By Jack Tracy and Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
“The most controversial event of 1937 started innocently enough in July when the Gardenia Packing Company asked the Sausalito City Council for permission to moor the ship Brookdale in Richardson's Bay.” That’s Jack Tracy’s take, from his local history book Moments in Time. Here’s the rest of Tracy’s tale:
The Brookdale was a floating fish reduction plant used in the production of fish oil. Several years earlier the city had considered a proposal to establish a fish cannery in Sausalito, similar to those on Monterey's "Cannery Row." The plan was rejected because of fears raised about odors emanating from the canning process. But the Brookdale was allowed to begin operations after a thousand-dollar bond was posted with assurances that no objectionable odors would be forthcoming. Sausalito residents awoke one morning to the pungent aroma of dead fish. Within weeks the stench had become unbearable.
Even the Sausalito Woman’s Club joined the battle. As reported on their website, https://sausalitowomansclub.org/history/civic-involvement, “For two decades, the Club fought repeated attempts by fishing interests to build a sardine cannery in Sausalito. In 1928, Club members personally investigated Monterey’s Cannery Row to ‘sniff out’ its impacts to the local community. They elicited written input from Monterey residents, who reported: ‘At times it is almost unlivable for many blocks around when these nauseating odors are turned loose on the air.’
“In 1937, the Gardenia Packing Company persuaded the Sausalito Town Council to allow a demonstration of its ‘odor-free’ fish-processing boat. The Gardenia Company’s claims were not as fragrant as its name implied; the ensuing odor caused such a furor that the boat was dispatched after only two weeks.
“The City Council ordered the Brookdale to up anchor and be gone. But the leaky, old, wooden-hulled vessel had sunk fast in the bay mud and could not be moved. After six months of cajoling, complaining, and threatening, the Gardenia Packing Company refloated the poor old Brookdale and towed her away. Early in 1938 the City Council outlawed fish reduction plants in Sausalito, vowing "No more Brookdale Affairs."
PHOTO COURTESY OF SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Sausalito’s odor-free waterfront, looking south toward downtown and San Francisco Circa 1937-38.
According to Tracy: “That action was part of Sausalito's new zoning ordinance, adopted in 1938 after six years of planning and deliberation. For the first time a zoning ordinance acknowledged that Sausalito was first and foremost a residential city, with pockets of commercial and industrial activity, rather than the potential industrial or commercial center some developers had envisioned.”
The Brookdale had been built in 1918 as a lumber schooner, according to the marine engineering journal The Log. She was 272.5 ft. long, and weighted 2,935 tons, so moving her must have been quite a project. When she left Sausalito, she relocated to Point San Pablo and resumed the practice of fish reduction.
Perhaps the Mill Valley Record of November 1937, described the Brookdale’s short-lived Sausalito operation best:
“There are gardenias and Gardenias, Sausalitans learned this week.”
Moments in Time is available for purchase at the Ice House, and can be read at the Sausalito Library or the Research Room of the Historical Society, which is open Wednesdays and Saturdays from 10:00 AM-1:00 PM on the top floor of City Hall.