Sparsely, Sage and Timely
By David V. MitchellRoads to nowhere
One day back in the 1970s, I was driving through Sleepy Hollow when I tried to take a shortcut north to Terra Linda via Fawn Drive. I never got there.
Despite what is shown on various maps, Fawn Drive does not connect Butterfield Road in the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood of San Anselmo with Freitas Parkway in the Terra Linda area of San Rafael. Instead, when I reached the end of Fawn, I had to do a lot of backing a filling merely to turn my car around.
With amusement, a resident came out to watch my maneuvers, so I asked him whatever happened to the rest of Fawn Drive. "You must have a Thompson Guide," he laughed. "This is the end of the public road. Although The Thompson Guide shows it continuing, the rest of Fawn Drive was never built."
In fact, Fawn Drive does continue east, but only as a fire road with gates at both ends. It’s fine for hiking, but hardly a shortcut for motorists traveling between San Anselmo and Terra Linda.
With one exception. From time to time it happens that county paramedics at rush hour need to quickly transport a patient by ambulance from the San Geronimo Valley, Fairfax, or San Anselmo to Marin General Hospital. But driving through Ross Valley’s commuter traffic is dreadfully time-consuming.
As a result, I learned this week, paramedics head to the Fawn Drive fire road, unlock the gate, and drive their ambulance over "Mission Pass" to the Freitas Parkway gate near the freeway. "It takes only about five minutes," one firefighter estimated.
Some of Point Reyes Station’s "paper streets," in contrast, will get you nowhere at all. Don’t bother trying to turn off Highway 1 onto Williams Street. On older maps, as Joe Soule at Coastal Marin Real Estate noted, Williams Street is a 60-foot-wide, extension of Mañana Way that was supposed to run below West Marin School. Try to find the street.
Light historian Dewey Livingston likewise noted that heading uphill on Bostick Avenue (which supposedly begins across Mesa Road from the back of Toby’s Feed Barn) will get you nowhere. Bostick, which was supposed to be perpendicular to Mesa Road, was never built either. Nor was "Loren Lane," an on-paper-only extension of Lorraine Avenue. Builder Doug Elliott of Point Reyes Station named it after his son Loren.
Meanwhile, the steady gentrification of West Marin has long been reflected by the renaming of its streets. Drake Highway is now Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, for example. but top honors go to a deadend road that parallels McDonald Lane on the north edge of Point Reyes Station. I’ve noticed that on a county fire department map, this little road still appears as "Poverty Lane." West Marin, however, is becoming more upscale with every passing year, and the road has now been renamed "Lois Lane." The Superman pun, however, is hardly original, there having been a "Lois Lane" in Forestville for decades; moreover, Point Reyes Station’s Lois Lane was at least technically named after Mrs. Lois McDonald from the neighboring lane.
Historian Livingston also pointed out that on older maps of Point Reyes Station, Lorraine Avenue is shown as a private road, prompting me to call the Road Maintenance Division of the county Public Works Department to find out of it’s still private. The word I got is that Lorraine is now on the county road division’s maintenance list.
I don’t object, but I can’t remember when the changeover occurred. Maybe it just slipped by. Don DeWolfe, publisher of this newspaper from 1957 to 1970, later wrote a wonderful column about how these things can happen.
DeWolfe told how the two-story apartment house on the corner of Mesa Road opposite Commodore Webster Drive came to be built. At the time of the building’s construction, Mesa Road was still unpaved with its edges rather vague. Over the years, buggies and motorcars had turned the corner into a wide, sweeping curve.
As it happened, the apartment house builder, Peter Strober, technically didn’t have enough land for his building, including setbacks. As DeWolfe told the story, the night before a county inspection of his building site was scheduled, Strober dug a hole in the middle of the county road and planted a cypress tree, making it appear the tree marked the corner of his property.
As a result, the apartment house then received a permit and was built. When county government paved Mesa Road, the pavement was laid outside the little cypress tree. And despite having been run over numerous times before a barricade was finally installed, the tiny tree still stands.-
Some of the most complicated paper-street problems are in the towns of Lagunitas, Forest Knolls, San Geronimo, and Woodacre, which were created as subdivisions in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the Lagunitas Development Company.
The company, which once owned 6,000 acres in the Valley, still had a few bits and pieces left long after it had sold off the bulk of its holdings. In 1992, the San Geronimo Valley Planning Group paid $2 for those scraps – 12 tiny lots, paper roads, and easements.
What a headache that turned out to be. Some of the parcels were subject to taxes the group had no way of paying, and in September, the tax collector sold two of Planning Group’s lots at auction for back taxes. Ironically, one 7,000-square-foot lot off Spring Road in Lagunitas sold for $10,000 – roughly $4,000 more than the taxes owed, so the Planning Group actually made a little money.
More typical, however, is the conundrum that arose in 2001 regarding Grant Street in Woodacre. The paper street, which was once supposed to connect Central and Railroad avenues, was never developed. While the ground beneath Grant Street has long been owned by neighboring landowners, the Planning Group’s 1992 purchase of paper streets gave it control over the access to use Grant Street.
You can imagine the problems that created. When the neighboring landowners two years ago said they wanted to clean up Grant Street and plant flowers and shrubs in it, the Planning Group became concerned. After all, some people had traditionally used Grant Street as a pedestrian path, and children sometimes played there.
No one disputed the fact that Grant Street would look better if it were cleaned up, but the Planning Group concluded a communitywide discussion on the matter would have to be held first. The curse of the paper street.