At low tide on a September morning, the rock path around the north side of the Albany Bulb opens up enough to walk the whole loop without wading. You pass the Beseeching Woman first, Osha Neumann's driftwood-and-scrap-metal figure with her arms thrown up toward the bay, then work your way toward the newest thing out here: a chunky cement Marble Run, about the size of a Ford Bronco, that sends glass marbles twisting through pipes and a xylophone bridge. It was finished in 2025, which is worth pausing on, because most people who already live near the Bulb talk about it like a fixed exhibit. Same castle, same rusted dragons, same dog beach. The Marble Run is proof that isn't quite true.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the usual write-ups: despite sitting inside what looks on a map like a single continuous stretch of protected shoreline, the Bulb itself isn't part of any park system. Not the state's, not the regional district's. And two active land deals on either side of it are about to make that gap harder to ignore.
Who Actually Owns This Peninsula
The land east and north of the Bulb, the Neck and the Beach, is managed by the East Bay Regional Park District as part of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. The southern edge belongs to the state. But the roughly 40-acre bulge at the tip, the part with the castle and the sculptures and the off-leash dog beach, is still owned and run by the City of Albany. EBRPD's own park page for McLaughlin Eastshore is blunt about it: the park does not yet include the Albany Bulb.
That word "yet" has been doing work since 2002, when the state folded the Bulb into the Eastshore park's general plan as a future conservation area. The transfer stalled for a cap-and-seal order from the regional water board, then stalled again over what to do about the people living there, then stalled again while the city sorted out a transition plan. Twenty-plus years later, the Bulb is still the one piece of this shoreline that answers to Albany City Hall instead of a park agency, which is a big part of why it still looks the way it does.
The Neighbor to the South Just Got a Nine-Figure Nudge
Golden Gate Fields sits directly south of the Bulb, and until its racetrack closed in June 2024, it was one of Albany's largest commercial taxpayers alongside Toyota and Target. In February 2026, the Trust for Public Land secured an option to buy the 162-acre site, most of it in Albany with about 40 acres reaching into Berkeley, for conversion into public parkland connected to EBRPD. The plan cleared a real hurdle this spring: Governor Newsom's May budget revision set aside $125 million for the purchase, drawn from the Proposition 4 climate bond and framed as part of his Outdoors for All initiative, on top of $20 million EBRPD had already committed from Measure WW. The buyers still need to assemble $175 million total by a deadline in early 2027.
None of that money touches the Bulb directly. But geography does the rest of the argument. If the Golden Gate Fields purchase closes, the Bulb will be flanked by managed park land on three sides instead of two, an odd holdout in the middle of a corridor that everyone else has already agreed to formalize. The pressure to finish what started in 2002 gets harder to postpone once the neighbor to the south is wearing a park district logo too.
What Governed Space Would Mean for the Art
The 2013 general plan language for the Eastshore park spells out what happens to unauthorized art once a site comes under State Parks jurisdiction: it gets reviewed under the agency's systemwide cultural resource procedures before removal, not automatically bulldozed, but not left alone either. Something close to that already applies at the Bulb even without a formal transfer. Posted rules from park officials currently ban multi-floor structures, which means the two-story Mad Marc's Castle, built over three decades by a man who came ashore after someone put a hole in his boat and started mixing cement scavenged from nearby construction sites, is a piece of the past that current rules wouldn't let anyone build again today.
That's the tension worth sitting with before the Golden Gate Fields deal closes. The reason the Bulb still produces things like the Marble Run is precisely that nobody is running a permit process out there.
"I'm out there a lot, and I don't see people go out and make art very much. It just kind of shows up."
That's how Armendariz, who works with the nonprofit Love the Bulb, described it to the San Francisco Chronicle last September. A managed park doesn't necessarily kill that impulse, but it changes the mechanism. Art stops just showing up and starts going through review.
The Practical Version, If You're Going This Fall
If you're timing a walk out there this season, the details that actually matter haven't changed much, with one exception worth clearing up.
- The lot at the foot of Buchanan Street is free but small and fills early on weekends. It carries a two-hour limit that long-time visitors say has been enforced for years, not a new crackdown.
- Posted hours run 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
- Go at low tide if you want to walk the full rock path around the north shoreline without wading, which is the stretch where most of the sculpture work concentrates.
- Buchanan Dog Beach, right past the entrance, stays busy with off-leash dogs most of the year.
- Love the Bulb still runs informal, low-key programming out there, including bird walks and journaling gatherings, if you want a reason to go beyond just wandering.
The exception is the radiation story that circulated widely in 2024. A state-ordered survey did find elevated gamma readings at a handful of spots on the Bulb, tied to historical dumping from a Richmond chemical plant decades ago. But the follow-up testing, whose results the city presented to the Albany City Council on December 2, 2024, found no radioactivity levels associated with that dumping and no cause for concern for people using the park recreationally. UC Berkeley nuclear physicist Kai Vetter put the exposure risk in terms anyone could picture: standing at one of the flagged spots for 20 hours gets you the same dose as a single dental X-ray, and 100 hours gets you the equivalent of one cross-country flight. If you've been avoiding the Bulb because of something you saw online in 2024 or 2025, that's the update.
There's also a nearer-term reminder that this shoreline draws crowds beyond the regulars. Park police issued a public warning ahead of a planned weekend gathering at Albany Bulb Beach this past March, similar to warnings issued around the same time for beaches in Alameda. It's not a reason to skip the Bulb, but it's a sign that the peninsula's informal, anyone's-invited character cuts both ways.
None of this is urgent in the way a closing date is urgent. The Golden Gate Fields sale still has months of financing and process ahead of it before that early 2027 deadline, and nothing about the Bulb's ownership changes overnight just because a neighbor's paperwork moves forward. But the direction is set. Twenty-plus years of "yet" has a way of resolving once the land on every side of it stops being an open question. If the version of the Bulb you value is the ungoverned one, the one where a man can spend thirty years building a castle out of borrowed cement and nobody stops him, this is a reasonable season to go walk it and pay attention, rather than assume it'll look the same in five years just because it has for the last twenty.
If you're weighing what a place like Albany actually offers day to day, not just what a listing says about it, that's the kind of detail Pirnia Homes spends time tracking. Reach out anytime if you'd like a closer look at what's happening in Albany's housing market alongside its shoreline.
