Larkspur Landing

History

Among various San Francisco Bay Area properties owned by San Francisco-born civil engineer Alfred Finnila in the 1970s was the area known as Larkspur Landing in Larkspur, Marin County. In the mid-1970s, Finnila sold, leased and rented parts of Larkspur Landing to the City of Larkspur and to various businesses, including the restaurant chain of Victoria Station.

The part of the Larkspur Landing area sold to the City of Larkspur by Alfred Finnila, to be used as a major Marin County ferry terminal, is today known both as Larkspur Landing and as Larkspur Ferry Terminal. It is the main Golden Gate Ferry terminal in Larkspur, Marin County.

Constructed in the mid-1970s, Larkspur Ferry Terminal rose from the ashes of the long demolished Hutchinson's Rock Quarry. The Ferry Terminal was built with an 18,000-square-foot (1,700 m²) open air space frame, or tetrahedral-octahedral tesselation, a canopy designed by San-Francisco-based architect Jacques de Brer. The Ferry Terminal opened on December 11, 1976. Regular commute service started on December 13, 1976. The ex-quarry-property also spawned the Larkspur Landing Shopping Center, with adjacent apartments and office space.

Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, a rail system similar to Caltrain and intended to ease traffic gridlock along Highway 101, will terminate at a newly built train station of the same name near the ferry terminal. It will serve as an intermodal station, where passengers can transfer to San-Francisco-bound ferries (after a 0.5-mile (0.8 km) walk).

In popular culture

Director Don Siegel filmed the final scenes of the 1971 movie Dirty Harry on the area of Larkspur Landing and at the adjacent East Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. After hijacking a school bus, the character of "Scorpio" - played by Andy Robinson - drives into East Sir Francis Drake Boulevard at the Greenbrae interchange, before crashing into the site of the Hutchinson Company quarry.