The Bank of Italy building at 1300 Fourth St. in San Rafael in the 1930s. (Courtesy of the Marin History Museum)
Visitors to San Rafael can learn more about the city through the STQRY app. (Courtesy of the Marin History Museum)
The past and present of 831 Fourth St. in San Rafael. (Courtesy of Rick Lewis)
Lori Deibel, left, and Marcie Miller helped create San Rafael’s new walking tour. (Courtesy of the Marin History Museum)
The former Bank of Italy building is a featured stop on the new San Rafael walking tour. (Courtesy of the Marin History Museum)
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The Bank of Italy building at 1300 Fourth St. in San Rafael in the 1930s. (Courtesy of the Marin History Museum)
A jewelry store inside a former car dealership. Offices where a grand courthouse once stood. Bartenders inside the same walls where bankers financed the Golden Gate Bridge.
If you’ve ever walked around downtown San Rafael and wondered about the history of the place you’re shopping or standing at, a new self-guided walking tour may soon have the answer in the palm of your hand.
A collaboration between the City of San Rafael and the Marin History Museum is bringing the city’s history to life with a digital walking tour featuring historic photographs, stories and information about buildings and places downtown.
“We often learn history through a wider lens — the Bay Area, the state or the country — but local history is just as important,” said Walter Gonzalez Valdez, management analyst in the city manager’s office and the project lead for the city. “Our past shapes our present and our future, and we want to make sure those stories are being told so we can continue to learn from them.”
The tour grew out of an experience more than a year ago, when members of the history museum visited Petaluma and took a walking tour led by local history enthusiasts dressed in period clothing.
During the tour, the group encountered a QR code near a historic building. Scanning it brought up historical information, photographs and an audio component telling the story of the site.
“It was an eye-opener for me,” said Lori Deibel, research librarian at the Marin History Museum and one of the project’s creators. “I thought to myself, we could do this!”
At the time, however, the technology was too expensive to make the idea practical. That changed when the City of San Rafael approached the museum about working together on educational projects, including exhibits and a walking tour.
The city gained access to the STQRY app, which powers the tour. The app allows visitors to access a historical profile and photos of a site by scanning a QR code or simply standing nearby. The tour currently includes information about more than 20 locations in both English and Spanish, with plans to add more. Get the tour at cityofsanrafael.stqry.app/en.
“We would eventually like to include locations all over the city,” Deibel said. “Obviously Fourth Street is the place where most pedestrians are going to be walking, so we started there.”
The project team walked the main parts of downtown and identified places where it was possible to create historical stories and match them to images in the Marin History Museum archives.
“I discovered so many buildings that still look exactly the same,” Deibel said.
“Our customers appreciate our art deco facade,” said Rick Lewis, owner of Gold Rush Jewelers at 831 Fourth St. in San Rafael, which was originally a Packard dealership. “Once inside, the period details make it more cozy and welcoming.”
Some sites have played multiple roles in the city’s history. San Rafael’s first house, Don Timoteo Murphy’s adobe, stood at 1300 Fourth St. in 1844. It was later replaced by the ornate Bank of Italy building in 1930, which will soon reopen as The Twelfth, a women’s sports bar.
“The Bank of Italy helped finance the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, which speaks to San Rafael’s contribution to the region,” Gonzalez said. “I love that the building has served so many different uses over the years; it reflects how adaptable we are as a city to our community’s changing needs.”
Some of the most compelling stops are places that no longer exist.
One is the site of the old courthouse, a stately building constructed in 1872 that stood for about a century. Historic photographs allow today’s visitors to see the building that once occupied the site.
That ability to connect today’s streetscape with the past is at the heart of the project.
“People want to know what they’re walking by,” said Marcie Miller, education coordinator at Marin History Museum and one of the tour’s co-creators.
She has conducted walking tours for nearly 15 years and continues to attract groups of nearly 20 people for each one.
“We’re history nerds. We love this stuff,” she said.
The digital tour also offers an updated solution to some of the problems with traditional historic plaques. Existing metal plaques installed in sidewalks can be difficult to notice, have weathered poorly or have been covered with paint. Installing new markers in sidewalks can also be expensive and complicated.
Instead, the city plans to install highly visible signs with QR codes on appropriate poles. Where that isn’t possible, window stickers will be placed in front of participating businesses.
The creators hope the tour will be something visitors can experience in an hour rather than an all-day undertaking, with the compact downtown making it possible to explore a substantial portion on foot.
Once the signage is in place, discovering the city’s past may become as easy as taking a walk, pulling out a phone and looking at the familiar streets in a completely different way.
“The kind of information that Marin History Museum provides has a tremendous amount of value,” Lewis said. “The walking tour app now puts all the information on a certain building in one place so you can more easily get access to our city’s history and get a new appreciation of it.”
Learn more about the new San Rafael walking tour at a Marin History Museum presentation by Lori Deibel at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the San Rafael Public Library.