Here's some pictures from our collection relating to that apartment building Steve posted. It's located across the street from the Lark Creek Shops in the 200 block of Magnolia. The property it was built on was important to us because it was just below our house at 9 Arch Street.

One day in 1958, trucks suddenly showed up and began ripping out the forest of acacias, oaks and Scotch broom on the slope below us. This was the first we knew anything was going on. Here's a shot I took from our dining room window.


That wasn't the worst of it, though. After the trees were cleared, earth movers came in and started excavating - right up to within a few feet of our foundation. Naturally, we freaked out. Investigation showed, however, that the southeast corner of our house was actually over the property line and we couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, the hard clay shelf our house was built on was stable, though my father had to build bulkheads to prevent erosion and slides. Each winter storm for years thereafter had us fretting.


Then the excavated property just sat empty like this, as late as 1960, when my brother Will took this gag shot of the 14 year old me, with his pipe in my mouth, sitting in one of Hil Probert's new Toyopets at his dealership (now, of course, the Lark Creek Shops). That's our house at the upper right corner.


I'm not sure when they finally built the apartment house, but it was there in 1963 when I took this shot of the Larkspur Fire Dept.'s 1946 American-LaFrance engine on the way to a fire call. Again, that's our house at the top.



There's more about Hil Probert and "our" block of Magnolia at my Larkspur web site.

-- Edited by Paul Penna at 01:58, 2008-04-23