Santa Cruz is a beach town, a university town, a surf town and a farm town, and it has never fully decided which of those it wants to be. That tension is the whole personality of the place. It is also why it's more interesting than the postcard suggests.
Downtown, and the forty-five seconds that rebuilt it
You can't understand Pacific Avenue without the earthquake.
Before October 1989 the main drag was the Pacific Garden Mall — a meandering, heavily planted pedestrian street from a 1960s redesign, lined with brick buildings from the turn of the century. On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 in the afternoon, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit at magnitude 6.9. The epicenter was about ten miles northeast of town, in what is now the Forest of Nisene Marks.
Sixty-three people died across the Bay Area. Three of them died on the Pacific Garden Mall, in the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, when the building came down. Roughly thirty-one downtown buildings were damaged badly enough to require demolition. The Cooper House, the most beloved building in town, survived the shaking and was torn down anyway — a decision people here still argue about.
What happened next is the part worth knowing. By the day after Thanksgiving, six weeks later, merchants were open again in temporary tent structures on parking lots — the Phoenix Pavilions. The Urban Land Institute told the city it would be lucky to have downtown rebuilt inside ten years. Bookshop Santa Cruz operated out of a tent for three years. The Coffee Roasting Company's lot sat empty for three decades, until construction finally started in 2019.
The street you walk today is straighter than the one that fell down, with the trees pushed to the edges. Abbott Square sits where the Cooper House was.
Downtown's current problem is a gentler one: Pacific Avenue has been filling up with national chains. Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters and Free People now anchor stretches of it. Bookshop Santa Cruz is still at 1520 Pacific, which counts for a lot.
The Boardwalk
Founded in 1907 by Fred Swanton, and it is California's oldest surviving amusement park. It is also free to walk into, which is genuinely unusual — you pay per ride, or not at all, and the beach is public. On a summer evening half the people on the boardwalk aren't riding anything.
The Giant Dipper opened on May 17, 1924, after forty-seven days of construction. Designed by Frederick Church, built by Arthur Looff, still made of wood, still rattling. It was declared a National Historic Landmark on February 27, 1987 — a working roller coaster with federal landmark status.
The Looff Carousel is older still: bought new in 1911 from the Charles I.D. Looff factory down in Long Beach. It shares the landmark designation with the Dipper. It also still has a working ring dispenser, which almost no carousel in America does anymore.
The surf part, told accurately
Santa Cruz has a real claim as the birthplace of mainland American surfing, and the story is better than the myth.
In 1885, three Hawaiian princes — Jonah Kūhiō KalanianaĘ»ole, David Kawānanakoa and Edward KeliĘ»iahonui, nephews of Queen KapiĘ»olani — were attending a military school in San Mateo and spent a summer in Santa Cruz. They had redwood planks milled into boards and surfed the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. That is the first documented surfing on the United States mainland, and there's a marker at the spot.
Steamer Lane is off West Cliff below the lighthouse. Pleasure Point is out east past the harbor. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum sits inside the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse, built in 1967 for a young surfer who died in the water nearby; the museum opened in 1986 and was the first surfing museum in the world.
And now the correction, because we'd rather be right than repeat the good version. Jack O'Neill did not invent the wetsuit. A UC Berkeley physicist named Hugh Bradner worked out the principle in 1951 and 1952 — that a snug neoprene layer traps a thin film of water and warms it. His patent was rejected and his company failed.
What O'Neill did was make it work for surfers and build an industry around it, opening a shop in 1952 and moving to Santa Cruz in 1959. Without him, cold-water surfing stays a niche for the very tough. That's a real legacy and it doesn't need the invention story bolted onto it.
One practical note: the O'Neill flagship downtown closed in January 2025 after twenty-five years. The shops on 41st Avenue, at the Boardwalk and in Aptos Village are still open.
The university, and the slug
UC Santa Cruz opened in 1965 on 2,001 acres of the old Cowell Ranch — a campus scattered through a redwood forest on a hillside, built as a set of small residential colleges rather than one institution. The northern half is still mostly undeveloped.
The mascot is the best story in California higher education. Students had informally adopted the banana slug — a bright yellow, extremely slow, extremely slimy creature that lives in the redwood duff — as a deliberate anti-mascot, a joke about a school that didn't care much for competitive sports.
Then in 1980 UCSC joined NCAA Division III and the administration decided it needed something dignified. They went with the Sea Lions. They painted a sea lion on the gym floor.
The students kept yelling "Banana Slugs" anyway. For five years the school had two mascots. In 1986 the students voted overwhelmingly, the chancellor gave up, and the slug became official. It turned up in Pulp Fiction in 1994 and the city council eventually declared an official Banana Slug day.
Around the town
Westside and Eastside split roughly at the river. Seabright sits by the harbor. Pleasure Point is technically outside the city line, in Live Oak, and Capitola beyond that is its own incorporated city with its own village and its own opinions. Up Highway 9 into the mountains are Felton, Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek along the San Lorenzo.
Those mountain towns took the worst of the CZU Lightning Complex fire, which started on August 16, 2020, after a storm dropped thousands of lightning strikes. It burned 86,509 acres and 1,490 structures, killed one person, and wasn't contained until September 22. Big Basin — California's oldest state park — lost its visitor center and much else. The old-growth redwoods mostly survived, because that is what they are built to do.
The thing almost nobody knows
London Nelson was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1800, was brought west, bought his own freedom, and spent his last years in Santa Cruz farming along the San Lorenzo and making shoes. When he died in 1860 he left his estate to the Santa Cruz City School District — money that helped keep the city's public schools going.
In 1979 the city named a community center after him and misspelled it "Louden," copying an error from his grave marker. That misspelling stood officially for forty-two years. The city council finally corrected it in June 2021, in time for Juneteenth.
Rep the town: the Santa Cruz collection has our California bear flag design made for Santa Cruz on shirts, hoodies, hats, mugs, blankets and stickers. Along the coast: Capitola, Monterey and the statewide California collection.