Full transcript
Twenty Thousand Shipbuilders
Sausalito looks like it was always this: yachts, galleries, ice cream, a view of the city across the water. It was not. In 1942 the Bechtel Corporation cleared the mudflats north of downtown and built a shipyard called Marinship. Within months this town of a few thousand people had **twenty thousand workers** on site, running three shifts. In three and a half years they launched 93 vessels — 15 Liberty ships, 16 fleet oilers and 62 tankers. They built the first one in months and the last ones in a matter of weeks. Then the war ended, the contracts stopped, and the whole thing was dismantled almost as fast as it went up.
The Case Almost Nobody Mentions
Marinship recruited heavily from the American South, and thousands of Black workers came west for those jobs. But the shipyard had a closed shop agreement with the Boilermakers union, and the local that covered these yards did not admit Black members. Instead they were pushed into an auxiliary — a separate, all Black unit with no vote and no real standing. In 1943 more than two hundred workers refused to pay dues to it and were fired. One of them, Joseph James, sued. The case went to the California Supreme Court, argued in part by a young NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, and in 1944 the court ruled that a union with a closed shop cannot exclude people by race. It became a precedent for civil rights cases for decades. It happened here, on the flat land you drove past on the way in.
The Floating Homes
When Marinship shut down, it left behind barges, tugs, ferry hulls, and scrap lumber sitting in the shallows of Richardson Bay. People with no money and a lot of ingenuity started building houses on top of them. By the nineteen sixties this was a genuine bohemian colony — the artist Jean Varda lived on a converted ferryboat and hosted Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg; the philosopher Alan Watts lived on another. In the seventies it turned into open conflict with developers and the county, evictions and all, which locals still call the houseboat wars. About 400 floating homes remain. Downtown will not show them to you — they are north of the center, off Bridgeway. Walk out on Issaquah Dock and you can see the whole thing: a neighborhood with no streets.