: Of refuse and refuge. Of the way that nature—both animal and vegetable—has used that salty stretch of shoreline to find its way.
Note: Alastair Boone is KALW’s Homelessness reporter. She’s also the Director of Street Spirit newspaper. Bradley Penner contributed to this story and he also produced Street Spirit’s April paper, which focuses entirely on the Albany Bulb.
