Our Santa Cruz retro logo carries the California Bear and the star of the 1846 Bear Flag tradition, with "1850" stamped beneath for the year of statehood. The black-and-white styling is retro, in the vocabulary of crate labels, mid-century beach signage, and the old wooden-coaster placards that once told boardwalk visitors how tall they had to be to ride. The bear and star, paired with the date, do the work of placing the design in the founding generation of the state — and the city that has been running its boardwalk longer than any other California town has been running anything along the Pacific.
Santa Cruz's lore is the lore of every California coast town that has had to live with the San Andreas Fault: the 1840 quake that brought down the mission bell tower, the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake that finished the rest of it, the 1906 fires that put a generation of Santa Cruz lumber into the rebuilt San Francisco, and the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta on October 17, 1989, whose epicenter was nine miles northeast of town in the redwoods of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park and whose downtown damage led to the rebuilt Pacific Garden Mall along Pacific Avenue. The bluffs along West Cliff Drive watch all of it and keep their pace. Steamer Lane has been the great Northern California surf break since the first redwood plank ever caught a wave here in the 1930s; Pleasure Point, at the eastern end of town, joined it as a world-class right-point break a decade later. The monarchs come to Natural Bridges every winter. Big Basin Redwoods, the first state park in California, was set aside up the road in 1902. UC Santa Cruz opened in the redwoods above the town in 1965.
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.
