Singer-songwriter Dino Valenti, though little known today, was an early mover and shaker in Sausalito’s houseboat community. Born on the East Coast in 1937, Valenti (real name: Chester William Powers, Jr.) began performing in Greenwich Village and North Beach coffeehouses, occasionally with Karen Dalton, Bob Dylan, Lou Gossett, Josh White,...
Gate 6 ½ resident Claudia Cowan is a senior correspondent for Fox News, and recently produced a podcast recognizing the 45th anniversary of a shocking kidnapping in Chowchilla, CA, in 1976. On July 15, 1976, a school bus carrying 26 schoolchildren ages 5 to 14 and their driver vanished without...
The Marin City Community Services District will host its annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration on Saturday, February 26. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, Dr. King received the Nobel Prize for Civil Rights and Social Justice. On Saturday, a commemorative parade will be held from 10:00 a.m. to...
Filmmaker Helen Vandeman of Gate 6 ½ has posted a 32–minute video of her neighbor, legendary banjo virtuoso Carl Lunsford, reminiscing about this musical career and his move to the floating homes community in 1974. Self–taught as a boy, Carl became a mainstay of many great traditional jazz bands, including...
The Bay Model will exhibit photos from Catherine Lyons-Labate’s book SAUSALITO once upon a waterfront from February 15—March 26. These photos tell a story of people from all walks of life who came together on the waters of Sausalito and created a community like no other. Catherine hitchhiked to the...
The more we learn about other floating home communities around the world, the more we realize what similar challenges we all face. The BBC has posted a short documentary on Dal Lake in the Kashmir region of northern India, where thousands of residents live on 910 houseboats. One Indian official...
Recently we mentioned a plan, put forth by Michael Haas, to turn the drydocks in Richardson’s Bay into a “Lunar Village,” a completely self–sufficient biosphere. The plan never materialized, but that didn’t stop Haas, AKA “the Shaman of Rainbow Bay,” from creating another fantasy for an old dredging barge moored...
Long before Forbes Kiddoo’s man–made island gained fame in the 1980s, a set of dry docks became a major landmark in Richardson’s Bay. In a two–part series for Marinscope, Annie Sutter wrote about the four drydocks, “the many tons of wood, iron and granite ballast that were deposited in Richardson...
Recently, my wife Jane and I joined Julie Durbin and Ed Lopez at a performance of a circus–themed extravaganza called Dear San Francisco. This acrobatic love letter to our neighbor across the Golden Gate is being presented at the legendary Club Fugazi in North Beach. The beautiful bandbox of a...
Donlon Arques is well known as the man who fostered Sausalito’s early houseboat community when he snapped up portions of the abandoned Marinship property and made them available to folks looking to live cheaply on the waterfront after World War II. But how did that come about? Arques was a...