On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an obituary for influential Sausalitan Annette Rose that reads like a pocket history of the houseboat community.
Annette got into politics after being evicted from a condemned construction shack on the Sausalito waterfront in 1984. She served on the City Council and Marin County Board of Supervisors for a total of 16 years. She also represented Southern Marin on a number of regulatory agencies, including the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the California Coastal Commission and the Golden Gate Bridge District. Her career was dedicated to shepherding her waterfront cohorts through tumultuous, hard-fought changes.
Chronicle reporter Sam Whiting recounts how Annette and her partner Chris Hardman created the experimental Antenna Theater, where she ran the administration and campaigned to secure grants.
With developers and lawmen picking over the ragtag Gates community, Annette and Chris staged numerous rallies, such as the time they led a group of preservationists into a City Council meeting bearing chainsaws in reaction to the destruction of waterfront mainstay Bob’s Boatyard.
Whiting quotes Donna Bragg Tate, a longtime neighbor of Annette’s at Galilee Harbor, on Rose’s effectiveness as an activist: “Annette was a key element in the movement to preserve the working waterfront.
“She gave us credibility. We were perceived as pirates on the waterfront, and she changed the perception. Getting to the City Council level and making decisions, that just wasn’t us until Annette came along.”
Among Annette’s contributions to her community was Maritime Day, now in its 45th year. Rose and Hardman, along with Whole Earth catalog founder Stewart Brand and cartoonist Phil Frank, also launched an arts advocacy organization called Art Zone in the early 1980s to protect the waterfront, along with its talented residents. Their struggles against encroachment by developers became the stuff of local legend.
Annette was also instrumental in getting BCDC approval for the reconfiguration of Waldo Point Harbor, which resulted in many upgrades, including the new Van Damme floating dock.
When the couple’s last tugboat home at Galilee was burned beyond repair after an electrical short in 2006, Annette and Chris moved onto dry land in San Rafael. He passed away in February 2024 and Rose died almost two years to the day after her husband on January 30, 2026.