Today Santa Cruz is, above everything, a coast town: the Boardwalk on the bay, the Carousel still spinning, the Giant Dipper still climbing its lift hill into the marine layer, West Cliff Drive running the bluffs from Lighthouse Point to Natural Bridges, and the redwoods of Big Basin and Henry Cowell standing the way they have stood since the mission was a wooden tent. Our Santa Cruz designs are made for that coast — the city that ran the lumber that rebuilt San Francisco, that came back from Loma Prieta with a new downtown, and that has carried the last great seaside boardwalk in America through every decade since 1907.
The Boardwalk era began in 1907 and never really ended. Swanton's first casino burned, his second one in 1906 burned too, and his third one opened in 1907 — the one that stuck. The Looff Carousel arrived from Long Beach in August 1911 with hand-carved horses and a 342-pipe Ruth & Sohn organ already from 1894. The Giant Dipper opened on May 17, 1924, used 327,000 board feet of lumber, climbed seventy feet at its lift hill, and ran 2,640 feet of red-painted track over Beach Street; both rides have been continuously operating ever since. Other parts of the Boardwalk came and went — the Pleasure Pier, the Natatorium plunge pool, the casino fun center, the Cocoanut Grove banquet hall — but the Carousel and the Coaster were named together as a single National Historic Landmark in 1987 and they are the heart of the park. The entire Boardwalk property 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 since 1987, the only original Mission Santa Cruz building still standing as the best-preserved Native-housing structure in any California mission, the world-class surf breaks at Steamer Lane and Pleasure Point, the three-and-a-half miles of West Cliff Drive, the sea arches and monarch grove at Natural Bridges, the rebuilt Pacific Garden Mall downtown, the redwoods of Henry Cowell and Big Basin — California's first state park — and the long Monterey Bay shoreline from the Wharf east to Pleasure Point. 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.
