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.
The beach at the rivermouth had drawn bathers since John Leibrandt opened his bathhouse in 1865. In 1907, the promoter Fred W. Swanton — chasing the dream of a Coney Island of the West — opened the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, running every season since — California's oldest surviving amusement park. His Neptune Casino of 1904 was lost in 1906; the grand successor of June 1907 was the one that stuck. Charles I. D. Looff delivered his hand-carved carousel from Long Beach in August 1911, its 342-pipe Ruth & Sohn band organ built in 1894 and still playing. Charles's son Arthur Looff built the Giant Dipper — 327,000 board feet of lumber, a seventy-foot lift hill, 2,640 feet of red-painted track over Beach Street — and opened it on May 17, 1924. The Pleasure Pier, the Natatorium plunge, and the Cocoanut Grove ballroom came and went, but on February 24, 1987, the Carousel and the Giant Dipper were designated together as a single National Historic Landmark, and the entire Boardwalk is California Historical Landmark No. 983.
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.
