Druid Heights | |
---|---|
Counterculture Enclave | |
Coordinates: 37°53′21.174″N122°33′52.9596″W / 37.88921500°N 122.564711000°W | |
Founded by | Elsa Gidlow, |
Druid Heights was a counterculture enclave in Marin County, California, U.S., The property was purchased in 1954 by poet Elsa Gidlow, and subsequently the land was split with carpenter Roger Somers and his wife Mary. In 1956, Elsa named her portion Druid Heights and today the entire site is called by this moniker although in practice the neighbors seldom used the name. In actuality, the community was not a monolith, but the neighborhood shared common values and responsibilities concomitant with the remote site's lack of services. It had no city water system, no sewers, and no city maintenance for the three mile dirt road that gave them access to their properties. The neighbors, including others along the road, had to pool money and resources to maintain these vital services and these challenges demanded they work together in harmony. The remoteness and uniqueness of the site attracted various countercultural movements and many figures of the San Francisco Renaissance. [1]
Druid Heights was, by its founder Elsa Gidlow, jokingly called an "unintentional" community located on the southeast flank of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, about a mile from the Pacific Ocean. [2] : 267–268 The property was initially inhabited by carpenter Roger Somers and poet Elsa Gidlow, along with their partners, on five acres of a former chicken ranch. [1] Gidlow purchased the acreage and then legally split the parcel in 1954 so she could share it with carpenter Roger Somers and his wife Mary. [3] [4] [5] In 1956, Elsa gave her portion, approximately two acres, the name Druid Heights in honor of two female writers, the revolutionary and teacher of Irish lore, Ella Young (the Druid), and Emily Brontë (author of Wuthering Heights)
The community members, sometimes separately and other times together, allowed the acreage to be a meeting place for three countercultural movements in the United States, including the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the women's movement of the 1970s. [1] It also, through the efforts of Elsa Gidlow, became a refuge for many famous figures of the San Francisco Renaissance including her friends Kenneth Rexroth and former resident of the Heights, Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder.
Accessible by a dirt road connected to Muir Woods Road, the two properties occupied a now split five-acre ranch formerly known as the Haapa Property. On his portion, Somers, a free spirited and hard working craftsman, was influenced by Japanese architecture and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. He built or remodeled many of the structures with the help of organizational skills and common sense from furniture designer and later the third owner, Ed Stiles. [6] Gidlow was fond of decorative gardening and organic agriculture, and she grew vegetables for herself and shared the excess with other people in the area. [7] : 136
Seeing a broader purpose for her portion of the land, The Society For Comparative Philosophy, begun in 1962, was established here as a non-profit by Elsa Gidlow and Alan Watts aiming for a broad vision approach to "studies of humanity's relation to nature and the universe." [8] : 360 They purchased the converted ferry boat Vallejo to "be headquarters for the Society and site of seminars and other events," and the Heights could therefore be kept a closely guarded secret enjoyed by insiders and invited guests. [8] : 361 The Society fell on hard times after the 1973 death of Alan Watts, but in his name and with the help of a solid board of directors, it revived and continued until Gidlow's death in 1987.
Gidlow had planned to turn Druid Heights into a pay-as-you-go retreat for artists, but after the National Park Service acquired the land using eminent domain in 1977, it could no longer host temporary guests, only legal tenants. [9] Located above Muir Woods National Monument, Druid Heights was acquired by the National Park Service in the 1970s [10] [3] and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. [11]
"With [Gidlow's] skill as a gardener and [Somers'] as an architect they transformed this area into a paradise, a Garden of Eden...All this they accomplished with imagination and muscle...It has what people who are only rich find so frustrating, because you cannot buy it with money."
Alan Watts [2] : 268
There are approximately 16 historic buildings and structures in what is today commonly called Druid Heights [11] with the most important structure, poet Elsa Gidlow's own house, seriously endangered due to a lack of maintenance. Remaining structures include:
Marcy Mendelson directed and produced a documentary about the location called Druid Heights, and stated that the location was a vortex of social and artistic energy and reminiscent of the Shire. [14]
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.
The Coast Miwok are an Indigenous people of California that were the second-largest tribe of the Miwok people. Coast Miwok inhabited the general area of present-day Marin County and southern Sonoma County in Northern California, from the Golden Gate north to Duncans Point and eastward to Sonoma Creek. Coast Miwok included the Bodega Bay Miwok, or Olamentko (Olamentke), from authenticated Miwok villages around Bodega Bay, the Marin Miwok, or Hookooeko (Huukuiko), and Southern Sonoma Miwok, or Lekahtewutko (Lekatuit). While they did not have an overarching name for themselves, the Coast Miwok word for people, Micha-ko, was suggested by A. L. Kroeber as a possible endonym, keeping with a common practice among tribal groups and the ethnographers studying them in the early 20th century and with the term Miwok itself, which is the Central Sierra Miwok word for 'people'.
The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is a private university in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1968. As of 2020, the institute operates in two locations: the main campus near the confluence of the Civic Center, SoMa, and Mission districts, and another campus for the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. As of 2020, CIIS has a total of 1,510 students and 80 core faculty members.
China Camp State Park is a state park in Marin County, California, surrounding a historic Chinese American shrimp-fishing village and a salt marsh. The park is located in San Rafael, California, on the shore of San Pablo Bay. It is known for its hiking and mountain biking trails, scenic views, and open spaces. The 1,514-acre (613 ha) park was established in 1976. A 75-acre (30 ha) district, including the shrimping village and a prehistoric shell midden, were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 for having state-level significance in archaeology, architecture, commerce, settlement, and social history. China Camp State Park, along with the Rush Ranch Open Space Preserve, is part of the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.
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.
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.
Olompali State Historic Park is a 700-acre (2.8 km2) California State Park in Marin County, California. It consists of the former Rancho Olómpali and was the site of the famed Battle of Olómpali during the Bear Flag Revolt. Rancho Olómpali was purchased by the Californian government in 1977, which turned it into a public park.
Jack London State Historic Park, also known as Jack London Home and Ranch, is a California State Historic Park near Glen Ellen, California, United States, situated on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain. It includes the ruins of a house burned a few months before Jack London and family were to move in, a cottage in which they had lived, another house built later, and the graves of Jack London and his wife. The property is both a California Historical Landmark and a National Historic Landmark.
Cliff May (1903–1989) was a building designer practicing in California best known and remembered for developing the suburban Post-war "dream home", and the Mid-century Modern
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 ("SCP") 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.
Robert Erickson is an American furniture designer and woodworker in Nevada City, California. He is a studio maker, who custom designs chairs and other furniture. His work is in several U.S. national collections.
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.
The Leale House is a historic residence located at 2475 Pacific Avenue, between Fillmore Street and Steiner Street, in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California in the United States.