brianeyes;760 wrote: Is that the same nursery that used to sit on this parcel of land currently for sale?

Yep, that terraced lot was the nursery proper; the house just downslope was Lila Lillie's. Loved her place when I got into cactus & succulents when I was 10 back in 1955. Even put an ad for her nursery in my pretend newspaper "The Arch Street News."

Mike Van Horn;757 wrote: Sorry to be so slow in responding to this discussion that I initiated.



First, to clarify "Altena":

Altena is a short, steep street in southeast San Rafael. From the east end of Woodland, just before Anderson, just before the wooden railroad trestle, turn right onto Auburn. One short block, turn left onto Altena, which curves steeply up to Tiburon Blvd.



As you go up Altena, it turns sharply to the right just as it comes to the 101 freeway cut. Looks like before the 101 freeway it may have gone east a bit to connect with some now-nonexistent roadway connecting San Rafael and Larkspur. Altena must be a late 19th or early 20th century street, judging from the vintage of the houses along it.

This sounds like the street that Lila Lilly lived on. Lila lived in the house that overlooks the freeway, up on the hill on the west side. There is a stone chimney and other stone trim, I think. She used to run a little succulent nursery out of her garden, and our folks used to go there often in the '50s 60's and 70s. That road does continue into upper Greenbrae and eventually connects down to SFD Blvd.

Dewey;752 wrote: Paul, that's a masterful match-up, and totally by chance! It looks different today, how about adding a 2009 view? Interesting to realize that, when the earlier picture was taken, the highway was new. Before that, no road, it was all marshland where the Strawberry center and freeway is now.

You know what's bizarre? The span between the two photos is 38 years, but almost 40 between later one and now. I hate things like that.

Paul, I love that art deco Richfield station !

Paul, perfect!......It's mind boggling!

Brianeyes, what an amazing resource! Thanks for posting the link. That's quite a find.

Another vintage Highway 101 photo I stumbled upon online months ago might be one of the most fascinating, looking southerly at the "Tiburon Wye" intersection from 1931:



http://imgzoom.cdlib.org/Fullscreen.ics?ark=ark:/13030/kt1v19q6ff/z1&&brand=calisphere



This was when the Richardson Bay Bridge & the highway through the Strawberry area were both still being built, so traffic went through Mill Valley in order to get to SF. You can see the old school traffic roadblocks in the middle of the intersection.



And for all the "California Highways" buffs, the SF Internet Archive started scanning volumes of the magazines- since as you know, the magazine now is extremely rare. One issue of the magazine went for over $150 on eBay a couple years ago.



We take for granted going over Waldo Grade on Hwy 101 after reading this article on its construction as a full freeway:



http://www.us.archive.org/GnuBook/?id=cavol3132liforniahighwa195253calirich#625



And interesting to read about the 101/580 interchange in its first rendition. Some great photos and a nice testament to the overpass that no longer stands...



http://www.us.archive.org/GnuBook/?id=cavol3132liforniahighwa195253calirich#695



Be forewarned though- if you are a roadgeek like myself, you could spend hours flipping through these magazines- not only filled with technical jargon on how to build a highway - but also covered with amazing photos that are a time capsule for the entire state.

Good stuff...enjoyable reading....I too remember the freeways being built in the early fifties growing up in S.F.....For a kid it was a major event to see them jack up a house and move it down the street to make way for the 101.



If the guys who are widening the freeway today in San Rafael were working in the fifties building the original freeway they'd just about be finished by now. :)

At nicasio resevoir the water level is low enough so you can see the little bridge from the old road.There's a good stretch of road and crossroad under water.In 90 or 91 mmwd drained about 70% of the water for some reason and long enough for the ground harden.Me and my friend drove down on the old road in my old international,it was a blast.

Those California Highways photos are great, and answer a gap in history for me. It appears that the easy-grade version of pre-101 at Puerto Suello to Mt. Olivet was built in 1919, replacing the steeper direct route down the hill (now Merrydale). The 1920 photo shows a new-looking road (now Los Ranchitos). The rails came out of the tunnel in the gulch between the old highway (foreground) and new (Los Ranchitos). Then, they built the new 4-lane "Dumbbell Highway") in 1940 or '41, using a lot of cut and fill, the modern precursor to the freeway.



Paul P., I relate to your 9-year-old-kid fascination with highways, it's my passion too. I remember driving the two-lanes around California in the 50s and early 60s and watching the "improvement" to freeways; the engineering is fascinating but I miss the quiet beauty of the 30s-era two-lanes. It's good that Marin still has many of them, having resisted modernization (straightening with cut and fill) for all these years. Marin road history is fun; we've spent days tracking the old routes of all the roads (and railroads) in the county over the last 30 years, even the obscure short lengths bypassed by curve straightening. [How about the really old San Quentin road on the hillside behind Marin Sanitary? And the original Bolinas Road over the ridge from San Rafael to Ross?] What's interesting, though, is that many of the rural roads follow exactly their original 1860s & 70s alignments!

The first picture looks like the s-connection between lincoln and los ranchitos the car is going south.Im not sure when the current stretch was built but the over pass at the northbound onramp had a date 1938.I have 59 issues of calif.highways from 1956 to 1967 not complete. Im curious which ones you have? maybe you could e-mail me? stingray64coupe@yahoo.com

Had to respond to the "101, guide dogs "mystery picture".

It is the "Guide dog area". The left, Mt Olivet Cemetery, still there. Stand of eucalyptus trees, still there. During the the last 60 years I am sure they did some construction so it looks different now. There was also a base ball field next to the cemetary that was the property of Grover Wilson ,had a paving business in the area. Grew up with his son Roy.

101 in background still there. Railroad tracks going under, small building on left side was a sewer treatment plant, (used to play in the area when I was a kid), other side of 101 was "salt flats" gray ground, cracked, used to play baseball with local kids. Now it is Civic center/fair area.

Can not say exactly what year but the location is not questionable.

Still live with in a few hundred yards if anyone wants any more info.

Picnic Valley is in the south part of San Rafael, near Davidson School. Picnic Ave. (off Woodland) gives it away. The Laurel Grove picnic ground was adjacent in the 1870s, 80s, etc. Not related to Laurel Grove in Ross/Kentfield.



Attached is a 1906 map of San Rafael, showing Picnic Valley in the lower center, just south of the curving railroad connector.



Check out all the other cool stuff in the map. You can see they've made progress in filling the marshes.

Attached files

Great information. Would love to see those maps. Any chance of scanning part of them and posting? I found an interesting link with some historical maps of Marin...



http://www.davidrumsey.com/directory/where/Marin+County++Calif++/



especially interesting is the 1871 map of the San Rafael salt marshes.....kind of scary to think about how much of the Eastern part of the county is fill in land considering the Big One is coming sooner or later.

Here's an account I wrote of the main north-south routes in Marin. I have old maps to document all of this.



About Picnic Valley, it was a favorite place for locals and train passengers to gather at the famed Laurel Grove picnic grounds. Thats why there are many old houses in that neighborhood.



The first highways in Marin were poorly constructed tracks across private lands. The county began building public roads in the 1850s, with the heyday the 1860s and 1870s with civil engineer Hiram Austin at the helm as county surveyor. Many of Marins rural roads continue to follow Austins original surveys (Hwy 1 from Sausalito to Olema, Sir Francis Drake Hwy., etc.). Wider, paved 2-lane highways first were built in the 1920s when automobiles were on the scene and the organization called Marvelous Marin boosted road construction and county development. The Golden Gate Bridge spurred construction of the beginnings of modern 101 as we know it today.



The original public road entered Marin from the north as it does now: crossing San Antonio Creek south of Petaluma, although the freeway now makes a slight bypass to the east, leaving the old highway and bridge intact. From there to Novato, the freeway replaced the old road. At Novato, the highway followed Old Redwood Highway (duh) and then Novato Blvd. down to Ignacio. Although mostly obliterated by the modern freeway, it followed the general route we use now, until taking off west of the freeway at Mt. Olivet cemetery/Terra Linda; the older route followed Los Ranchitos and Lincoln Ave. into downtown San Rafael, still intact as a back road. There was another, direct route where the freeway is now between Puerto Suello (top of Lincoln) down to the cemetery that pre-dated Los Ranchitos. Lincoln Ave. was called Petaluma Road until the freeway was built in 1941 (called the Dumbbell Highway at that time).



At San Rafael, there were a few ways to get south, but the main road headed west (later the Miracle Mile) to San Anselmo then south through Ross, Kentfield, Larkspur and Corte Madera. This was the original Highway 101. Keep in mind that there were extensive marshes to cross and so travel kept inland closer to Mt. Tamalpais. The first marsh roads were the San Rafael-San Quentin toll road and a new road across the Corte Madera Creek marshes constructed around 1900 but not used much. Wolfe Grade was also an old route over the ridge.



Also at San Rafael was the first railroad in Marin (1869), which took people to Point San Quentin where there was ferry at Agnes Island (now obliterated). The next rail line to reach San Rafael was the North Pacific Coast RR, which sent a spur track from its main line at San Anselmo (the Flatiron Building is a remnant from that time). They didnt build the main line SF & NPRR until 1884, the one with the big depot at San Rafael and tunnels north and south. All these lines later merged into the Northwestern Pacific.



At Corte Madera, the oldest route south over the ridge to Alto/Mill Valley was southeast of town, now called Sausalito Ave.; it was replaced by Camino Alto, constructed by the 1890s. From Alto, the original travelers had to travel inland around the marsh, but by the 1870s a levee had been constructed across the marsh where today Camino Alto continues over to Tam High. Then, the road hugged the shore of the marsh in the Almonte area and had to go all the way around the marsh at Tam Valley until a levee was built there in the 1860s or 1870s.



Then, the road passed Manzanita, Waldo and into Sausalito. The roads south of there were built by the US Army starting in the 1850s.



The current routes of US 101 did not get built until the 1920s and 1930s, and the first freeway was 1941, a short stretch through San Rafael that was the second freeway built in the US (Pasadena Freeway the first). You can still see the 1941 in the cement railing off to the left as you take the northbound San Rafael exit at Irwin Street. Waldo Grade was built in 1937 as part of the GG Bridge project; it was narrower, with only one tunnel bore until the 1950s addition of a second one. One old timer told me how the new highway cut off all the wildlife that used to come down into Sausalito from the hills.



--Dewey L.

from lincoln down 4th which turns into red hill to the hub at san anselmo,then left onto sir francis drake,thru ross,then right at college that becomes magnolia thru larkspur to corte madera ave over camino alto to tam high school then to tam junction past the buckeye restaurant into saucelito.this was the pre 1925 route