Local Stories in California
21 places
Architecture·Marin County
Eichler's Terra Linda
Terra Linda, the valley of flat-roofed, glass-walled houses north of San Rafael, is where the developer Joseph Eichler put his principles on the line in 1955 by selling a house to a Black family. The land was the Freitas family's dairy ranch, sold in 1953 and approved for the largest subdivision in Marin's history, and Rose Constance, one of the Freitas daughters, gave it the Portuguese name meaning beautiful land.
History·Marin County
Golden Gate Village
Golden Gate Village, the public housing on Drake Avenue in Marin City, was designed by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, won a national award, and is on the National Register of Historic Places, which is not the usual biography of a housing project.
Transport·Marin County
Marin Says No To BART
Marin County was one of the five founding counties of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, and in May 1962 it withdrew, which is why no train has ever crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The plan was to hang a second deck for trains beneath the roadway. BART's own 1956 study found the bridge capable of carrying them, and a report by the engineers Gronquist and Steinman, published in 1960 after wind-tunnel tests, called the installation feasible and practical.
History·Los Angeles County
Nazimova's Garden
At 8152 Sunset Boulevard, on the Los Angeles side of the old county line, there stood for thirty two years the Garden of Allah: a main house and about two dozen villas around a pool on two and a half acres, and by most accounts the most storied address in Hollywood's golden age. The house came first, built in 1913, and the silent film star Alla Nazimova acquired it in 1919, at the height of a career that had briefly made her one of the highest paid women in pictures.
History·Los Angeles County
Riot on the Strip
Pandora's Box was a one storey wooden building about the size of a house, lavender stuccoed with bold orange and white stripes down one side and its name hand lettered in red, standing on a concrete traffic island where Crescent Heights meets Sunset. On the night of Saturday 12 November 1966 a crowd of two to three thousand young people gathered outside it.
History·Marin County
Sally Stanford's Valhalla
The Valhalla, the old restaurant building at 201 Bridgeway on the Sausalito waterfront, was for thirty years the establishment of Sally Stanford, the most famous madam in San Francisco and later the mayor of Sausalito. She was born Mabel Janice Busby in Oregon in 1903, ran a series of houses in San Francisco from the 1920s, and by 1941 kept the best known of them on Nob Hill at 1144 Pine Street, where the columnist Herb Caen liked to say the United Nations had been founded, since so many of the…
Film History·Sonoma County
The American Graffiti Cruise
Petaluma Boulevard North, the two-way main street of downtown Petaluma, is the road the cars cruise for most of American Graffiti. George Lucas began shooting the film in San Rafael on 26 June 1972, and within a day the San Rafael city council, worried about the disruption to businesses, withdrew permission to film beyond a second night. Lucas negotiated two more nights of general cruising footage there and moved the production twenty miles north to Petaluma, which proved more cooperative.
Industry & Science·Marin County
The Buck Trust
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the I. M. Pei complex on the hill above US 101 at the north end of Novato, exists because of an oil deal and a lawsuit over whether Marin County was too rich to deserve its own fortune. Beryl Buck of Ross died in 1975 and left the San Francisco Foundation a trust built on her late husband Leonard's seven percent share of Belridge Oil, worth about 7.6 million dollars and restricted by her will to the needs of Marin County.
History·Los Angeles County
The County Strip
The Sunset Strip exists because of a line on a map. A mile and a half of Sunset Boulevard, running west from around Havenhurst Drive to the Beverly Hills line, lay in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside any city. The Los Angeles Police Department had no authority over it. Enforcement belonged to the county sheriff, who had a great deal of county to cover, and the difference was enough to shape what got built there.
History·Los Angeles County
The Discovery Myth
For half a century the most famous drugstore in America stood at 8024 Sunset Boulevard. Schwab's Pharmacy, in business there from 1932, was where the movie colony filled its prescriptions, nursed its hangovers and read the trades at the soda fountain, and it is enshrined in legend as the place where Lana Turner was discovered sipping a soda. The legend is wrong in almost every particular except the soda.
Industry & Science·Sonoma County
The Egg Basket Of The World
The brick hatchery building at 7th and F Streets in Petaluma, now artists' studios, is a survivor of the industry that made the town call itself the Egg Basket of the World. It was built for the Must Hatch Incubator Company, founded by Alphonse Bourke in 1898, which was hatching a million and a quarter chicks a year by 1911. The industry began with an incubator.
History·Marin County
The Fireman's Fund Campus
The three-building campus on San Marin Drive in Novato, 700,000 square feet of offices set among lawns west of US 101, was for three decades the headquarters of the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, and in September 2025 the demolition crews arrived to turn it into about 1,300 homes.
Music History·Los Angeles County
The Go Go Cage
The Whisky a Go Go opened at 8901 Sunset in January 1964, in a converted bank building, taking its name from a Paris nightclub that had been calling itself the Whisky a Gogo since the 1940s. What the Los Angeles version added was the cage. The club hired Johnny Rivers to play and put a young woman in a glass sided booth suspended beside the stage to spin records between his sets; during one set she started dancing up there, the audience took it for part of the show, and the club had…
History·Marin County
The Houseboat Wars
The floating homes at Waldo Point on Richardson Bay are the settled end of a twenty-year fight between a waterborne shanty town and the county that wanted it gone. The shore was seized by the government in 1942 for Marinship, the Bechtel shipyard that launched 93 tankers and cargo ships in three years and closed in May 1946.
History·Sonoma County
The Jewish Chicken Ranchers
The synagogue at 740 Western Avenue in Petaluma was built in 1925 as the Jewish Community Center, the meeting hall of a community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had taken up chicken ranching on the hills around the town. Petaluma had had a Jewish congregation since 1864, but many of the ranchers were socialists or communists, and the 1925 building was a compromise between the atheists who wanted a culture club and the observant who wanted a synagogue.
Film History·Marin County
The Kerner Company
For 27 years the warehouses at 3210 Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael's Canal district carried a sign reading The Kerner Company, and behind it Industrial Light and Magic built the effects for most of the biggest films of the age. George Lucas moved the shop up from Van Nuys in late 1978, during pre-production on The Empire Strikes Back, wanting distance from Hollywood. The anonymous name was, in his words, a deception designed to keep kids from rummaging through the garbage bins.
History·Marin County
The Larkspur Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl Apartments at 461 Cane Street in Larkspur stand on the site of an outdoor dance floor that, for fifty summers, paid for the town's fire department. The dances began in 1910 as a fundraiser during Booster Days, held on a temporary platform to buy fire equipment for a volunteer company that had none. By 1913 the crowds justified a permanent home, and the firemen bought half an acre of redwood grove on Cane Street and fenced it in roses, which is where the name came from.
Transport·Marin County
The Novato Narrows
The stretch of US 101 between Novato and Petaluma, known as the Novato Narrows or the Marin-Sonoma Narrows, was until the 2010s a freeway in name only: a four-lane road with private driveways, a landfill entrance and side roads such as San Antonio Road and Kastania Road emptying straight onto it. By 2013 it carried 146,000 vehicles a day, 6,200 of them trucks.
Transport·Marin County
The Sausalito Ferry War
For seventy-three years the Sausalito waterfront was the way across the Golden Gate, and when the bridge opened in May 1937 it went to war with the boats. Ferries had run from Sausalito since 1868, when the side-wheeler Princess sailed twice a day from the foot of the street that still carries her name.
History·Los Angeles County
The Wilkerson Clubs
Billy Wilkerson published the Hollywood Reporter and used the trade paper's leverage to build the Sunset Strip's most glamorous rooms. The Cafe Trocadero opened in 1934 at 8610 Sunset and became the place the studio era went to be photographed. Ciro's followed in January 1940 at 8433, a third of a mile east along the boulevard, and the Mocambo opened almost next door to the Troc in 1941 under Charlie Morrison and Felix Young. The glamour was the public floor.
Entertainment·Sonoma County
The Wristwrestling Statue
The statue of two men locked at a table on the corner of Petaluma Boulevard North and East Washington Street commemorates the World Wristwrestling Championship, which began a block away in a bar and ended up on national television. On the evening of 27 January 1955, at Diamond Mike Gilardi's saloon at Washington and Kentucky Streets, the newspaper columnist Bill Soberanes matched Jack Homel, a trainer for the Detroit Tigers, against a local rancher named Oliver Kullberg.