A copper weathervane turns above an octagonal bell tower, which sits on a four-story stucco turret. Below it, steel-sash casement windows run across clinker brick and half-timbered gables. On Monday evening, November 2, the Mill Valley Historical Society, the City Council and city officials gathered at 26 Corte Madera Avenue to unveil a newly installed bronze plaque. It marks the building's place on the National Register of Historic Places.
Most people in town know this building as City Hall, or as the fire station with the three bay doors facing the street. The listing describes it as something more specific. It is the building Mill Valley put up when it was at its lowest point, after a fire and a market crash in the same season, and the materials it was built with still show that.
The order of events
The plaque is easiest to understand as the end of a long timeline. The dates below come from the National Register nomination prepared for the site, from the City of Mill Valley, and from the National Park Service.
| Date | What happened at or around 26 Corte Madera Avenue |
|---|---|
| 1902 | The city buys the parcel, a redwood grove that Mountain Railway workers had used as a campsite |
| 1908 | The fire department builds a two-story wood-frame building with a stable below and a town hall and firemen's quarters above |
| July 1929 | A fire burns for four days through Blithedale Canyon and into Middle Ridge, destroying more than 110 homes |
| October 1929 | The stock market crashes |
| November 5, 1935 | Voters approve a $30,000 bond for a new City Hall |
| December 12, 1935 | Ground is broken under contractor Vincent Maggiora |
| August 1, 1936 | Construction is complete and the city holds a dedication ceremony |
| November 7, 2025 | The State Historical Resources Commission approves the nomination |
| January 5, 2026 | The National Park Service lists the property |
| November 2, 2026 | The bronze plaque is unveiled |
When the fire hit, Mill Valley had about 4,000 residents. The fire damaged 2,500 acres, and three months later the country went into the Depression. According to the nomination, the fire damage and the recession together ended the railroad tourism to Mount Tamalpais that was already declining. Growth in both the economy and the population slowed through the 1930s.
By 1935 the town had outgrown the 1908 wood building, and it was torn down. Voters approved the bond that November. The city also bought the lot next door so there was room for a larger building. The plan was to put City Hall, a fire station, a police station and three jail cells under one roof, with one cell for a woman offender and two for men. The architects, Walter C. Falch and D. E. Jaekle, were chosen through a design competition.
The bond did not pay for all of it. The Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency, granted forty-five percent of the construction costs, and the building was finished seven months after groundbreaking. The city describes the building as "a symbol of the collective effort and collaboration undertaken by Mill Valley's citizens during a prolonged period of economic hardship."
A concrete building dressed as a cottage
From the sidewalk, the building looks like an English manor house shrunk down for a civic job. The nomination shows that the look is a surface. Both City Hall and the attached fire station are built of reinforced concrete. The clinker brick on the front, south and north walls is a veneer, and the half-timbering is applied stucco. Underneath it all is a rusticated stone base, and the roof is slate with copper gutters.
In 1936, a town that had lost more than 110 homes to fire seven years earlier built its new firehouse and seat of government out of concrete and steel-framed windows. It then covered that structure in the warm, handmade Tudor Revival style. The nomination calls it an excellent local example of a Tudor Revival institutional building, and that is the basis for its listing under Criterion C, for architecture. Criterion A, the other basis, covers the history in the table above: Depression-era civic building, PWA funding, and the recovery after 1929.
A walk along the Corte Madera Avenue facade
You can see all of this from the public sidewalk in about ten minutes. The station is still a working fire station, City Hall and Fire Station #6, so stay off the driveway. Working from north to south:
- The three apparatus bays. Each garage door sits back inside its own bay under a carved wood lintel. The station's south wall is clinker brick on the first story and half-timbered stucco in the gable. According to the nomination, a bronze fire pole and an upstairs dormitory survive inside.
- The turret. The four-story square tower is plain stucco with clipped edges and a stepped cornice. It has a narrow four-lite window at the third story and vents on all four sides of the fourth. On top is a recessed octagonal bell tower on brick-clad columns with shaped terra cotta lintels, roofed in copper and finished with the weathervane.
- The entry bay. Look for the pointed Tudor arch trimmed with terra cotta quoins around the recessed double doors, and the copper-clad oriel window just above. Metal lanterns hang on either side, and a carved wood sign over the door says City Hall.
- The primary wing. Clinker brick runs along the first floor, with a terra cotta water table above the stone base and soldier-course brick lintels over the windows. The second-floor windows sit in gabled wall dormers.
- The secondary wing. At the south end is a one-story wing with a glazed steel French door under a stained-glass transom, set inside a segmental arch with more terra cotta quoining. This is the wing where the three fireproof jail cells were built.
Up at the gable peaks, each original gable end has a wood finial and a wide bargeboard with angled ends. Drop finials hang at the base of several of them.
What the plaque leaves out
The nomination sets the building's period of significance at 1936 to 1943. Changes made after that are part of the building's working life, but they are not what the listing honors.
There have been several. In 1976 the police and fire departments moved their headquarters elsewhere, leaving a smaller crew of firefighters at the station. The fire station's former second-story space became City Hall offices, and the City Hall interior was largely remodeled in the 1970s. A rear addition followed in 1978. Exterior repairs came in 1992, a seismic and structural upgrade by McNealy Construction Company in 1995, and an ADA entry ramp in 2018.
You can spot the 1978 addition from outside. Its roof is square terra cotta tile, while the original sections are slate. A building can be listed after decades of remodeling, retrofitting and accessibility work because the parts that tell its 1936 story still read clearly from the street.
Second on a short list
Mill Valley does not have many nationally listed buildings. In its November 2025 announcement of the state approval, the city wrote that the Outdoor Art Club at 1 West Blithedale, listed in 1978, was then the city's only property on the National Register of Historic Places. The release also says the Outdoor Art Club and the Old Mill are on the California Historical Resources List, and City Hall joined that list in 2025. The National Park Service's weekly list for the first week of January 2026 shows City Hall's federal listing, reference number SG100012501.
That puts City Hall on the National Register next to the Outdoor Art Club, two buildings a short walk apart downtown.
The people behind the nomination
National Register listings start with a nomination, and someone has to write it. This one was prepared by Samantha Purnell, an architectural historian and cultural resources planner at Page & Turnbull. Her draft is dated May 2025 and was revised that July. The city's announcement credits Mill Valley Historical Society board member Lisa Newman with guiding the project through the nomination process alongside city staff and the consultants. It also notes that the society planned to work with the city on a commemorative plaque once national designation was final. The plaque unveiled on November 2 is the result.
Distinctive buildings carry their histories in their materials, and that applies to homes as much as to City Halls. If you own a historic or architect-designed home in Mill Valley and want to know how its story would come across to the right buyer, Colm Glass and Design Collection are happy to walk the facade with you and talk it through. Contact Us.
