The Bay Area Loses a Hippie-Era Landmark

The Bay Area has lost yet another venue that carried the echo of San Francisco’s golden age as a hub of hippie culture. On New Year’s Eve, the Trident on the Sausalito waterfront closed its doors after 127 years, ending the run of a restaurant that felt less like a business than a living scrapbook of the region’s cultural history.

The Trident mattered to me not just as a landmark, but as a setting. I worked it into a scene in Code 3 on Buena Vista, Book 4 in The Haight Mystery Series. One evening, SFPD homicide detective Jimmy Spracklin eats there with his daughter, Marie, despite his reservations that it might be a little too much of a hippie hangout for his taste.

I liked the Trident more than Spracklin did, mainly because of its setting and history. I loved the iconic ceiling mural and the memorabilia framed on the walls. It was magnificent to sit on its deck and gaze out on the bay during lunch. And it was as much of a hippie landmark as Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park or the Grateful Dead’s old house at 710 Ashbury Street.

Long before it became synonymous with the counterculture, the Trident began life in the late 1800s as the home of the San Francisco Yacht Club. For decades, the building hosted yacht club galas and events, a symbol of an older, buttoned-down Bay Area. When the club moved in the 1920s, the space reinvented itself as a jazz club, beginning a long tradition of musical and cultural relevance.

Its most famous incarnation began in 1960, when ownership passed to members of the Kingston Trio. As San Francisco became a global epicenter of the counterculture, the venue was renamed the Trident and quickly turned into a magnet for artists, musicians, and celebrities. The Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, Clint Eastwood, and Jerry Garcia all passed through its doors. Janis Joplin came so often she had a regular table. A young Robin Williams once worked there as a busboy, years before the world knew his name.

That layered history was very much alive the last time my wife and I ate there. While we were having lunch, the owner wandered over to another table and began regaling them with stories. One, in particular, stuck with me. He said that Martin Luther King Jr., while visiting San Francisco, insisted on crossing the Golden Gate Bridge so he could eat at the Trident—a restaurant he’d heard about back east. Whether apocryphal or not, it captured what the place represented: a destination that resonated far beyond the Bay.

Th Trident’s famous ceiling mural

In recent years, though, even the Trident’s pop culture fame couldn’t keep it afloat. The property was listed for sale, but the deal fell through. The restaurant fell behind on rent, owner Bob Freeman told the San Francisco Chronicle. Rising costs and dwindling customers sealed its fate. “We don’t see as many tourists as we used to,” Freeman said. “It used to be bustling with people.”

I wanted Marie to work there as a bartender in later books, but as a teenager she was simply too young. In Code 3 on Buena Vista, Spracklin and Marie sit on the deck overlooking the water, talking through his latest case as the light fades:

He lit up a cigarette and watched his daughter wolf down her fries like she’d never eat again. As he felt the warm smoke relax him, his gaze drifted beyond her into the black void over San Francisco Bay. The darkness shrouded the island of Alcatraz, invisible at night now that the Feds had closed down the prison. He always thought it had been a mistake to shutter that prison. It was the perfect place for men like Michael Lindros. And standing so prominently in the bay, it was a daily reminder to every hoodlum in San Francisco of what awaited him if he crossed the law.

That sense of looking out over something vast, dark, and slowly changing feels apt now. With the Trident gone, the Bay Area loses not just a restaurant, but another tangible link to a time when San Francisco defined the cultural weather for the rest of the world.

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Hi. I’m Peter Moreira and my latest novel is the technothriller Presidio Biotech. I’m also also the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to my home page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.