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. Donald Arques bought the Waldo Point yard from the War Assets Administration that year, and over the following decades he let artists, musicians and drifters live for nothing on the barges and derelict ferries the shipyard had left behind. Alan Watts lived aboard the old ferry Vallejo, and the Charles Van Damme ferry reopened in 1968 as a nightclub called the Ark. By the 1960s the anchorage was a village of improvised houses with no sewer connections and no interest in acquiring any. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission, created in 1965, took charge of the shoreline, and in 1971 the county moved to clear the boats. On 5 June 1971 sheriff's and Coast Guard boats arrived to tow away five vessels and met an armada of canoes, rowboats and tugs. On 12 December 1977 the county sent bulldozers and pile drivers to build a parking lot at Gate 5, and deputies turned fire hoses on the residents. The houseboaters organised into cooperatives in 1978 and 1979, and after years of litigation a compromise in 1983 let the boats stay, provided they moved onto approved docks with proper utilities. That settlement regularised the community and priced much of it out. Hundreds of floating homes remain in the harbours off Gate 5 Road.
Getting there
37.8733, -122.5025
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