Arch Street

Arch Street ascends the hill opposite the Lark Creek Shops in the 200 block of Magnolia Ave. It's sometimes referred to as being one of Larkspur's "paper streets," thoroughfares that were plotted out by land developers in the late 19th century and that continued to be indicated on maps through the 1950s despite the fact that they remained unimproved, impassable or never even built at all. Nevertheless, Arch, though obviously passable only by foot, is a real, official, city-maintained street. It connects with Walnut Avenue at the top. These days it gets considerable use by people in fitness training.

Until recently, the house my family owned between 1941 and 1987 at 9 Arch, off to the left of these photos, was the only one on the street. We traversed these steps, at least up to our front walk by the red-flowering quince, innumerable times over the decades, me every day on my way back and forth to school at LCM and Redwood High, to church at St. Patrick's on Sundays, downtown to get my hair cut at the barber shop, buy comics or drop my film off at the pharmacy or visit the library. My mother would lug bags of groceries up them from shopping trips downtown. Of course, we could drive places too, but it was an even longer trek up to our garage on Walnut. We all had strong legs.

My father always maintained the area along the lower portion of the steps below our front yard with ground cover and ornamental trees or shrubs. The row of red-hot poker plants seen blooming in the 1962 shot are still there.

As a kid, I sometimes had dreams about seeing cars actually driving on Arch Street. In 1959, we really did it. Click here to see the time my father backed our '56 Rambler station wagon up to the bottom of the stairs so we could load it with junk from our basement.