History of Galilee Harbor, Sausalito’s Live-Aboard Co-op

At the foot of Napa Street, beside Dunphy Park, a few dozen boats make up one of the stranger success stories of the Bay Area waterfront. The history of Galilee Harbor in Sausalito takes in a Gold Rush shoreline, a wooden ship that came to rest in the mud, a boatyard torn down before dawn and a long legal fight.

A pier at the foot of Napa Street

Latitude 38 wrote in 2013 that the site “has been involved in maritime trades since shortly after the Gold Rush,” and that by the turn of the 20th century a pier served fishing craft and live-aboard barges.

A 2026 San Francisco Chronicle article on Annette Rose put it this way: “The live-aboard vessels that now constitute Galilee Harbor have been around since the turn of the 20th century, providing affordable housing for fishermen and people who worked in the boatbuilding industry. Artists began moving in after World War II.”

The ship that gave the harbor its name

“The residents named their community after a wooden cargo ship built by renowned builder Matthew Turner in 1891,” Elena Kadvany wrote in the Chronicle in 2023. The Sausalito Historical Society explains the name: “Many of her passengers were missionaries, which is why the biblical name Galilee was chosen.”

The Galilee had several lives. After Turner died in 1909 she was sold to the Union Fish Company and rigged as a three-masted schooner; in 1936 Captain John Quinn made her a home. She ended up “beached in Sausalito at the foot of Napa Street where Galilee Harbor stands today.”

Sausalito condemned 22 vessels in 1962, the Galilee among them. Her stern was cut off for restoration in 1975, her bow went to Benicia in the mid-1980s, and the restored stern is on display at Fort Mason. Call of the Sea’s history of the Matthew Turner tells how a new brigantine was designed from Turner’s original plans.

August 4, 1980: the end of Bob’s Boatyard

“In the late 1970s, the Sausalito City Council sought to clean up the town’s waterfront,” the Chronicle wrote. A local timeline of the water wars records that in 1977 “Bob’s Boatyard in the area of Napa Street was under attack simultaneously”.

In the early hours of August 4, 1980, Bob’s Boatyard in Sausalito was torn down, and accounts differ on who ordered it. The 2023 Chronicle feature, citing resident Marianne Dolan’s documentary, says police officers came with a bulldozer. The 2026 Chronicle article on Rose says the yard “was demolished by a developer who had bought the property,” while Latitude 38 and CBS San Francisco say the city cleared it.

The residents answered in court. “They got a restraining order to block further demolition and started campaigning for a viable way to live at the Napa Street harbor.” The same year the boatyard’s people organized as a co-op and incorporated as Galilee Harbor.

Sixteen years with the regulators

The harbor’s biggest opponent was the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which in the Chronicle’s words “doesn’t permit residential use of the water”. The commission “sued Galilee and threatened to fine its residents.”

“Galilee countersued and won a settlement in 1996 whose purpose is to preserve affordable housing for artists and maritime workers,” with conditions that included restoring a neighboring marsh and keeping public shoreline parking.

Latitude 38 counted the cost in years: “After 18 years of haggling with various agencies,” the tenants won permits for a legal live-aboard marina, which puts the permits at the end of the 1990s. By 2010, “The Association now owns the much-upgraded property.”

Hardman, Rose and the harbor

Chris Hardman, who founded Antenna Theater, and Annette Rose, its longtime managing director, were part of the harbor’s story from the start. When the boatyard came down, preservationists including the two of them “walked into a meeting of the Sausalito City Council carrying chainsaws. They didn’t have to start them up.”

In the mid-1980s they bought “the Escort, an 85-foot tugboat that they towed to Galilee Harbor and that became their home.” Rose was “the first and only Galilee Harbor resident to serve on the City Council”, elected in 1988 and mayor in 1991, and later the only one on the Marin County Board of Supervisors. Galilee’s longtime administrator remembered: “We were perceived as pirates on the waterfront, and she changed the perception.”

The harbor was a stage too. In 1993 Antenna’s town-wide show On Sight (in Sausalito) used its parking lot as a stop. Years earlier, Snake Theater had built the giant puppets of the 1977 houseboat protest. In 2006 a fire ended the couple’s last tugboat home, a night told in Fire and Ice, the piece it became.

Year	Event	Source
Early 1980s	Maritime Day begins, marking the 1980 demolition	San Francisco Chronicle, 2026
Mid-1980s	The tug Escort towed to Galilee as the family home	San Francisco Chronicle, 2026
1988-2004	Rose, the only Galilee resident on the City Council and the Board of Supervisors	San Francisco Chronicle, 2026
1993	On Sight (in Sausalito) uses the harbor’s parking lot as a stage	Reviews, via the On Sight post
2006	The tug Liberty burns; Fire and Ice follows	Antenna press release
2024	Maritime Day: “A Salute to Chris Hardman”	Floating Times

One boat, one vote: the harbor today

The 2023 Chronicle counted “38 boats docked at 300 Napa St. overlooking Richardson Bay” and called Galilee “thought to be the only wholly owned and operated live-aboard cooperative harbor in the country.” It runs itself: “Galilee functions democratically; its slogan is ‘one boat, one vote.’”

“Residents are either artists or maritime workers and must be voted in,” CBS San Francisco reported, and most must qualify as low income.

Galilee Harbor Maritime Day is the harbor’s summer festival, held the first weekend of August “to commemorate the date of Aug. 4, 1980, when Bob’s Boatyard on the waterfront was demolished”. Rose and Hardman started it in the early 1980s. Latitude 38’s note on Maritime Day describes exhibits, demonstrations, music, dinghy races and a flea market, and in 2024 the theme was “A Salute to Chris Hardman,” with his masks and props in the community garden.

The history of Galilee Harbor, Sausalito, in eight dates

Year	Event	Source
c. 1900	A Napa Street pier serves fishing boats and live-aboard barges	Latitude 38
1936	The brigantine Galilee becomes a residence, later beached at the foot of Napa Street	Sausalito Historical Society
1977	Bob’s Boatyard “under attack” in the waterfront fights	Floating Times
1980	Bob’s Boatyard torn down on August 4; residents incorporate as Galilee Harbor	Chronicle; Floating Times
1989	City draft report on a 41-berth marine service harbor	CEQAnet
1996	Settlement with BCDC preserves affordable homes for artists and maritime workers	Chronicle
2002	Marin Community Foundation loan builds docks	Chronicle
2023	About 38 boats; “one boat, one vote”	Chronicle

The harbor sits in the old Marinship district, a short walk from the Marinship and the Bay Model nearby. Across the water, the history of the Herbst Theatre is another Bay Area place story, and every Antenna production that touched Sausalito is in the Antenna chronology.

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