Walter Haake, developer of Petaluma’s Foundry Wharf, dies at 73

He transformed the metal structures that once housed an engine works plant into Foundry Wharf, an award-winning office and warehouse space.|

On a training run as a competitive oarsman, Karl Walter Haake rowed from San Francisco’s Dolphin Club to Petaluma one day in the late 1980s.

Haake, a real estate developer, was struck by the tranquil beauty of the Petaluma River and the potential of a few gritty industrial buildings along the waterfront about six blocks south of downtown Petaluma. He returned to the city the next day, learned the buildings were for sale. The rest of the story, as his daughter O’Meara Cover of Petaluma said, “is history.”

Haake, who died of esophageal cancer Aug. 7 at his Glen Ellen home, transformed the metal structures that once housed an engine works plant into Foundry Wharf, an award-winning office and warehouse space that evokes the “neo-industrial cool factor made famous in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhoods,” according to the property’s website. He was 73.

“He had a vision,” said Cover, who manages Foundry Wharf with her husband, Bill Cover, and her sister, Marina Butler of San Anselmo.

Tall and robust, with a dry wit and booming voice, Haake, who went by his middle name, gained his passion for architectural preservation from his father, Otto Haake, who trained as a cabinetmaker in his native Germany.

Emigrating to America in the 1920s, Otto Haake eventually settled in San Francisco, where he started out as a carpenter and became manager of the Merchants Exchange Building, a 15-story Beaux-Arts style landmark built in the Financial District in 1904.

Walter Haake, a San Francisco native who started out in the financial and banking business before becoming a developer, saw potential in a largely ignored corner of west Petaluma, said Jane Hamilton, a friend and former Petaluma city councilwoman.

“He was the first developer to come and see the character of that part of Petaluma and preserve it,” Hamilton said. “He had the sense of how to value something, to tie it to the past and bring it into the future.”

Redeveloped by Haake in 1987, Foundry Wharf has attracted an eclectic mix of tenants, including high-tech startups, business offices, food and beverage companies and a cafe. In an area where most of the aging buildings turned their backs to the river - a tidal slough that connects with San Pablo Bay - Foundry Wharf offered views across the water and McNear Peninsula, with Sonoma Mountain in the distance.

Haake built a dock, available to rowers, and granted the only public access to the river south of Petaluma’s Turning Basin.

Bill Cover said his father-in-law’s greatest reward in developing the 100,000-square-foot Foundry Wharf was creating a place where people enjoyed coming to work. “There’s a good vibe here,” he said.

The project also triggered the transformation of the project’s neighborhood into a thriving commercial area, Hamilton said. “Walt was great for this town,” she said. “He showed us a new way to develop.”

Heritage Homes of Petaluma, a community group, gave Haake an award of “great merit for historic preservation” in 1989.

In another signature project, Haake bought and renovated the Movie Colony Hotel in Palm Springs in the early 2000s, preserving the “desert modernism” style of the 16-room boutique hotel built in 1935 and once a hangout for Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

“He was gregarious, larger than life, and a visionary,” his daughter said, “but first and foremost a family man.” His personal motto, she said, was “never stifle a generous impulse.”

Haake graduated from San Francisco’s Lincoln High School and earned a degree in geography from San Jose State University in 1963. He worked in banking and finance and co-founded a mortgage company before turning to real estate development on his own.

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1971, he met Linda Dobbas in San Francisco, told her she would be the “love of his life” and they married a year later, his daughter said.

The Haakes raised two daughters in Marin County and moved to Glen Ellen in 2000.

As a young man, Haake hiked throughout Marin County and mountain biked on Mount Tamalpais. He made solo bicycle rides from Ross to Mexico and Lake Tahoe, and was a lifelong member of the Dolphin Club, his base for rowing on San Francisco Bay.

Survivors, in addition to his wife and daughters, O’Meara and Marina, are Cameron Mock, a daughter from his first marriage, and five grandchildren.

A celebration of Haake’s life will be at 2 p.m. Sept. 10 at Glen Ellen’s Quarryhill Botanical Garden, a 25-acre site that specializes in cultivating wild-source Asian plants. Haake served on its board of directors. Memorial donations may be made in his name at www.quarryhillbg.org.

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