Marin, Step by Step

A walk, a workout and a world of small wonders.

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I’m walking in the Sausalito hills, looking for a stairway tucked into the cul-de-sac end of Prospect Avenue. The summer fog is already in, the air is thick with eucalyptus and the growing sound of traffic spilling over from the freeway above means I’m close to my destination.

All afternoon this is what I’ve been doing, lugging myself and 30 pounds of camera gear up and down. The problem is I don’t see the stairs. There’s nothing at the end of the street except what appears to be a wall of bramble climbing up to Highway 101. At the last house on the street a man and a woman stand talking in a driveway. He’s taking a break from yard work. She is dressed in red, the same color as her hair. I ask about the stairs. The woman answers. “If you like stairs,” she says, a wide smile framing her words, “then your dream is just ahead.”

Despite the glowing burn in my calves, the steady twitch in my quads and the nagging realization that my aging knees may refuse to ambulate in the morning, I laugh. The line between dream and nightmare is whisper thin and I have a feeling I’m about to cross it. Fifty feet farther down the road, there they are—seven concrete flights, daunting, but not nearly as steep as some I’ve already climbed on my trek up from the waterfront on Bridgeway.

A few minutes and some heavy breathing later, I’m on the Spencer Avenue overpass, looking down at the freeway. I feel self-congratulatory, not so much for the physical climb—although it is indeed a grind—but more for overcoming the habit of using four wheels to take me somewhere where two legs will work just as well.

As you’ll see, the story of the dozens of hidden and not-so hidden public stairways in Marin is really a tale about getting from point A to point B the old-fashioned way—on foot—and what you might find as you go.

A BIT OF HISTORY

The hilly cities of southern Marin, from Sausalito to Corte Madera, are dotted with public steps and stairways linking one neighborhood to another. Finding a definitive number of these stairways is elusive. Many are mapped. A few aren’t. Many have names, historic markers or signposts. Others seem abandoned.

Some accounting has been done, though. A recent effort by Mill Valley to inventory all its steps, paths and lanes found more than 175 such byways, not all of them stairs, but most involving some sort of hill. In Sausalito, local writer Dorothy Gibson detailed the history of more than two dozen stairways and painstakingly counted the steps in each—109, for example, on El Monte, which leads up from Bridgeway to Bulkley Avenue. In Belvedere, a map (obtainable from city hall) shows how to find the city’s 18 stair-stepped lanes, each marked by a colorful illustrated sign.

The first impression many of these stairways present is age—and old they are. Some date back to the 1890s and many others to the early 1900s, remnants of the first days of these cities when cars were still a rarity, electric trains linked Fairfax, San Anselmo, Mill Valley and San Rafael with Sausalito, and the common connection to San Francisco for a commuter or a weekend homeowner was the ferry.

The stairways were built essentially as shortcuts from the hill neighborhoods to the flats, where the trains or the ferry terminals were. Developers constructed some as enticements for would-be home buyers. Other paths evolved organically as residents (or servants) eschewed the looping switchbacks of hillside roads in favor of more direct routes.

The vintage is readily visible. Art Deco–esque pillars bracket the lower entrance of the North Street steps in Sausalito. In Mill Valley, broken slabs of concrete and loose wooden railings make for treacherous passage on the steep Willow Steps above Miller Avenue, and a crumbly dirt path, rippled with tree roots, substitutes for stairs on Alcatraz Lane.

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