The Machine Shop's Missed Opportunity
Dear Neighbors—
We’ve all seen the Machine Shop: the giant building with the collapsed roof, sitting empty in the middle of Sausalito for decades.
Whenever I look at it, I think about what it once was—and what it could have become.
Built in just a few months during World War II, it was part of a shipyard that built Liberty ships; the fastest of these ships went from keel-laying to launch in a stunning 33 days! It represents an extraordinary chapter in Sausalito’s history: people coming together, building things, and serving their country.
In 2010, we had an opportunity to carry that story forward.
The building belongs to the Federal Government. The Veterans Administration proposed replacing it with a facility to research cancer and liver disease for our veterans. Its design echoed the soaring curves and scale of the original Machine Shop. These are actual renderings from the 2010 Veterans Administration proposal (not AI!):
Imagine that: a place built to serve our country during wartime finding a new purpose caring for those who served.
The original structure would have come down. But its history would have been visible in the architecture, and its spirit would have lived on in the work happening inside.
To me, that would have been a beautiful way to honor our past.
Rather than embrace this proposal and smooth the way for it, we instead insisted the government restore and maintain the existing shell. We backed this up by pushing for a National Historic Register designation so no one else could ever do anything different.
The Marin Independent Journal reported in an article entitled: 'Sausalito fights feds over Marinship building'
“Now the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs…wants to tear down the hangarlike structure and replace it with a new medical research center.”
“But the city of Sausalito is fighting the plan, saying the old structure is part of the city’s history and needs to remain standing.”
An official Veterans Administration report said:
“this project was dropped based on opposition from the City of Sausalito and its residents”
I understand the desire to hold on to something that means so much to our town. But a lack of flexibility and accepting doing nothing while waiting for the perfection, has significant costs. And we see in examples across the Marinship today what we saw in microcosm at the Machine Shop back in 2010.
Sixteen years later, the research center was never built. The Machine Shop is still empty, and the historic structure we hoped to preserve continues to fall apart. Read this article and see if the sentiments back then sound at all familiar to today.
Whatsmore, the building has a security guard 16 hours a day. My estimate is that, over the years, more than one million of our federal taxpayer dollars have been spent paying to guard this decaying building instead of researching cancer.
That is what saddens me. A lose-lose outcome. We wanted to save something precious; but it wasn’t just the building that was precious. There was meaning behind the building that could have been honored with something new. Today we are losing the building, we wasted a bunch of taxpayer money, and we lost the opportunity to cultivate something that would have honored the past with a meaningful active future.
I think about the researchers who could have worked there. The veterans their work might have helped. The people coming to our waterfront each morning to do something worthwhile.
We cannot recover that opportunity. But we can learn from it.
Preservation takes care, investment, purpose, and also compassion, humility, and flexibility. Sometimes that means restoring an old building. Sometimes it means welcoming something new that carries our story forward. Something that makes new history.
The Marin Independent Journal said this when it endorsed Measure X last week:
“It is a Sausalito tradition to stop proposals and promise a better plan in the future. But no significant plan has ever been approved and little has really changed.”
“As businesses in the area leave, shrivel or struggle to maintain status quo, rusty and broken old buildings, as well as vehicle, remain. That’s not preservation, that’s willful disregard.”
“Measure X is a positive step in the right direction. Sausalito can no longer afford inaction.”
I believe we can approach the next proposal for the Machine Shop, and for anything in the Marinship, with both care for what we love and openness to what it could become. But we have to try to resist the urge of letting the perfect be enemy of the good.
Measure X doesn’t approve any new building, not a single one. It begins changing the rules that discourage people from bringing proposals forward, so we can consider them, shape them, and decide.
It is a first step. It can be amended. We can keep improving it as we go.
I want a waterfront where our history has a thriving present, adaptable to an unknowable and changing future, but where people always make things, create things, and do work that matters.
That is why I’m voting YES on Measure X on November 3.
I hope you’ll join me.
PS: If you have the time to dig deeper:
Here are emblematic messages from an artist, marina steward, entrepreneur, maritime organization, fisherman, and maritime leaders who are being suffocated by our current laws.
Here is Heath Ceramics pleading for help. Do we value Heath?
Click to read the endorsements from the Marin Independent Journal here, the Greenbelt Alliance, the Sustainable Waterfront Association.
Here is a link to the SFChronicle polemic on Measure X.
Here is a description of the mind numbing multi-year process that will still exist after Measure X that ensures we can control the appearance of anything actually permitted; regardless of what is proposed.
Watch the whole Measure X debate here.
Here is an FAQ and a Fact vs. Fiction, if you have time to read.
Here is how CAST, and MALT are examples of what is empowered by Measure X. Both these protective mechanisms take money. And Measure X is a pathway to funding things like this.
PPS. We can do better than this:
This is an actual photo of an RV storage yard in today’s Marinship that the current rules will not allow to be developed into anything with higher commercial usage.
