Sausalito: Hotels, Landfills, And Celebrities

If you ever find yourself north of the Golden Gate Bridge

, you're bound to find yourself in a town that does for cozy coastal towns what San Francisco does for exclusive, high-priced cities. Yes, tucked into the North Bay of Marin, within a stone's throw of the City by the Bay is lovely, over-priced, ever-packed Sausalito. Of course, these descriptors aren't entirely fair, the town is a rightly a tourist destination and one carefully cultivated over decades of declining industry and soaring housing prices -- making the prospect of booking any Sausalito hotels a slim one during peak seasons.

Once known as Rancho del Sausalito, the town now enjoys the distinction, aside from being a go-to tourist destination, of being one of the many partially submerged towns in the world. Venice, Italy, it's not -- but, Sausalito, in part, has lost some precious real estate to the Pacific Ocean. In 1868, the town had high hopes of following San Francisco's example in terms of expanding the city perimeters with landfills (ala Manhattan). Unfortunately, the funding for the landfill fell through and a number of town streets ended up in the Bay.

The notion of using trash to expand the town perimeters was scarcely imaginable by the colonial Spanish a hundred years before. Though the Spanish, specifically Don Jose de Canizares, had settled the Bay Area in 1775, their emphasis was fortifying Mission Dolores and the Presidio in San Francisco. Sausalito would fail to enjoy any planned development until the late 1800s, when it's coveted timber would be stripped for the shipyards of the boom-time Bay.

During and after the famous California Gold Rush, the town managed to attract a number of artists and celebrities who appreciated the town's serene, picturesque qualities. Among the celebrity roll-call are Alan Watts, the purveyor of Zen Buddhism, Shel Silverstein, the poet, Otis Redding (who composed Sitting on the Dock of the Bay while doing just that), and the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst. It would be Hearst's interest in Sausalito that would fuel a real estate buying frenzy in the late 1900s.

With the verdant hills of Marin County on one side and the glistening San Francisco Bay on the other, who could blame the land-hungry buyers? The town remains an evergreen tourist attraction. Barring the submerged parts of the city, it is easy to see how visitors can survey the town and ache to never leave. It is a perfectly balanced counterpoint to the bustle and congestion of San Francisco -- and though the cost of living may be too rich for some, it is always available to vacationers and tourists eager to sit on the dock of the bay and waste some time away.

by: James Pynn

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