Sixty Years of Chowder — Remembering Cap'n Flint's at Noyo Harbor

For nearly sixty years, the way you knew you'd reached Noyo Harbor was the smell of clam chowder drifting out from under the bridge. Cap'n Flint's opened in 1957 at 32250 North Harbor Drive, tucked beneath the Noyo span, and for decades it was one of the harbor's best-known tables — chowder, shrimp wontons, plates of seafood, and a working view of the boats coming in. It served its last bowl in 2016.

But the story locals tell isn't only about the restaurant. It's about the small building out back, the one with the big front windows that always looked like it had been built to be seen into. That little structure has quietly outlived nearly everything around it, and it has been, at one time or another, almost everything.

In the mid-1960s it was a gift shop. Through the 1970s and into the early '80s it housed Bobby Anderson's photography studio. In between and around those years it did time as an art gallery, a display space, and — less romantically — storage for the restaurant's fryers and equipment. A koi pond near the building was filled with sand sometime in the mid-1970s and became, for a while, a place where kids played.

"Everybody remembers it as something different, depending on when they were young." (placeholder quote for layout testing)

The lives that little building has led, as neighbors remember them:

• Gift shop, mid-1960s
• Bobby Anderson's photography studio, 1970s to early 1980s
• Art gallery and display space
• Restaurant storage

The restaurant is closed now, its long run finished. But the outbuilding still stands on the harbor property, big windows facing out, waiting to become whatever comes next.

This is placeholder text created for design and layout testing only.