Marin County is located in the northwestern part of the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 262,231. Its county seat and largest city is San Rafael. Marin County is across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and is included in the San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Sonoma County is located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, its population was 488,863. Its seat of government and largest city is Santa Rosa.
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
The Castro Theatre is a historic movie palace in the Castro District of San Francisco, California. The venue became San Francisco Historic Landmark #100 in September 1976. Located at 429 Castro Street, it was built in 1922 with a California Churrigueresque façade that pays homage—in its great arched central window surmounted by a scrolling pediment framing a niche—to the basilica of Mission Dolores nearby. Its designer, Timothy L. Pflueger, also designed Oakland's Paramount Theater and other movie theaters in California during that period. The theater has more than 1,400 seats.
Andrew Molera State Park is a 4,800 acres (1,900 ha), relatively undeveloped state park on the Big Sur coast of California, United States, preserving land as requested by former owner Frances Molera. Situated at the mouth of the Big Sur River, the property was part of the Rancho El Sur land grant, and later owned by Californio pioneer John Bautista Rogers Cooper and his descendants. Cooper's grandchildren Andrew and Frances Molera inherited the property from their mother in 1918. Andrew popularized the artichoke in California in 1922, and died in 1931. In 1965, Frances sold the property to The Nature Conservancy, stipulating that the park to be created should be named for her brother.
Penngrove is a census-designated place (CDP) in Sonoma County, California, United States, situated between the cities of Petaluma and Cotati, at the foot of the western flank of Sonoma Mountain. It is part of the North Bay subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 2,522 at the 2010 census.
Mount Tamalpais, known locally as Mount Tam, is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Mount Tamalpais State Park, the Marin Municipal Water District watershed, and National Park Service land, such as Muir Woods.
Bayside is an unincorporated community 2.25 miles (3.6 km) south-southeast of Arcata, at an elevation of 33 feet in Humboldt County, California. The ZIP Code is 95524, the area code is 707. The relatively large area was originally covered by large, ancient Coast Redwood trees down to what was the edge of a significantly larger Humboldt Bay at high tide. Later, the mammoth redwoods made it the natural placement of some of the area's earliest redwood lumber operations. A rock quarry was located in the area's hills, which form the beginning of the Coast Ranges, the source of water for an early public water system for the City of Arcata. Today, Bayside provides Arcata a buffer from Eureka's northward expansion along US Route 101 and the area, with the exception of some business and public buildings, is largely rural, with homes and small ranches dotting the landscape. Second growth forests exist mostly apart from cleared lands, which show some evidence of the extensive redwood forest that once existed in the form of large stumps. Some of the area's older Victorian era houses, are still present on the Old Arcata Road, the original main road connecting Arcata to Eureka. Jacoby Creek runs alongside a road of the same name from the hills in the direction of the Bay.
The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) is a U.S. National Recreation Area protecting 82,116 acres (33,231 ha) of ecologically and historically significant landscapes surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the park is land formerly used by the United States Army. GGNRA is managed by the National Park Service and is the second-most visited unit of the National Park system in the United States, with more than 15.6 million visitors in 2022. It is also one of the largest urban parks in the world, with a size two-and-a-half times that of the consolidated city and county of San Francisco.
Margaret Jean "Margo" St. James was an American sex worker and sex-positive feminist. In San Francisco, she founded COYOTE, an organization advocating decriminalization of prostitution, and co-founded the St. James Infirmary Clinic, a medical and social service organization serving sex workers in the Tenderloin.
Elsa Gidlow was a British-born, Canadian-American poet, freelance journalist, philosopher and humanitarian. She is best known for writing On a Grey Thread (1923), the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. In the 1950s, Gidlow helped found Druid Heights, a bohemian community in Marin County, California. She was the author of thirteen books and appeared as herself in the documentary film, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977). Completed just before her death, her autobiography, Elsa, I Come with My Songs (1986), recounts her life story. It is the first complete-life, lesbian autobiography published where the author "outs" herself and does not employ a pseudonym.
The Tamalpais Union High School District or TUHSD provides high school education to students residing in ten elementary districts in central and southern Marin County, California and parts of West Marin. The headquarters are on the property of Redwood High School in Larkspur, California.
Rancho Petaluma Adobe is a historic ranch house in Sonoma County, California. It was built from adobe bricks in 1836 by order of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. It was the largest privately owned adobe structure built in California and is the largest example of the Monterey Colonial style of architecture in the United States. A section of the former ranch has been preserved by the Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park and it is both a California Historic Landmark and a National Historic Landmark. The Rancho Petaluma Adobe State Historic Park is located on Adobe Road on the east side of the present-day town of Petaluma, California.
Founded in 1981, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy is a nonprofit cooperating association that supports park stewardship and conservation in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area—the most visited national park in the U.S.
Chelsea Heights and Westchester Hills are adjacent neighborhoods, separated by a municipal park, in the northwest corner of the Atlanta, Georgia suburb of Decatur. Chelsea Heights straddles the east and west sides of the CSX railroad tracks, falling within the City of Decatur and the unincorporated DeKalb County, respectively. The latter part, though located east of what historically was Druid Hills, is part of the Druid Hills CDP and participates in the Druid Hills Civic Association: see Chelsea Heights.
Rona Elliot is an American music journalist and interviewer of television, radio, and print. She was the first news anchor on music channel VH1 and music correspondent for NBC's Today show for ten years.
Adobe Creek, historically San Antonio Creek, is a 14.2-mile-long (22.9 km) northward-flowing stream originating on Black Mountain in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It courses through the cities of Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, and Palo Alto on its way to the Palo Alto Flood Basin and thence to southwestern San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Historically, Adobe Creek was a perennial stream and hosted runs of steelhead trout entering from the Bay, but these salmonids are now blocked by numerous flood control structures, including a tidal gate at the creek's mouth and a long concretized rectangular channel culminating in an impassable drop structure at El Camino Real. The co-founders of Adobe Systems both lived on Adobe Creek.
The Vallejo is a houseboat in Sausalito, California, United States. It was originally a passenger ferry in Portland, Oregon, known as O&CRR Ferry No. 2, in the late 19th century. After falling into disuse in Portland, it was transported to the San Francisco Bay in California, where it was used as a ferry between Vallejo and Mare Island until the end of World War II. It was later purchased by a group led by artist Jean Varda, and repurposed as a houseboat, where a number of parties and salons were hosted. The vessel was sold to the Society For Comparative Philosophy which was created by Alan Watts and Elsa Gidlow to be a charitable and teaching organization in 1962. It hosted many seminars and musical events and attracted many of the leading figures in the San Francisco area counterculture scene of the 1960s,70s and '80s. Jean Varda rented from the SCP until his death in the early 1970s. The Society continued, with Elsa Gidlow in a leadership role, until her death in 1986.
Isabel Grenfell Quallo was a Congolese-born British-American domestic worker and community activist known for her involvement in the development of Druid Heights, in Marin County, California. Born in the Congo Free State, she was educated in England and then moved with her mother to Kingston, Jamaica. Marrying at 16, she immigrated with her husband to New York City in 1914. Struggling with racism and her husband's mental illness, she supported her children by working as a domestic and waitress. Through contacts in the theater district, she made the acquaintance of writer Elsa Gidlow, becoming her lover for ten years. In their last two years together, Elsa purchased 5 acres of land south of Muir Woods. She then split the property with builder and jazz musician Roger Somers, and his wife Mary, and, initially with Isabel’s help, they fostered an atmosphere which would attract many of those involved in countercultural movements, active in the United States between 1950 and 1970.
Rancho Las Palmas also known as the Hiram Corey house, is a historic Queen Anne style house located at 100 River Road, Salinas, California. It was built by Hiram Corey in 1891, one of Monterey County's most successful stock farmers of the late 19th century. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 4, 1978, as Rancho Las Palmas. Today, the historic mansion is located in a gated residential community named Las Palmas Ranch and was renamed Chateau Coralini, which is open to the public as a boutique inn.
