Prologue: A Short History of Sausalypso
On January 1, the first day of the year, I wrote the words “the end” to Sausalypso, the novel I’ve been working on during the pandemic. That doesn’t mean I’m finished, but I made it to the end of the first draft and now I go back and rewrite, reorganize, and make it better.
I just recently reworked my prologue. Which is a short and sweet introduction and history of Sausalypso.
Prologue: A Short History of Sausalypso
My name is Tin Alley and if you’ve heard of me, keep in mind that I don’t consider myself a hero and I didn’t solve the murder by myself.
I was not in Sausalypso when the houseboat story started, during World War II, when Bechtel Corporation built a massive shipyard called Marinship on the shores of Rich Bay. At its peak, Marinship employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 cargo ships and oil tankers for the war in three years.
I lived in the City then, as a newly orphaned sixteen-year-old, laundering sheets and scrubbing toilets for Sally Cal, who ran a brothel on Nob Hill.
I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.
This was long before I became police chief in Sausalypso, the first woman police chief in California. You can look it up. Long before the houseboat wars, the murder at City Hall, and my brief brush with fame.
Workers came from all over to work at Marinship, and there wasn’t enough housing for them. The county housing authority and the feds teamed up to establish Marin City on what had been a dairy farm, and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still wasn’t enough. Many workers lived on old boats or built them from whatever materials they could scrounge.
When the war ended, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and a boatbuilder named Donlon Arquez bought 20-plus acres of waterfront, full of shipbuilding debris. The land was considered worthless at the time. But that changed.
Arquez dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to free-spirited artists and soldiers returning from the war. People built their homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes — most were not true houseboats as they were not navigable — connected to land with ramshackle wooden walkways or floating docks made from plywood sitting on styrofoam.
Arques charged little or no rent, and his landlord style could be generously described as “benign neglect.” Others called it anarchy. The waterfront became home to junk collectors, artists and craftsmen, boat builders and carpenters. Then, after the Summer of Love turned dark across the bay in Haight-Ashbury, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living. Many homes had electricity, the wires strung along posts on the piers, but not sewage hookups.
This waterfront property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. Local officials tried to clean up the houseboat scene, and Arques was forced to sell as complaints mounted. Then the evictions started.
You might remember news anchors like Dennis Richmond or Johnny Dash reporting from the Sausalypso waterfront about the eviction raid standoff, when the houseboaters in their dinghies pushed away our police boats with long oars. Or you read about the murder at City Hall in the newspaper.
But you can’t believe everything you see on your television screen or read in your paper. I was there.
Here’s what really happened.
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