Golden Gate Fields Is Becoming A Park. The Albany Bulb Already Beat It There.

On a recent Saturday morning, a handful of volunteers gathered by the bathrooms near the Buchanan Street parking lot, water bottles and hand trowels in tow, for the first-and-third-Saturday gardening shift at the Albany Bulb. Weeding, mostly, since it's summer. A few hundred feet south, behind a chain-link fence that hasn't moved since June 2024, the grandstands at Golden Gate Fields sit exactly as they did on the last day of racing, when the track closed after 83 years in operation.

Everyone in Albany has read the headline by now: the old racetrack is becoming a public park. What most coverage skips is the gap between that headline and this particular week. The truth is that Albany's waterfront is running on two different clocks right now, and only one of them tells you anything useful about what to do this weekend.

The Deal, So Far

Here's where things actually stand, in order:

1. February 2026 — Trust for Public Land signed an option agreement giving it the exclusive right to buy the 161-acre Golden Gate Fields site, according to the East Bay Regional Park District's project page.
2. March 31, 2026 — TPL and the Park District announced the deal publicly, with the mayors of both Albany and Berkeley, State Senator Jesse Arreguín, and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks all issuing statements. Robert Cheasty, a former Albany mayor and longtime advocate for the site, called it a "crowning achievement" for the shoreline in a Berkeleyside report.
3. May 2026 — Governor Newsom set aside $125 million for the purchase as part of his "Outdoors for All" initiative, funded through the Prop 4 climate bond voters approved in 2024. When it was announced, the earmark still needed legislative sign-off as part of that year's state budget cycle.
4. End of 2026 — The deadline for TPL to actually close the $175 million purchase. The Park District has already committed $20 million from Measure WW, the 2008 bond that first set money aside for this exact site.
5. Spring 2027 — The earliest the property is expected to transfer to the Park District, per its own project timeline.

That's the entire deal, and it's a real one. But notice what isn't on that list: anyone breaking ground, opening a trail, or taking down a fence. The purchase agreement calls for the Stronach Group to demolish the grandstands, stables, and other structures before the sale closes, which means the site you drive past today looks essentially identical to the site that closed for racing more than two years ago.

Why The Fence Is Still Up

Part of the delay is simply funding math. Part of it is that Golden Gate Fields wasn't just a racetrack to Albany's budget. Before it closed, the property ranked among the city's top commercial taxpayers, alongside Toyota and Target, and historically generated millions of dollars a year in tax revenue that helped fund city and school district services, according to reporting from Berkeley Scanner.

A budget presentation to the Albany City Council flagged that converting the site to public parkland could cost the city an estimated $800,000 in use-fee revenue alone, on top of additional losses from sales and property taxes, as detailed by Local News Matters. That's the unglamorous reason city officials keep using phrases like "robust public engagement process" instead of announcing an opening date. On July 12, Citizens for East Shore Parks held a community update on the acquisition at the Albany Library's Edith Stone Room, with Cheasty and fellow advocate Amaya Williams-Segovia walking residents through shoreline restoration, habitat, and where the money still needs to come from.

None of this is a reason to worry the deal falls apart. It's a reason the waterfront you'll actually use this month isn't the one behind the fence.

The Unofficial Park That's Been Open The Whole Time

While Golden Gate Fields waits, the Albany Bulb keeps doing what it's done for decades: functioning as an accidental public park built out of a former landfill. The art here didn't get planned by anyone. It shows up, according to the volunteer group Love the Bulb, as sculptures made from the site's own construction debris and driftwood, weathering in place at spots locals know by name, like Mary's Mask and Mad Marc's Castle out at the Bulb's tip.

If you're wondering about the landfill history, it's worth a straight answer instead of a shrug. In 2024, testing found a handful of locations with elevated gamma readings, and the comparisons the state used to explain the risk were specific: the California Department of Public Health said a person would need to stand at one of those spots for 20 hours to get the same radiation exposure as a single dental X-ray. A nuclear physicist quoted by Bay Area News Group put it at 100 hours to match one cross-country flight. The city has said it plans to run additional testing at the three flagged locations, but nothing found so far has closed the park or changed how people use it.

What has changed is the rhythm. The gardening workdays run the first and third Saturday of every month, meeting at the same spot by the parking lot restrooms, which puts the next one on August 15. It's not a tour or an event with a program. It's weeding, mostly, and anyone can show up.

Your Actual Waterfront Calendar

If the park story is a multi-year process, the neighborhood around it is not waiting. A few things worth knowing about right now:

• Albany Bulb Gardening Workday, first and third Saturdays, 2 p.m., meet near the Buchanan Street parking lot restrooms. Bring your own small tools and water.
• Free Fishing Day at East Bay Regional Parks, September 5, when both park fishing fees and the state license requirement are waived across the district.
• Ivy Room's Monday Happy Hour, a new addition this July, every Monday at 4 p.m., 860 San Pablo Ave. No cover, no stage production, just an open door.
• Match Point Brewing's First Thursday Music Night Open Mic, 745 San Pablo Ave, signup at 6:30 p.m. and music from 7 to 9. It runs monthly.
• Rosie's Sandwich Popup at Flowerland on Solano Ave, Sunday mornings, known for selling out early.

None of that requires waiting for a ribbon-cutting. It's what a waterfront town does with its Saturdays while a much bigger, much slower project works its way through funding rounds and city council budget lines.

The Actual Point

The Golden Gate Fields park is worth tracking, and worth being glad about. A 161-acre stretch of shoreline connecting Albany Beach to McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, Point Isabel, the Bulb, and views out to Brooks Island is not a small thing for a city this size. But if you live here and you're waiting for that grand opening to start enjoying your own waterfront, you're waiting for something that already exists two hundred yards up the trail, run by volunteers with trowels instead of a ribbon-cutting committee.

That's the part the headlines keep skipping. The park isn't coming to Albany. Most of it never left.

For more on what makes life in Albany and the rest of the East Bay worth paying attention to, from waterfront news to the neighborhoods around it, Mark Choi keeps a close eye on the ground here, not just the market reports.