Last week we recounted architect Michael Rex’s early days on the Sausalito waterfront. This week he recalls how he created the unique design of South 40 Pier at Waldo Point Harbor, where he eventually settled. These excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity:
When Don Arques owned the property, the county had just abated a lot of the arks, or houseboats on the Larkspur Canal, and destroyed them, and T.J. Nelsen (Arques’ property manager at the time) saw the writing on the wall: If they’re going to do that in Larkspur, they’re going to do that in Sausalito.
Don Arques, I don’t think, really cared, and that was why there was such freedom, because he didn’t care about anything. So T.J. went to Arques and said, you know, we should prepare some drawings and apply for approval, or they may abate all of it, and all we need is a paper plan. It doesn’t have to cost that much, and we just fill out the application and turn it in, and they won’t abate us, because we’re trying to become legal.
Don never expected to build the harbor, and so to keep the cost down, T.J. and marine engineer Ed Beattie just took out a piece of paper and started lining up these piers. They were straightening out the shoreline to get a lot of parking. It was a horrible plan, but they submitted it. It had no input from the community. No one took it seriously except T.J., and my God, he got a permit, because the city and county wanted it cleaned up.
Well, that was the antithesis of our community. To line all the boats up in a row, that had always been scattered all over the place and crazy, and lining up the shoreline, filling in the bay, I mean, all this was craziness and ugly, and there were no houseboat codes yet on what you could build.
We needed improvements. Our dock was sinking. Unsafe wiring is why we were having fires. None of this was sustainable, and it was going to take some developer who’s willing to invest a lot of money if this houseboat community is going to survive, and we certainly needed sewers.
Thank goodness the tide went in and out twice a day, right? We had a toilet, but it wasn’t hooked up to anything, and to flush the toilet, you’d grab a bucket, scoop up some salt water and flush it down the toilet. Into the bay. The tide would take it all out, but the water wasn’t clean. It wasn’t very sparkly.
I went to Waldo Point Harbor managing partner Lew Cook. Now the houseboat wars are beginning, because they had started building permanent piers. South 40 was the last one to get built, where I lived, at the south end of the harbor, and it was called the South 40 because back then it was a no man’s land. There was practically nothing out there much, other than water.
I said to Lew Cook, you know, we need these improvements, but I don’t like what you’re gonna build, and I don’t like violence. And Lew said, well, what do you want?
Wow, that kind of opened the door a little bit. So I went back to my neighbors and said, instead of fighting for what we don’t want, let’s envision what we do want, and answer the man’s questions. We might get something better.
And so we put a committee together to design our own community. It’s not every day you get an opportunity to design your own neighborhood, where you live. For an architect, what an opportunity!
I wanted to think out of the box, and I wanted to put my mind in a different place, so it’d be more open to something new. So I hopped on an airplane and went to Arcosanti (a resilient and self-contained community in a canyon north of Scottsdale, Arizona). I needed something like Arcosanti’s a three-dimensional city where you could walk up walls and live on roofs to open my imagination. So, I flew down there, but I couldn’t find a single connection between a desert canyon and a waterfront.
Oops. I was coming home pretty bummed. We flew over the San Francisco airport, and I looked down, and there was that aha moment when the light bulb goes off. I saw the main concourses going out from the terminals, and the airplanes radiating around the gates. And I thought, my God, there it is.
I certainly didn’t want to line all the boats up in a row like soldiers. And when you group around floats, each one of those pods, as they became known, become these little family elements.
You’ve got the main dock, which is the broader community, and then you’ve got the little floats that you cluster around for the smaller groups, which is socially very healthy. So we drew it all up, and the dock was gonna be really cool.
Lew took one look at our plan and said, I could build that. He called up Ted Rose, who was the project manager, and said, I want you to work with Michael and build it.
We prepared working drawings. We got it approved. It was the only dock built without war. And to me, that was my greatest satisfaction because I don’t like violence.
This is only a fraction of Michael’s recollections about his life on Richardson Bay. You can hear the entire 2-hour interview online.