![]() ![]() The explanation for the name Waldo is less precise. “In the ’70s, Alan Hart, a Caltrans engineer, came up with that concept,” she states, “and Caltrans has maintained them ever since.” As for local color, according to Currie, blissful hippies did not paint the rainbows on the southern portals. In the mid-’50s, a second tunnel opened to handle southbound traffic (northbound uses the original tunnel). The original 1,000-foot bore was four lanes wide, handled two-way traffic and cost $630,346. “Now, 60 years later,” says Mary Currie, public affairs director for the Golden Gate Bridge District, “39.3 million bridge crossings were made in 2008.” This equates to roughly 115,000 cars a day traveling somewhere on Highway 101 in Marin. Within 10 years of the bridge’s opening, 7.8 million vehicles crossed it in a year and traveled some part of Highway 101 in Marin. Before the bridge, the highway handled approximately 1.5 million cars annually. Traffic-wise, the most significant impact on Highway 101 in Marin was the May 27, 1937, opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, Marin’s billboards disappeared-and never reappeared.” Her efforts resulted in passage of County Ordinance 226, which, Spitz says, “required architectural approval of all signs within 500 feet of the highway. “This was sore subject number one for Sepha Evers, a cofounder of today’s Marin Conservation League,” says historian Spitz. ![]() In 1935-even before the Golden Gate Bridge opened-Marin County moved to ban billboards along its stretch of Highway 101. “But just 25 years later, in 1956, it was replaced with a much wider steel and concrete structure.” “It was built of redwood timbers, supposedly to last hundreds of years,” Whitten adds. “After it was finished, tidal waters sometimes rose on both sides of the highway, giving motorists a sense of trepidation as they drove atop the dike that formed the roadbed.” Today, that roadway is eight-lanes wide, and Town Center and the Village at Corte Madera shopping centers occupy those marshlands.Īccording to Caltrans historian Alicia Whitten, the conversion to a direct route through Marin culminated with the November 1931 completion of the Redwood Bridge, a quarter-mile span over Richardson Bay. “They constructed the Redwood Highway right across the marshland,” reads A History of Corte Madera, edited by Jana Haehl. By 1929, work on a direct passage through Marin had begun. Highway 101, the nation’s westernmost federally owned highway. government authorized construction of U.S. That circuitous route through Marin was four miles longer than what the current six- and eight-lane 101 travels between Sausalito and San Rafael. The original “State Highway” then traveled down Fourth Street and turned north at today’s Lincoln Avenue before going through what would become Novato (today’s Redwood Highway), into the California redwoods and eventually on to Oregon. From there, it went through Larkspur, Ross, and San Anselmo, before turning east onto what’s now San Rafael’s Miracle Mile. “No aspect of the county’s infrastructure plays a bigger role in our daily lives.” According to Spitz’s Marin, a History, the original “State Highway,” as it was designated in Marin in 1909, was a collection of Miwok trails and county roads that started at the ferry terminal in Sausalito and traveled a westerly course around Richardson Bay.Īfter passing just-completed Tamalpais Union High School, it bypassed downtown Mill Valley and followed today’s Camino Alto over the hill into Corte Madera. “Someday, someone should write a book about Highway 101 in Marin,” says local historian Barry Spitz. The Golden Gate Bridge and the original Waldo Tunnel were completed in 1937 both significantly impacted Highway 101. Highway 101 in Marin? Why are there none now?ģ. In 1909, what was the original “State Highway” route through Marin County?Ģ. What’s a history lesson without an exam? This is an open book test-the answers are in the story that follows.ġ.
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