An Enduring Legacy: Martha Gerbode and the GGNRA
Alison Taggart-Barone
Bobcats, coyotes, chirping birds, and colorful wildflowers are just some of the amazing wildlife you may encounter on a trip to Gerbode Valley, a rugged chapparal backcountry running northeast from Rodeo Lagoon in the Marin Headlands. Here, it’s easy to forget you’re just minutes from the soaring towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyscrapers of San Francisco.
This beautiful, wild place might have been turned into parking lots, tract homes, and strip malls if not for the efforts of the valley’s namesake, Martha Gerbode. Her name isn't often mentioned in accounts of the Bay Area environmental movement, but this San Francisco philanthropist, environmentalist, and civic leader played a paramount role in preserving some of the most treasured sites in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) for future generations.
NPS/Romaine Photography, Bancroft Library
In the 1960s—prior to the founding of the GGNRA in 1972—Gerbode financed efforts to halt the construction of a city-scale development called Marincello on the 2,100 acre parcel of land now bearing her name. Without Gerbode’s backing, and her later advocacy for setting aside Alcatraz Island as a national park site, it's possible the GGNRA in its current form wouldn't exist.
Gerbode was among a new wave of environmentalists who emerged in the Bay Area and across the United States in the 1960s. She was a behind-the-scenes patron of organizations and individuals seeking to stem the tide of reckless post-World War II development. Importantly, as a socialite and city matron in her late 50s, Gerbode’s involvement challenges the prevailing notion of postwar environmentalism as the exclusive enclave of radical college students, scientists, outdoorsmen, and powerful male politicians from the Northeast.
Martha Alexander Gerbode was born in Piedmont in 1909 to a well-to-do family, descended from missionaries who settled in Hawaii in the 1830s. Highly educated and well-traveled, Gerbode developed wide-ranging intellectual and artistic interests as a young adult, from international affairs to the fine arts of printing and bookbinding. At Stanford, she met and would later marry a young medical student, Frank, who went on to become a world-renowned heart surgeon. The couple built a palatial house in Pacific Heights in the 1930s and had four children.
Although ensconced in the San Francisco elite, Gerbode refused to play the part of an aloof socialite. Rather, she was a deeply engaged advocate for causes ranging from women’s health (she funded the establishment of San Francisco’s branch of Planned Parenthood), to public housing and peaceful international relationships. She was a consistent patron of the arts, fundraised for the Red Cross during World War II, and was the first woman to be selected for a federal grand jury in San Francisco.
“Don’t bring me any projects that other people would fund. I just want the tough, controversial ones." — Martha Gerbode
Over the years, she garnered a reputation as both generous and fiercely independent, willing to disregard peer pressure and social conventions in supporting causes she held important. During the fight to stop Marincello, she told Huey Johnson, then western regional director of the Nature Conservancy, "Look, don't bring me any projects that other people would fund. I just want the tough, controversial ones."
Gerbode’s emergence as an environmental philanthropist by the mid-1960s wasn't driven by a personal penchant for outdoor adventures. Rather, she was motivated by preservationist instincts and a sense of civic responsibility. Through the expansive windows of her mansion in Pacific Heights—over which she proudly flew a green-and-white ecology flag—she observed the precipitous growth of smog and traffic following World War II. She also saw suburban sprawl gobble up open land and even encroach upon the Bay itself.
“We must preserve some of our natural resources for our descendants. That is very important to me,” she told an interviewer in 1969. Following her convictions, she marshalled her significant financial resources and influence to preserve undeveloped land in both California and Hawaii.
Her backing of efforts to derail Marincello, a multiuse development featuring 50 high-rise apartment towers, light industry, and a mile-long shopping center to accommodate 20,000 people in the Marin Headlands, perhaps best exemplifies her willingness to ruffle feathers among powerful interests and to make her mark on the ecology movement.
The city-sized Marincello was first proposed by developer Thomas Frouge in 1964, to be built upon land owned by Gulf Oil. It seemed all but destined to become reality after the project received approval by the Marin County Board of Supervisors. However, with Gerbode’s strong financial support, a group of environmentalists led by Johnson and the Nature Conservancy used novel legal strategies to stall and eventually stop the plan.
In 1972, the Nature Conservancy purchased the land from Gulf Oil for $6.5 million dollars, holding it in a trust until the land was transferred to the National Park Service in 1975. Johnson led efforts to name the tract the Martha Alexander Gerbode Preserve (a portion of which was later renamed Gerbode Valley), in honor of his steadfast supporter after she passed away in 1971.
The Marincello saga was one of many instances of Gerbode’s dedication to protecting undeveloped land. She knocked on doors and collected signatures for Save the Bay, vehemently fought plans for high-rise development in Hawaii, and played an important if largely forgotten role in the transfer of Alcatraz Island to the GGNRA.
When plans for the island were uncertain after the closure of the federal penitentiary in 1963, Gerbode held off Texas businessman Lamar Hunt’s plan to develop Alcatraz into a commercial hub by offering to pay the $1,800 monthly maintenance fee the federal government was proposing to charge the city. After the government waived the fee, Gerbode proposed instead to gather philanthropic support to purchase the island outright for $2 million and to turn it into a park. Although this latter offer proved unnecessary after Alcatraz Island was included among the original boundaries of the GGNRA in 1972, Gerbode nonetheless played an important role in helping to preserve Alcatraz for future generations.
Gerbode was a “pioneering conservationist” who “used her position within the establishment to fight the evils of the system,” Johnson eulogized in Clear Creek, an environmental magazine, in 1972. “The Martha Gerbodes [of the world] were the kind people who were the backbone, principled people who also had the wealth to put behind their beliefs,” he later reflected in 1989.
Most of all, Martha Gerbode wanted to leave a better world behind. Gerbode’s enduring legacy as an environmental philanthropist is unmistakable upon any visit to the stunning wilds of Gerbode Valley and the shores of Alcatraz Island. In the 1969 newspaper interview, she reflected on how she wanted to be remembered: “I like to be thought of as one who believes in birds and flowers and bees.” We have people like Gerbode to thank for preserving the parklands of the GGNRA, and the Parks Conservancy works every day to continue that legacy.
