Albany Hill Park

Albany Hill Park is an interesting foil to the Albany Bulb.  Unlike the Bulb, which is an emergent, non-defined space that exists because people have never really dictated what it is or isn't,  Albany Hill Park exists because everyone, plus their mothers, seems to have an opinion about it.  It is perpetually stuck in a mindless bureaucratic purgatory, it has both a Yelp and Wikipedia page, and it is completely covered with fucking eucalyptus.

When driving in the East Bay the park is a striking point of visual relief.  Out of nowhere a hulking green hill protrudes from suburbia, dominating the skyline.

The interior is mildly spooky.  The Eucalyptus creak and sigh like old floorboards.  I have been twice and it has been virtually empty both visits, despite the fact that it is surrounded by a residential area.
Besides a few benches and a renegade swing, it is non-designed and non-maintained.  Paths are desire lines and informal.

It turns out that everyone has plans for this land, build more apartments, build a better park, tear out the Eucalyptus, make money- change it, improve it.  And that's the precise reason why it hasn't changed in years nor likely will in the future.  Too many meetings, too many approvals, people screaming "Nimby," etcetera.  And so it stays just like it is, a giant green mascot of the shortcomings of bureaucracy.  If Kafka were alive, this is where he would hang out.

Landscapes Change

Time makes landscape, and landscape makes time. Trees grow, water moves, rocks roll, program changes, and on and on and on. In landscape architecture, time is a permanent consideration and the great equalizer. To work outside its shadow is to labor under a misapprehension.

In the United States it is quite rare to find an older designed landscape with the original vision still intact. This is tragedy and truth- our maintenance skills are poor, our tastes or notions of a successful landscape are fickle and we too often prefer to bulldoze and build something completely new rather than to take on the challenge of refurbishing or improving an existing landscape.

It is for all these reasons that Alvarado Park, in Richmond, California, completely blows me away. First laid out it in the 1940s, it has aged with both grace and scrapiness. It contains both a sense of adventure and humor (the Egyptian theme), and provides a lovely level of danger that children have undoubtedly reveled in for decades. From it's inception to the present day it was never over-programmed, rather, it is simply a quirky, magical-real place that allows its users to choose how they want to use the park rather than impose that upon them.

Alvarado Park was designed with growth and nature in mind, and the simple fact that it has persevered for all these years is symbolic of the fact that such considerations have served it well.