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|  Thin slicing Marin County-What's it really like to live here?
Marin County is my home and has been since 1976. What a place to call home! The spectacular scenery is soulful and peaceful amongst the Redwoods and misty fog that rolls in off the Pacific.
Marin is home to a whirlwind of folks from Fortune 500 CEO's, families, retirees, students, farmers, sailors, artists and alternative lifestyle folks-in short, a cross cultural mix of perspectives and walks of life--who mingle together at any number of festivals and cultural events that take place in Marin all year long.
Marin is a landscape that changes dramatically along HW 101, a 31 mile vertical axis from the Golden Gate Bridge overlooking the Pacific on the west and the Bay on the East, past volcanic- looking Mt. Tamalpais, up to the rolling hills of Mt. Burdell in Novato, known as the gateway to Sonoma's wine country. Novato is home to the oldest California land grant winery, Pacheco Ranch (where friends Debbie and Herb Rowland make a fabulous Cabernet Sauvignon). Their winery is but one of a handful found in Marin.
What's the weather like? Well that depends on where you are and what season. The proximity to the ocean and Bay keeps us slightly cooler in the summer and slightly warmer in the winter. If you think those few degrees aren't a big deal, they are. It makes the difference between Sonoma being a better grape growing region than Marin. However, Marin has several microclimates. For example, Kentfield, at the base of Mt.Tam, gets well over 35 inches of rain a year. A summer day in August might find you freezing in the fog in Tiburon while only 10 miles away someone is sunbathing by their pool. The Sacramento Valley greatly affects our temperature variations during the summer as the climatic pressure variations between the high heat of the Sacramento Valley pulls the cool air off the ocean (that's called fog!).
The roads in Marin inlcude a number of idylic 35 mile east-west corridor throughways that takes the urbanite out to the magnificent Pacific Ocean bluffs to Stinson Beach in the south to Point Reyes in the north.
No matter how you thin slice this county we are not homogeneous! In the western part of the county, many can trace roots back to farming communities in Portugal and Mexico, where life to this day still revolves around weather, crops and livestock.
Drive north and amongst the dairy cows you will find an eerily familiar triangle similar to the one outside the Louvre. Yes, I.M. Pei has come to Marin with his austere, isolated and controversial bio tech Buck Center for Research in Aging. Scientists there have even spotted mountain lions climbing the stairs here (we have foxes, bobcats, migratory whales and an innumerable cast of characters to ride the arc in Marin).
Ah, Marin. Welcome aboard! You are in for the ride of your life. I guarantee it! | |
 Early People of Marin
Marin County's story is one that only a few other locations in this country can parallel. We are a group of 247,289 people (of which the largest segment, 36.4% is between the ages of 35-54, mostly white, fairly evenly divided amongst the sexes) who call Marin home. For as homogeneous as the stats seem to think we are, we are at times, a complete enigma to the rest of the country and even amongst ourselves as so many different perspectives reside in one county. It often makes for very lively City Council meetings at any given city at any given time.
Who was the first documented visitor? That would be adventurer Sir Francis Drake in 1579. Although he left no enduring personality stories to tell or architectural legacy upon our shores, other than a few coins and artifacts, we named one of the longest roads that traverses east to west along Marin County after him.
His landing was significant in that the Miwok Indians greeted him warmly and he moved on rather than staying!
The Miwok Indians lived peacefully in Marin County for generations. There are still those who descend from the Miwok ancestry. In Novato, there is a museum housing many of the artifacts and stories of the Miwok Indians. It's not uncommon to hear of Indian middens being excavated during construction. Quite a bit of care and respect goes into protecting ancient burial grounds and middens once discovered. | |
 Transplants start sticking in Marin
Adventurers set foot again upon our shores by the Spanish sailors in the 1700's. Initially they were kept away by Indians but the Spaniard Missionaries prevailed over time. In 1817, they set down roots along the Mission Trail with the building of Mission San Rafael Arcangel which became the 20th of 21 missions throughout California. Unfortunately they brought with them, the decimating Western diseases, which the native American Indian barely survived. | |
 And you thought it was just a couple of rocks
Marin is an awesome geological place. From Slide Ranch in the south to Walker Ranch in the north, kids have so many places in Marin with outdoor interactive camps, museums and exhibits to learn how to walk softly upon the earth (a great exhibit with a water and geological focus is the Bay Model in Sausalito).
Lest I sound like a school teacher, Marin started out as a place to escape the fog in the summer for city dwellers many of whom became permanent residents after the'06 quake. The rockin' and rollin' that took place made folks realize the fairly solid bedrock of Marin was a far better cry than the landfill in SF. Thus, the seeds for Marin as a suburban commuter county were sown as folks could commute by ferry. Water transportation was a mainstay for Marinites back then but at the same time, the '06 quake caused Marin's only deep water port, Tomales Bay(pictured here) to silt in. This bay runs along the San Andreas fault line or subduction zone where the North American plate on the east meets the Pacific plate on the west (yes, plate tectonics for you geology buffs-do take the Earthquake Trail out in Point Reyes).
Why even a portion of Marin's earth itself is a transplant from down south that just wants to hang around as long as it can!
One of my most favorite places for geology isn't the serpentine melange in the road cuts of Mt. Tam but the imploded basalt colums you can see in the road cut along the Pt. Reyes-Nicasio Road because those were formed deep under the water many moons ago. I haven't even gotten to the indigeneous plants that call Marin home but I'm going to leave that up to you to explore on your own. College of Marin has some fabulous biology and natural resources classes that everyone should take just for the fun of it. Can you tell I just love this place! | |
 How the Military Helped Shape a Slightly Left of Center Legacy in Marin
Marin is home to some of the most politically left of left thinking in America. Yet we are a county settled by the military from north to south. The military influence has indelibly shaped this county that started with WWII shipbuilding in Sausalito and Marin City to the Hamilton Air Field in Novato commissioned in 1932. Unlike so many other places where stationed military personnel returned home upon the end of their tour, many in Marin remained. They left behind families of origin, proving once again, that Marin was the home of the original thinker, the adventurer and the renegade, even amongst the military! Some of my best friends have origins from these earlier days. | |
 Eichler: Glass walls overcome redlining
The advent of Golden Gate Bridge in 1937 set the wheels in motion for the automobile to take hold and the developers were ready! A mini revolution took place by a feisty and cantankerous developer named Joseph Eichler. While not entirely a Marin phenomena (as he built over 11,000 houses in California with 2,300 built all over Marin and SF) Eichler epitomized the best of the best in cutting edge thinking that changed the landscape physically and metaphorically.
His counter part, Bill Levitt was building post war Levittown in New York, slamming up little houses that were affordable. Levittown is in every urban planner's textbook for classic subdivison development but Eichler wanted to do more even though his houses were comprable in size-1200-1500 square foot 3 and 4 bedroom houses designed to hold the traditional 6-8 member family during the 50's.
First, he embarked upon unique architectural features to best capture the essence of Marin with glass walls, using post and beam construction to bring the natural beauty seamlessly indoors all the while heating the interior spaces with radiant heat using copper pipes inlaid into the foundation.
Second, he wanted mom to spend less time cleaning too and the advent of the kitchen appliance oriented home, easy to clean surfaces, doors to accomodate lots of flow in and out of the house, was a mainstay of the Eichler design-now considered a contemporary midcentury classic. He had copycat developers building quickly around him with look alike Kinney and Alliance models.
But what set Eichler truly apart was his refusal to discriminate, selling to anyone who could buy. If someone complained about the neighbors, why he sent the complaintant packing by buying back his house! Eichler was ahead of the national movement towards fair housing and against redlining due to skin color and race. In this way, as in so many ways, Marin found itself as a change agent at the national level. Go Marin! | |
 How Haight brought love and music to Marin
Flower Power, Love and Peace were alive and well in San Francisco during the 60's. It wasn't too far to come to beautiful Marin to escape the foggy summers and come they did! Nighttime may have been for Bill Graham Presents (he lived in Corte Madera) and the Fillmore but daytime was the place these rockers called home.
To this day, legendary musicians call Marin home from former Grateful Dead members (Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart), Huey Lewis and The News, Journey, Train, Bonnie Raitt, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Pablo Cruise, Jeses Collin Young and so many more.
Marin is also the former home to many notables including Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and many, many others. At the end of Baltimore Canyon in Larkspur, is Janis' old house where in fact, the Board of Supervisors are discussing plans to purchase a portion of her old homestead for open space access.
Marin has many great music venues including: Cafe Amsterdam, Perry's and 19 Broadway in Fairfax, Rancho Nicasio in Nicasio plus many other smaller venues like Rafters and Caffe Trieste, making the nightlife an active one in Marin. And wouldn't it be nice to at some point have a music hall of fame to commemorate all these great musicians? Now, that's something to think about! | |
 The Spaceship lands in Marin
Frank Lloyd Wright was like an alien from another planet landing upon the hallowed ground of the Marin environmentalist movement in the 1970's. This famous architect's peculiar vision aptly pegged the iconclastic spirit of Marin's governance that has interestingly become fodder for national attention with our pesticide free ordinances and nuclear free zones.
During the 1970's, Marin again became focal point for the rest of the country from a little book written by a local author about hot tubs and peacock feathers!
While many things are uniquely Marin, one statistic bears pointing out as it has a direct effect on why housing is so expensive here. Over 85% of the land in this county is held in some type of public ownership from MALT, to GGNRA, to Marin County Open Space District, to land held by water districts and Flood Contral and State wetlands etc etc. Most of the development takes place along the north-south HW 101 corridor and all future growth is tightly controlled.
Novato is the most affordable community in Marin yet the average household income earns $102,000 which is one-and-a-half times that of the national average! Less than 20% of the current Marin population can afford to buy their house today. Affordable housing in Marin is truly difficult to find with a housing prices for a single family house (mainly a 2 bedroom) costing close to $600,000! | |
 Darth Vader: Fortune 500 Spokesperson
Once again, something foreign landed in Marin, forever shaping Marin's uniquely iconclastic economy. This time, it took the vision and genius of George Lucas, with the use of multimedia and special effects to create a 'Hollywood north' influence along the green hills of Nicasio, previously known for its horse ranches and Redwoods. To forever put to rest the question of what came first, George Lucas or the Lucas Valley exit which you must take to get to George Lucas' house, the answer is, the HW 101 exit came first.
Marin is a fascinating slice of the national economy, where companies who were birthed here, impact S&P rankings. They include the casual footwear made by Birkenstock, the now deceased but avante garde educational software company Broderbund; dog loving companies like Mrs. Grossman's Stickers and Autodesk and cutting edge health and holistic businesses like BioMarin and Cruelty Free Cosmetic companies.
Other companies caught wind that Marin is a pretty good place to headquarter in secluded suburban enclaves including Fireman's Fund, Smith and Hawken and Sonic Solutions. From Biotech to High Tech from Entertainment to Education, Marin County can boasts it is one of the most diversified economies in the United States. We historically weather economic cycles- be it downturns in real estate, jobs' growth and other bellweather indicators because our capital is built on some of the best and brightest entreprenuers with slighly left of center thinking business brains! Seems to be a theme here! | |
 Castles (of Sorts) in Marin County
Tucked away in the San Geronimo hills where no one can see them, is the non-sectarian peaceful yoga center, the castle of calm, known as Spirit Rock. It's architecture isn't as "period" as the San Francisco Theological castles in San Anselmo pictured here, but Spirit Rock is a fabulous place to get centered in one of the most centered counties in the US.
The Seminary Area of San Anselmo houses the SF Theological campus where the most beautiful buildings in Marin can be found (pictured here).
At the other extreme of famous buildings, is the historic yellow "castle" of sorts, known as San Quentin. It houses some of the country's most notable criminals, and is smack in the middle of some of the most expensive view corridors in the world. It seems ironic that the view corridors of some of the most expensive (and largest) housing in Marin looks straight onto San Quentin (with some of the smallest living spaces in the county!)
Interestingly, many of the folks who do work at Spirit Rock and SF Theological Seminary can be found imparting spiritual wisdom at San Quentin as spiritual advisor volunteers.
Hope you enjoyed one denizen's view of Marin. Marin is a great place to sit back and observe what makes the world go round. We have it all right here in our county. Any corrections, additions etc. please let me know! Thanks. | |
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Trust Takes Time: Frank Howard Allen Voted #1 for Marin Real Estate. Margaret Kapranos sells Marin Real Estate. Over 20 years of Marin Real Estate experience. I help buyers and sellers in Marin. Moving? Call now!
-Margaret Kapranos
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