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Love Note to Benicia CA—Final Lush Years pg147
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
1987
I settled into my wonderful hovel in the historic downtown. At that point Benicia was a quiet, backwater berg on the Carquinez Straits, about halfway between San Francisco and Napa. It would evolve into a lively, artsy tourist destination, but wasn’t there yet. Benicia had always been a little lost in time.
Prostitution was legal until 1962 when bridges finally connected the town to a modern world and the ferries shut down. In an effort to waylay new legislation, the soiled doves pooled their money and built a large community pool for the town that is still in use. The mayor thanked them by naming it after himself and outlawing their profession.
Benicia sits on a mile-wide, brackish tidal waterway that connects the delta of northern river systems to the San Francisco Bay. Along the shoreline are bird sanctuaries, historic homes, a quaint downtown, a large marina, the Civil War era Arsenal (now a thriving art colony), and a deep-water port where auto carriers from Asia and tankers from everywhere offload into the Industrial Park. — From Chapter 8
Skidding off topic again. Here is my goodbye letter to 2020…
