The town's modern story runs on the San Andreas Fault as much as on the surf: on October 17, 1989, at 5:04 in the afternoon, the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake struck, its epicenter nine miles northeast of town in the redwoods of the Forest of Nisene Marks; downtown's Pacific Garden Mall was rebuilt as today's Pacific Avenue pedestrian district. The surf never stopped. Steamer Lane, off Lighthouse Point, has been the great Northern California break since the Santa Cruz Surfing Club formed in 1936 — half a century after the princes' redwood boards — and its cold-water surfers helped pioneer the modern wetsuit; Pleasure Point joined it on the eastside as a world-class right point, with The Hook at its far end. A bronze surfer statue stands watch on West Cliff Drive. The monarchs fill the eucalyptus grove at Natural Bridges every winter, bright-yellow banana slugs cruise the redwood duff up the hill, Big Basin — California's first state park — was set aside in the mountains in 1902, and UC Santa Cruz opened in the redwoods above the town in 1965.
For thousands of years before the Spanish, the Awaswas-speaking Ohlone fished, gathered acorns, and stewarded this coast — and their descendants, among them the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, remain part of the region today. The mission and the Branciforte pueblo brought European agriculture and ranching to the San Lorenzo lowlands; secularization arrived in 1834. The American era began with statehood in 1850, and by the 1850s and 1860s Santa Cruz was a lumber town, milling the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains and burning lime at the Cowell works, shipping both north to build — and after the 1906 earthquake, rebuild — San Francisco. Henry Cowell, who gave his name to the state park up the river, ran the lumber and the lime that ran the town.
Why People Visit Santa Cruz California
Santa Cruz offers California's oldest surviving amusement park on the bay, the 1911 Looff Carousel and the 1924 Giant Dipper as a paired National Historic Landmark, the only original Mission Santa Cruz building still standing, the surf breaks at Steamer Lane and Pleasure Point where mainland American surfing began in 1885, the sea arches and monarch grove at Natural Bridges, the rebuilt Pacific Garden Mall downtown, and the redwoods of Henry Cowell and Big Basin — California's first state park. It is a coast town that has been running its boardwalk longer than any other California city has been running anything along the Pacific. On Monterey Bay since 1791.
