Marinship Historic Site
Historic · Marinship Way, Sausalito, CA 94965
Verified September 2026
Photo by Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
From 1942 to 1945, this stretch of Sausalito waterfront was a wartime shipyard that built 93 cargo ships and oil tankers and employed 20,000 people at its peak — a huge, dense workforce for a town this small. Walking Marinship Way now, past the boatyards and Marinship Park at the water's edge, is walking through what's left of it.
What To Expect
A number of the original shipyard buildings still stand and now house boatyards, marine businesses, and artist studios — more surviving WWII "emergency shipyard" structures than almost anywhere else in the Bay Area. Marinship set a wartime production record on June 16, 1945, launching and delivering the tanker SS Huntington Hills in just 33 days. The yard was also the site of James v. Marinship, a 1944 California Supreme Court case that struck down a shipbuilders' union's practice of excluding Black workers from full membership — a genuine early civil-rights milestone that predates the postwar era Sausalito is usually associated with. The Bay Model Visitor Center, a short walk away, has a permanent exhibit covering both threads of the story.
Getting There
Marinship Way runs along the waterfront just south of the Bay Model, easy to reach on foot or bike from downtown along Bridgeway. Marinship Park itself has been closed since 2021 and is not currently open to the public — see our events guide for why, and what replaced the festival that used to fill it every Labor Day.
Good To Know
This is a working waterfront, not a formal historic park — there's no admission or set hours, just streets and buildings you can walk past. Marinship Park itself is fenced off, so don't plan on sitting in it. The Bay Model's Marinship exhibit is the best single stop for the actual history.