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. The Northwestern Pacific Railroad ran electric trains down from Mill Valley, San Anselmo and San Rafael to meet its boats at the terminal, and from the early 1920s the Golden Gate Ferry Company carried automobiles from a slip beside the railroad terminal. On one summer weekend in 1915 more than 700 cars had already been ferried across. Both the ferries and the new bridge charged a dollar per car for the round trip. When the ferry company cut its fares in half, bridge traffic fell twelve percent, and in August 1937 the bridge directors formally declared war on the Golden Gate Ferries. The bridge tried a ten-day fifty-cent toll that December and offered a compromise the following February, but the boats could not win a price war against a fixed span. The Southern Pacific's Sausalito auto ferry to Hyde Street made its last crossing on 24 July 1938, and bridge traffic jumped from 50,000 to 56,000 crossings the first weekend after. The railroad's train ferries lasted until 28 February 1941, when the electric interurban system that fed them was shut down with them, ending a service that had carried Marin commuters since 1903. The present ferry landing occupies the historic terminal site. The Eureka, the double-ended ferry that worked the route from 1922 and was once the largest of its kind in the world, is preserved at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco.