The Awaswas-speaking Ohlone fished, gathered acorns, and stewarded the Monterey Bay coast for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived. Lasuén's 1791 mission and the Branciforte pueblo of 1796 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 shipping the wood north to rebuild San Francisco after every fire. The city incorporated in 1866. Henry Cowell, who gave his name to the state park up the river, ran the lumber that ran the town.
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.
