How does a wooden chapel with zero on-site parking end up hosting some of the best-attended live music in town? In Tiburon, the answer explains more about how the town actually runs than any list of restaurant openings could.
For most of the year, Old St. Hilary's sits on its hillside above downtown looking like exactly what it is: a 138-year-old chapel, built in 1888 as a place of worship for the railroad workers who once ran the line through town. The land itself came from the heirs of John Reed, who held title to El Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio, the Mexican land grant that once covered the whole peninsula. They sold the quarter-acre site to the Archdiocese of San Francisco for two dollars. It is one of the few surviving examples of Carpenter Gothic architecture left in California in anything close to its original condition, with redwood interior walls, a Douglas fir ceiling, and a single original stained-glass window depicting St. Hilary, the patron saint of scholars.
The Belvedere-Tiburon Landmarks Society took over the building in 1959 and has been running concerts inside it for more than sixty years since, not out of nostalgia but because the acoustics in an all-wood nave this size are hard to replicate anywhere else in Marin. That is the draw. The friction is the parking, or rather the total absence of it, and that friction is the actual story.
The Bakery Is the Real Front Door
There is no lot at Old St. Hilary's. Concertgoers are directed instead to park at the Boardwalk Shopping Center on Tiburon Boulevard and catch a shuttle that departs from directly in front of Rustic Bakery, usually starting about a half hour before the show. Handicapped parking is available at the chapel itself, but everyone else rides up the hill together.
That single rule does something most venues never manage: it turns a bakery parking lot into a gathering point before the music even starts. People who've been coming for years know to arrive early, grab a coffee, and let the shuttle schedule set the pace of the evening rather than trying to beat traffic to a lot that doesn't exist. It is a small piece of infrastructure that quietly shapes the entire ritual, and it is the kind of detail you only know if you've actually made the trip.
What Was Actually Playing This Year
The Landmarks Society's 2026 lineup gives a sense of the range the chapel pulls in, and the ticket structure rewards the people who plan ahead over the people who show up hoping for the best.
| Date | Act | Genre | Advance / Door |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 26 | Musae | Not specified | Not specified |
| May 17 | Mads Tolling & John R. Burr | Jazz violin and piano duo | $20–25 / $25–30 |
| June 14 | Caroluna with pianist Jennifer M. Lee | Opera arias (Puccini, Bellini, Mozart, and others) | $20–25 / $25–30 |
| August 23 | Charlie Torch | Bluegrass | $20–25 / $25–30 |
The May show paired two-time Grammy winner Mads Tolling on violin with jazz pianist John R. Burr, touring behind their debut album together, Ramblin', with a set list that reached from Chick Corea to Lennon and McCartney. The June date brought lyric soprano Caroluna through a program spanning Puccini, Bellini, Mozart, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Chopin, and Pauline Viardot. The August 23 show was a family bluegrass act, Charlie Torch, fronted by fiddler Chad Manning alongside his daughters Jayne Manning on guitar and Jasper Manning on mandolin, with Tyler Stegall on banjo and Mark Schatz on bass.
Every ticket carries the same five-dollar gap between buying ahead and buying at the door, assuming the show isn't already sold out by then. It's a small tax on procrastination, and it's the kind of detail longtime attendees factor in without thinking twice.
There is no parking at Old St. Hilary's. Free parking is at the Boardwalk Shopping Center, with a shuttle leaving from in front of Rustic Bakery beginning half an hour before the show.
Same Week, Two Different Registers
Here is where the calendar gets genuinely interesting. August 21 marked the last Friday Nights on Main of 2026, the Chamber of Commerce's free, all-ages street party that closes Lower Main Street to cars for live music, food from local restaurants, and games for kids. Two days later, on August 23, the Charlie Torch bluegrass show played out on the hill at Old St. Hilary's, ticketed, shuttle-only, capped at whatever the chapel can hold.
That back-to-back sequence is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is the town's seasonal handoff happening in real time. Summer in Tiburon runs loud and free at street level: Slow Streets closing Main Street to traffic on weekends through the end of July, Friday Nights on Main twice over the season, the annual car show and wooden boat show packed into a single June weekend. When that format winds down, the town's cultural center of gravity doesn't disappear. It moves uphill, gets smaller, and starts charging admission. Fewer people know about it, which is largely the point.
The same weekend the bluegrass show played, the Strawberry Recreation Center ran its own Community Night down the peninsula, with food trucks, vendor booths, and a climbing wall for families. Two neighborhoods, two completely different kinds of evening, happening within days of each other. That's the texture of a fall calendar here: it splits rather than simply slowing down.
Filling in the Rest of the Evening
Locals who've done this enough times tend to build a small routine around the concert nights. A stop at Rustic Bakery before the shuttle leaves is close to mandatory, given that it's also the meeting point. Afterward, or sometimes before if the show is an afternoon matinee, the loop extends down to Ark Row, the strip of Main Street shops built out of actual houseboat arks that were converted to storefronts in the early 1900s. Eric Schoenberg Guitars, tucked into that stretch, is worth a stop for the instruments alone even if you're not buying. A few doors down, Mings on the Boardwalk quietly serves some of the more generous portions of Chinese food in town, the kind of place regulars mention almost apologetically, as if it's a secret that shouldn't be given away.
For a pre-show dinner with a view, Sam's Anchor Cafe remains a longtime default for its lively outdoor deck over the water. None of this is a coordinated program. It's just how an evening here tends to assemble itself once you know the pieces.
What This Actually Tells You About the Town
The easy read on Tiburon is that its identity lives on Main Street, in the waterfront restaurants and the boutiques on Ark Row. That's true as far as it goes, but it misses the part of the calendar that doesn't advertise itself. A chapel with no parking lot, a shuttle that only runs from a bakery, and a single season that swings from bluegrass to opera says something the street parties don't: the town's deeper social life happens by appointment, in small rooms, for people willing to park somewhere else and ride up the hill. That's a different kind of local knowledge than knowing which restaurant just opened, and it's the kind that sticks.
At RARE Properties Northern California, we spend as much time learning the texture of a town as we do its home values, because the two are never really separate. If you're curious what else makes a Marin neighborhood work the way it does, or you're ready to talk about a move here, we're glad to share what we've learned.
