Marc’s castle on the landfill’s western shore stands as a testament to the possibility and creativity of a world built on the fringes of the disposed.
Marc “Mad Marc” Mattonen is considered the first of the Landfillians to make a home on the Albany Bulb. In 1995, after somebody shot a bullet into the hull of his boat, The Griffin, which he’d anchored off the Bulb’s western edge, Mattonen reached land without a plan. But necessity, curiosity, and resolve soon overcame him.
“God, the idea of…just living down here in the bushes,” Mattonen told Street Spirit during a visit to the castle, “that was out of the question for me. You can’t have anything if you’re homeless…someone will steal it. I thought maybe I could build something and lock it so I could have things. And well…I [needed] something to do.”
Mattonen began work on his castle in 1997, appropriating bags of wet, discarded cement from construction sites on the nearby freeway overpass. He worked alone and at night, hauling the bags to his building site on the handlebars of his bike. After four months of digging to create a level floor, Mattonen constructed walls with crumbling slabs of landfill concrete, wrestling them in place with a pry bar and a come-along. Using a mixture of liberated cement, shoreline gravel, racetrack sand, and sea water, he mortared the slabs into the shape of a heart—one of the four suits in a deck of cards—signifying the first of many symbols embedded in the castle’s deeper purpose, intention, and meaning.
Mattonen has the compact, muscular body of a laborer, with a thick neck and meaty hands, short finger nails, and prominent knuckles. Inside that solid body is a mind that runs at impossible speeds through a fantastic and ever-changing landscape, leaping over obstacles, plunging into tunnels, never stopping.
Ask Mattonen about his castle and you end up trying to follow him through a maze in which numbers and letters have mystical significance, DJs on AM radio stations have the power to see through walls, skunks communicate telepathically with possums, and mockingbirds speak to humans warning them of impending danger. Ask him about his life—try to establish some basic biographical facts—and you will be led through endlessly branching paths until you come to one hallucinogenic scene that stands out like a night landscape suddenly illuminated by a flash of lightning.
Central to his personal iconography are the fractured fairy tales of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the suits in a deck of cards, and the Golden Gate Bridge—the latter of which Mattonen refers to as “The Slot.”
“It is a slot,” Mattonen once told Osha Neumann, “a coin slot. And on the inside of the coin slot of the atomic universe it says ‘rainbow’ on an engraved stamp. Sometimes a rainbow forms over the Golden Gate Bridge, and over the rainbow, that’s where heaven is in radiant light and the atomic universe makes a certain noise and is alive.”
In Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mattonen says, there’s a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which inspired his revisions in 2000, aptly renaming it “The Fairy Castle” to symbolize a golden heart inside the four suits of his castle complex. Add the castle’s heart to the red diamond and the green clover leaf once painted on the patio, and you have three of the four suits. When Mattonen plants his shovel in the ground, the deck of cards is complete.
Everyone calls him “Mad Marc,” and undoubtedly he is by society’s usual standards. Voices argue in his head. Should he continue building the castle? But he’s developed a strategy for keeping himself from flying apart, and that seems to be a reasonable equivalent to sanity. He began building the castle to keep himself grounded. He knew homeless people who lived in piles of filth by the side of the railroad tracks. They “didn’t care about right answers” and it seemed to him “like they were just a little bit more burnt out and not planning on getting a job or ever working again.” So Mattonen undertook what he calls “this ridiculous project of trying to find a level surface around here and make a floor.”
“I knew it was more than I bargained for,” he says, “It was ridiculous to take it on, but once you start something you’re supposed to finish it.”
Mattonen’s castle may never be totally finished, especially in the landscapes of his mind, but its emblematic presence on the western shores of the landfill stands as a testament to the possibility and creativity of a world built on the fringes of the disposed.
“This is our place of centeredness for the world’s people,” he says, “this is a major contribution to the world.”
Read Mattonen’s treatise, Global Resolve: A Golden Opportunity, here:
Bradley Penner is the Editor of Street Spirit.
Osha Neumann is a lawyer and activist in Berkeley.