Long-time Marin photographer Bruce Forrester has spent the past 50 years photographing people and events for a wide range of publications, corporate and private clients and just for fun. On April 18, he will give a Zoom presentation on two collections of his works: “Celebration & War: The Sausalito Houseboat...
The following is a personal opinion essay by longtime Issaquah resident Jim Woessner. It is offered here as food for thought but does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Floating Homes Association or the Floating Times. My partner and I recently went to see a melodrama murder mystery entitled...
Joe Tate’s role in the 70’s Houseboat Wars is well documented (his video Last Free Ride is available online and in libraries) but when I ask about the feud, he claims his role was a saboteur or disruptor in modern usage. With his co-conspirators, floating ropes laced with metal shards...
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,...
Former 25-year San Franciscan Mira Pickett crossed the Bridge to explore life on this side a year ago. Originally renting on Yellow Ferry Harbor, Mira knew that that would be a temporary move as the owner occupied his home for a good chunk of each year. A furnished rental became...
Catherine Lyons-Labate has created a 209-page hard cover photo essay featuring hundreds of her photographs, as well as recollections by her and others who lived or worked on the Sausalito waterfront in the late 1970s. The book, Once Upon A Waterfront, tells the stories of many colorful Co-Op characters, and...
Charles Bush, former attorney for the Gates Cooperative, recently recounted the seesawing and at times even violent past of the area just north of Sausalito called Waldo Point. Here is a lightly edited digest of his remarks, leading up to the houseboat wars of the 1970s: Part I — Boats...
For more than a century, law and reality didn’t correspond at Waldo Point: what the law said should be there wasn’t in fact what was there. The past fifty years witnessed a seesawing and at times even violent struggle to bring law and reality into harmony. Charles Bush, former attorney...
Every Monday night, you can find Joe Tate and the Blue Monday Band jamming at the Sausalito Cruising Club. If you haven’t seen him there, maybe you’ve caught his escapades in the videos The Houseboat Wars or Last Free Ride. Joe’s one of the founders of the Sausalito floating homes...
WHO: Charles Bush WHAT: Reads from his novel Houseboat Wars WHERE: Sausalito Library WHEN: July 9 at 7:00 p.m. Charles Bush is a former attorney who represented the waterfront dwellers during the County’s attempts to evict them in the 70s. He’s now written a novel based on those events,...