Thomas Frouge's plan for Marincello was ambitious in scale and conventional in execution. The development would have placed high-density housing on the ridges above the Golden Gate, with commercial districts, parks, and transportation infrastructure serving a population the size of a small city. Preliminary grading began, and a road -- Marincello Road -- was cut into the hillside. The project had financing, permits, and the momentum that large-scale development typically carries in a region where housing demand has always outpaced supply.

Conservationists, led by local activists and environmental organizations, mounted a sustained campaign against Marincello. They argued that the headlands were too ecologically valuable and too scenically important to be developed. The campaign drew support from an emerging environmental movement that was beginning to challenge the assumption that all undeveloped land was simply development waiting to happen. Legal challenges, political pressure, and financial difficulties slowed the project. When Frouge's financing collapsed in the early 1970s, the development died.

The defeat of Marincello was one of the pivotal moments in the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The land that Frouge had planned to develop was eventually acquired by the National Park Service and incorporated into the GGNRA. Today, Marincello Road -- the only physical trace of the project -- serves as a hiking trail. Walkers follow the old construction road across the headlands, through landscape that would have been a parking lot, breathing air that would have been exhaust, looking at views that would have been someone's living room wall.