At a recent public presentation in Albany on the nascent plans to replace the shuttered Golden Gate Fields horse racing track with a waterfront park, much of the discussion centered on taxes, acquisition and ownership of the site.

While concerns over financial matters are understandable — the buyers have until 2027 to secure $175 million to purchase the site from the Stronach Group — questions about what the park will look like and how it will best serve the community were left unanswered.

In fact, since the plan to turn the racetrack into a “world-class” park was announced in late March, only one conceptual image has been presented to the public — and that vision has left a lot to be desired.

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The ho-hum rendering produced by Citizens of Eastshore Park shows a familiar mix of open grassland, habitat restoration, trails and a handful of buildings. Those are worthwhile elements — but they also look remarkably similar to the passive shoreline landscapes that already define much of the narrow strip of land squeezed between San Francisco Bay and Interstate 80.

The new park is being billed as the “missing link” that will unite McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, which spans 8½ miles along the East Bay shoreline. While the existing green spaces have plenty of remarkable views and places to walk or ride bikes, they don’t really add up to a remarkable waterfront. Instead, they often feel assembled through circumstance rather than shaped by a shared vision — an afterthought that lacks identity, programming and civic energy.

If we’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring and ultimately building this new park, we should aim higher than what currently surrounds it. Sure, the Albany Bulb is a........

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