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.
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.
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.
