Discovery below the debris: The life of Amber Whitson

Amber Whitson—organizer, mechanic, and Bulb historian—along with her then-partner Phyl Lewis, are considered the final residents of the Albany landfill, the place they called home for nearly eight years. On May 29, 2014, “Phlamber,” as they were known among friends, were subject to a 4AM raid by Albany Police Department, Berkeley Police Department, and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, who entered their campsite with a barrage of floodlights, excavators, dirt bikes, and assault rifles to arrest the pair for violation of California Penal Code Section 647 (e), or “lodging” along the Albany waterfront. 

Both Whitson and Lewis had refused to accept the Cody v. City of Albany settlement earlier that year, which would have paid them $3,000 each to vacate the landfill with a 12-month stay away order, but would have barred them from seeking long-term housing placement from the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. In protest, both Whitson and Lewis decided to resist the eviction, beginning a five-week stand off that followed the city’s official closure of all encampments dotting the 33-acre landfill.

Whitson’s last stand at the Albany Bulb was an apogee of resilience, resolve, and advocacy after nearly two decades spent living unhoused in the East Bay. This month marks 11 years since the City of Albany evicted the autonomous community that had carved out an existence there since the late 90s, but for Whitson, who now lives in an RV nearby, the Bulb will always be home.

The Berkeley Vortex

Born and raised in Santa Monica, CA, Whitson left home on a Greyhound bus in 1997 at the age of 16, intent on traveling to Seattle with a group of gutter punks—a subculture of transient, homeless youth known for their punk aesthetics—that she had met along the 3rd Street Promenade. When the bus pulled into San Francisco, Whitson and her crew decided to explore the Bay Area before continuing north, taking BART to Berkeley and camping around People’s Park. It wasn’t long before Whitson’s northbound itinerary changed course.

“We were warned about the ‘Berkeley vortex’ and laughed it off,” Whitson told Street Spirit, “but we got stuck here.”

The “Berkeley vortex,” a known phenomenon in the vagabond community, refers to a traveler’s propensity to stay in Berkeley longer than intended. But for Whitson, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She recounts the late-90s gutter punk scene on Telegraph Avenue as a time of “cohesion and community” in the Southside neighborhood, in which people living on the streets found “a sense of solidarity with each other” that she says has been “shrinking…getting more scattered” over the past two decades. Centered around the “Punk Fence,” the iron gate that once surrounded the vacant lot at the corner of Telegraph and Haste Street, she and her community anchored themselves along the bustling intersection just a stone’s throw away from People’s Park.

“We would roll out our sleeping bags [along the fence] at night, then roll them up in the morning, sit on them, and hang out during the day,” Whitson says, “That is, until they moved the mobile police station there and we all [moved down to] Shattuck Avenue.”

According to Whitson, most interactions with Berkeley and UC police were far less militant—if not outright friendly—in the late 90s, as law enforcement was willing to negotiate an unwritten code of conduct with gutter punks who had gathered around the downtown Berkeley BART station.

“When we first moved down to Shattuck,” Whitson says, “[Berkeley police] came up to us shortly thereafter and told us, ‘Look, if there’s going to be any fighting, take it down to the park off the main street, out of the public eye. Have it over before we get there, nobody’s going to get in trouble.’ And they stuck by their word, like we stuck by our word. It was just a whole different scene.”

A Mother, The Wrench

In December 1999, Whitson, then 18 years old, left downtown Berkeley and began living out of vehicles throughout Berkeley and West Oakland. It was during this time she started “wrenching,” as she calls it, working on the numerous vehicles that she lived in with her partner at the time.

“We lived in a little bitty two-door Volvo, a Chevy Citation,” she says, “we lived in vans, a little tow-behind trailer. We had a white 1969 Rambler, the first car I ever fell in love with. And learning to wrench, that’s when I found out I actually had some marketable talent.”

In 2001, Whitson became pregnant with her son, Devin. She soon found her way back to Berkeley and took a job at the drop-in center located out of the First Congregational Church on Durant Avenue to save money for her new life as a mother, but was unable to secure a lease before Devin was born.

“We had about $2,000 saved by the time I gave birth to my son. But you have to make three times the rent to [sign a lease] in this area, and there was no way we could live around here. I couldn’t be homeless with my son.”

The couple decided to move with Devin to Salem, Oregon in early 2002, with the intention of purchasing a quadruplex among a group of friends who had recently left the Bay Area. But after a year of failed attempts to secure ownership of the building, the couple moved back to Oakland, eventually finding shelter in the Sutter Hotel at 14th and Jackson streets.

Whitson soon enrolled in automotive technology courses at College of Alameda, which made her eligible for financial services through the CalWORKS program. Her partner worked collecting scrap metal throughout industrial areas in the East Bay, but their combined incomes continued to fall short month to month.

“We paid by the week at the hotel, and every month we would be one week short on rent. We were happy, but we were really struggling. Realistically, it was not sustainable, but I would have never admitted that at the time. We had commitments, and we were committed.”

Those commitments were soon interrupted by a series of events that would change the course of Whitson’s life.

Between semesters in 2003, Whitson fell gravely ill with MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria that was most likely contracted through her son’s fecal matter. After months of sickness, two inpatient surgeries, and a month of recovery at home, she made her way back to College of Alameda to continue her studies.

“By the time I could drag myself out of bed, our car had stopped running, so I walked all the way to College of Alameda through [the Webster Tunnel] to start the semester,” Whitson says. “But I had missed the first day of classes, and [was dropped]. I would have to wait until the next semester, which meant I wasn’t going to get CalWORKS, which meant I couldn’t pay rent.”

Whitson and her family had no choice but to move out of the Sutter Hotel and back to the streets, making their way to Berkeley where they’d be closer to available resources. But within days, another tragedy struck—Berkeley police officers, along with Child Protective Services (CPS), took her son Devin away.

“We were walking on Fulton Street between Channing and Durant,” Whitson recounted, “My son was in his stroller, we had just had ice cream on Shattuck. All of a sudden, four cop cars swooped on us in all directions. They arrested me for child endangerment for being under the influence.”

According to Whitson, Berkeley officials had profiled her as a methamphetamine user, which was pursued without evidence at the time of her arrest.

“I had THC in my system, that was it,” Whitson says, “but they refused to test me.”

Whitson spent the weekend in the Berkeley jail where she repeatedly requested a drug test, which was denied. The following Monday, after appearing in court where all charges dropped, Whitson scheduled an evaluation at Berkeley Mental Health to begin the process of regaining custody of Devin.

“We contacted a mental health advocate from the drop-in center I worked at who came with us to the evaluation,” Whitson says, “but she wasn’t allowed to come into the room with my partner and I. We were called to a tiny room with two workers. One kept jumping up to leave the room.”

That’s when Whitson noticed EMTs and Berkeley police standing outside the door.

“They opened the door wearing purple gloves, rolled in a gurney, and told us to empty our pockets. I had no idea what was going on, but my partner knew right away. They strapped me to the gurney, rolled me out right past the mental health advocate, and 5150’d me.”

Whitson was taken to the John George Psychiatric Pavilion in San Leandro, where a doctor deemed her of sound mind the following day. Upon release, she learned that her first visitation with her son had been scheduled at a CPS facility in Dublin that same morning.

“I left the Pavilion at 11:30AM, and my visitation had also been scheduled for 11:30AM. They railroaded me, they put in the court papers that I didn’t even bother showing up to the visitation with my son. Then the family that had been fostering him kept taking him out of town during our scheduled visitations. It was just horrible from then on. Eventually they got me to sign over my parental rights. I had no chance.” 

People’s Park

In 2004, after losing Devin and ending her relationship, Whitson found herself living unhoused around People’s Park, which she described as much more dangerous than it had been in the late 90s. To keep herself busy, Whitson spent the majority of her time dumpster diving and sharing found supplies with people living around the park, but items she kept for herself were often stolen. She was also a frequent target of sexual assault.

“I hadn’t spent too much time single, let alone living alone since I had left home, and I was devastated about Devin,” Whitson says, “So I’d take my dog Ruby and go from dumpster to dumpster collecting what was reusable, then take those items back to the free table at People’s Park. But what I kept for myself would often get stolen…Then there were two nights I woke up with different guys in my bed, just like grinding on me. It was like the lower-left armpit of hell up there. And that’s when I decided, you know what, fuck people.”

Whitson also found herself in the crosshairs of a recent shift in policing around the park, frequently ending up in jail for unpaid vagrancy tickets.

“[Berkeley and UC police] actively, and with joy, hunted homeless people,” Whitson says, “I can’t tell you how many times I was arrested in People’s Park for a homeless ticket warrant, and they’d laugh as they drove me down to the Berkeley police station, like, ‘hahaha, you’ll be out later today!’”

It was around this time that Whitson met Phyl Lewis, and the two quickly became a couple. Frustrated by the state of the Southside neighborhood, both Whitson and Lewis wished to leave People’s Park for good, but didn’t know where they could safely relocate. That’s when their friend Sandy, who would often stop by the park, told them about his camp at the Albany Bulb.

“I had no concept of where the Bulb was,” Whitson says, “but Sandy said we should come visit. So we said, you know what, fuck it, and walked all the way down there with our backpacks.”

After a full day of walking, Whitson and Lewis sat on a bench near Albany Beach as the sun set over the Golden Gate, realizing they had no idea where to find Sandy. Within minutes, an old friend, James, who Whitson hadn’t seen in years, walked up the path on the way back to his camp.

“James is like, ‘Oh, Sandy? I’ll take you to his place!’ So [he walked us] up the high road [into the Bulb]. It’s dark at this point. and lights started to appear from different directions. We didn’t use headlamps at the time, so we were like, what the hell is going on? The concept was alien to us.”

Arriving at Sandy’s camp, the group realized he wasn’t home. James told Whitson and Lewis to get comfortable and wait for Sandy to return, but after years of precarious living around People’s Park, the couple felt uncomfortable occupying the camp without Sandy’s permission. 

“We walked all the way back to People’s Park that night,” Whitson says, “but the next day, October 31, 2006, we found a tent on a curb along Haste Street, in its stuff sack and everything. We were like, ‘Wow, this is a sign.’ We picked up the tent and walked back to the Bulb that day. And that’s how it all started.”

Discovery below the Debris

For the first six months, Whitson and Lewis lived quietly in their tent near the concrete slabs on the southwestern edge of the Bulb, rarely interacting with the 13 other residents who lived there at the time. The couple took turns traveling back to downtown Berkeley to gather food and supplies from dumpsters they were familiar with. 

“Zellerbach Hall had the chicken strips,” Whitson explained, “Spun Sugar on University would have the cookies and stuff. Then we’d collect cans and bottles on our way back down to the Bulb. That was the only actual income we had for the first couple of years.”

The concrete slabs, an art-covered landmark just north of Mad Marc’s Castle, are located in an area prone to sharp winds entering from the Golden Gate, and the couple struggled to settle in comfortably through frequent winter storms. One day, while exploring the small bluff just east of their tent, Lewis stumbled upon a secluded patch of landfill hidden behind a large tree.

“[Lewis] yells, ‘Hey! Babe! You gotta check this out!’” Whitson says, “So I walked right up the hill from where we were [camping], and there was this huge tree and a little trash pile under it. We started cleaning it up and that became home. That’s where we were for the next seven years.”

Whitson and Lewis began building their fortified camp in the spring of 2007—which quickly earned the name “Phlamburg,” a combination of their first names—out of found materials scattered around the landfill and dumpsters that lined the East Bay shoreline. Lewis built a floor for their home from a pile of nearly 2,000 bricks, scraping the mortar from each piece and neatly stacking them until the floor was level. In the “backyard,” an open area just south of their camp, Whitson worked almost daily with a digging bar and shovel, unearthing a vast collection of historic objects she refers to as her “nifties.”

“You find the green bits in the brown ground and the red bits in the grey ground,” Whitson says, referring to the forms of oxidation happening beneath specific dump sites throughout the landfill, “Here [in my backyard], you’d find some rusty stuff but it’s far more likely to find the green bits.”

Over a seven-year span, Whitson collected, cleaned, and catalogued a large cross section of Bay Area history, including Studebaker emblems, Ford Model T parts, Word War II-era dog tags, brass skeleton keys, and hand-spun marbles. Her excavations quickly expanded beyond the vicinity of camp, and Whitson remembers the locations of different dump sites with vivid clarity.

“There’s an area right by where John Pope lived where you can still find glass bottles with styrofoam labels from the 80s,” Whitson told Street Spirit during an interview at the Bulb in March, “Just over here are old pieces of vinyl from car manufacturing. You can still find huge, thick barnacles in an old sand pit dumped by the steel mill, from when the Bay was much healthier.”

Whitson credits her time excavating the Albany Bulb as a period of genuine discovery, as the convergence of local history and her own sense of purpose, identity, and curiosity were uncovered through layers of the landfill’s topsoil.

“We are a wasteful society,” Whitson says, “arguably more wasteful than when this place was still a dump. But this place—which was a Class III landfill—brought in a lot of landscaping debris… plants [are] growing everywhere. It really shows that nature will find its way. Always. And the same goes for myself. I found my way out here, outside the rat race of capitalist society. I don’t think enough people care about finding their way, I don’t think they’re allowed the headspace.”

Share the Bulb

In the years following the 2008 recession, the Bulb’s population steadily rose from 15 full-time residents to around 40. Whitson and Lewis mostly kept to themselves during that time beyond the occasional visit from friends, but Whitson recounts the steady influx of new residents as a manageable shift for their community. 

In 2011, as the City of Albany began cracking down on its unhoused residents, more people began moving to the landfill. Within the span of a year, the Bulb’s population grew from roughly 40 full-time residents to more than 70. It was during this time that Whitson became more involved in organizing efforts around the Bulb, both as a steward of the land and advocate for the rights of its residents.

“It started with Pizza Thursdays,” Whitson says, referencing a weekly pizza drop-off organized between Bulb residents and a local church, “There were all these new people showing up that couldn’t survive out there, living off of others, had no hustle. But when the threat of us getting run out of there started around September 2012, that’s when I started community organizing.”

Whitson soon founded “Share the Bulb,” an advocacy group that aimed to preserve the landfill as a safe space for its unhoused residents. After researching the City of Albany’s mentions of the landfill on publicly available documents via the city’s website, Whitson began making trips to city hall.

“I became politically aware of what was going on out there, of the discussions Albany’s Waterfront Committee was having about our community. So I started attending and speaking up at their meetings.”

Whitson’s efforts caught the attention of a number of Albany residents, many of whom helped organize petitions, marches, and attendance at city council meetings to advocate on behalf of the Bulb’s burgeoning population. But in May 2013, the City of Albany voted to evict all residents from the landfill to break ground on the development of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park.

With the help of East Bay Community Law Center, 30 Bulb residents—including Whitson and Lewis—sued the City of Albany for lack of assistance through the Bulb’s impending eviction plans. By April 2014, 28 of the plaintiffs had accepted the terms of the Cody v. City of Albany settlement. But Whitson and Lewis—who had been instrumental in the lawsuit—refused to sign. On April 24, 2014, after the remaining residents trudged the last of their belongings down the muddy, rain-battered paths of the Bulb for the final time, Whitson and Lewis hunkered down inside “Phlamburg” to devise a plan for their resistance, which was organized alongside a rotating group of homeless advocates.

“We had walkie-talkies,” Whitson says, “and our supporters would station themselves at the top of the low road, right where all the trails intersect.”

Albany Police Department had started a daily patrol of the Bulb to cite individuals in violation of the April eviction orders, using vehicles and dirt bikes for quick access to the landfill’s interior. With the help of their advocates, Whitson and Lewis were alerted via radios whenever police began a patrol, allowing them a few minutes to hide behind the walls of their camp. For weeks, Whitson and Lewis evaded contact with law enforcement through their ad hoc alert system, until the early morning of May 29 when a coordinated raid descended on their camp.

“At 4AM, 30 cops in vans, trucks, and cars barged into our camp, all for me, [Lewis], and one supporter. They took us to Santa Rita Jail and booked us.”

Immediately released after their booking at Santa Rita, Whitson and Lewis were met by a jail support advocate who offered them a ride to wherever they needed to go.

“She asked us, ‘So where do you want to go?” Whitson says, “and we were like, home!”

The couple made their way back to the Albany Bulb within hours of the early morning raid, finding the remnants of their camp in piles alongside a nearby trail. But for both Whitson and Lewis, their return was a moment of elation and triumph. Having successfully resisted their displacement for five weeks, their next move was the least of their concerns—they had left their mark on the Bulb. 

After the Landfill

Soon after the eviction, Whitson and Lewis established residency in Albany, living in a friend’s basement nearby with their dog, Derby. Whitson continued organizing around the rights of homeless individuals living in Albany and ran a campaign for a seat on Albany’s city council in 2016. But as time wore on, Whitson found it difficult to acclimate to life inside. After amicably ending her relationship with Lewis—who she remains very close to now, a decade later—Whitson purchased an RV and settled on the streets of West Berkeley, where she continued her love for automotive mechanics.

“I started wrenching on my RV,” Whitson says, “then started wrenching on other people’s RVs. Soon I realized a lot of unhoused people can’t afford to get their RVs fixed in shops around here. So that started my long career of being an RV mechanic.”

Her wrenching is mostly a labor of love these days. Whitson receives SSI and supplements her income as a “picker,” buying abandoned storage units at auction to sell off alongside collections of scrap metal she finds throughout the industrial areas of Berkeley and Oakland. After 27 years living on the streets of the East Bay, she says she is comfortable where she’s at, and does not intend to find permanent housing indoors. But as the City of Berkeley continues their efforts to close encampments throughout the western edges of town, Whitson hopes officials will seek out creative and effective ways to better serve its unhoused residents.

“Safe parking sites work, like the one we had on Grayson Street,” Whitson says. “Golden Gate Fields would be a perfect spot. There’s plenty of space, and it’s right next to the Bulb.”

Eleven years after the final eviction, Whitson’s schedule doesn’t allow for frequent visits to her old home on the landfill, but she visits every chance she gets.

“I don’t make it out there enough,” she says, “what I would consider to be enough. But every time I do, I discover another reason to come back. I just miss it so much. The Bulb will always be home for me.”