Why Nobody Wants to Visit Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California was built on lime, redwood and gunpowder. Henry Cowell burned limestone above town into the county's largest fortune, and sixty Genovese families fished off the wharf. In 1903 Fred Swanton pitched a tent city on the sand and rented the ocean by the week; the Neptune Casino, the Looff carousel and the 1924 Giant Dipper followed. A schoolteacher could buy a cottage within earshot of the roller coaster. Then the San Lorenzo River flooded downtown and engineers walled it in. Jetties buried the rivermouth where Hawaiian princes brought surfing to America in 1885. The Loma Prieta earthquake took half of downtown in fifteen seconds, and 160 of the cheapest rooms with it. Silicon Valley came over the hill. Huntington Beach won the right to call itself Surf City USA. Three million people a year still come to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and admission is still free; a two-bedroom near it now takes $81.21 an hour against an average renter wage of $22.13. This is the story of a town that kept every landmark it ever built and lost the people who built them. SOURCES Friends of the Cowell Lime Works, UC Santa Cruz — "Who Was Henry Cowell?" and the Lime Works history: https://limeworks.ucsc.edu/history/ Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History — "Princes of Surf," on the 1885 redwood boards and the first surfing in the Americas: https://www.santacruzmah.org/exhibiti... UC Santa Cruz Regional History Project — "Malio J. Stagnaro: The Santa Cruz Genovese" (eScholarship oral history): https://escholarship.org/uc/item/79d5... Santa Cruz Public Libraries Local History — "The History of Floods on the San Lorenzo River in the City of Santa Cruz": https://history.santacruzpl.org/omeka... The Christian Science Monitor, 8 March 1990 — "Santa Cruz Struggles To Rebuild Downtown, Mend Political Divisions": https://www.csmonitor.com/1990/0308/a... Lookout Santa Cruz on the National Low Income Housing Coalition's Out of Reach report — "Santa Cruz County named the nation's least affordable rental market for third straight year": https://lookout.co/santa-cruz-county-...