Sausalito Neighborhoods: Marin City & Pohono St.

Next Neighborhood North: City of Mill Valley‘s “Tam Junction” area

Next Neighborhood South: Marinship

Next Neighborhood Southeast: Floating Homes

This is one of a series of pages on each of Sausalito’s Neighborhoods, with links to Restaurants, Hotels, Bus Stops and Activities in each area. Click here to return to the Neighborhoods Index.

Marin City & Pohono St.

Marin City is the area at the northern border of Sausalito. To many people, Marin City is more familiar as the location of a regional shopping center and a major Golden Gate Transit and Marin Transit bus routes hub. This area also includes a strip of Sausalito that lies between Highway 101 and the Bay near Pohono St., the seaplane dock and Gate 6 1/2 Road. where Sausalito adjoins Mill Valley. Parts of the area are outside the city limits of Sausalito, but within the Sausalito-Marin City School District.

But there’s more to Marin City’s history than many people know. Northern Sausalito is an historic area due to its role in World War II shipbuilding, but there is even more important social and cultural history here from the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The Marin City neighborhood was born out of the western-most housing units built for the shipyard workers at the Marinship shipyards in Sausalito during World War II. It was the workers who lived here in the early 1940’s, many of them African American, who had the courage to stand up against discrimination practiced by labor unions on behalf of employers in the landmark 1944 California Supreme Court case James v. Marinship, where one of the lead attorneys was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. They won that legal battle, striking a major blow to employment discrimination in California a full ten years before Brown v. Board of Education — a case also argued successfully by Marshall.