Santa Cruz runs the last great seaside boardwalk in America. The Awaswas-speaking Ohlone have been the original peoples of this coast for thousands of years. On August 28, 1791, Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén — Junípero Serra's successor as president of the California missions — raised the cross at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River and founded Mission Santa Cruz, the twelfth of the twenty-one missions and the only one named not for a saint but for the Holy Cross itself. The river flooded the mission its first winter, so the padres rebuilt on the bluff above; the Neary-Rodriguez Adobe of the rebuilt mission still stands today at Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park, and it is the best-preserved Native-housing building in the entire California mission chain. In 1796 the Spanish founded a pueblo across the river called Branciforte. An 1840 earthquake cracked the bell tower, and the great 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake brought the rest of the mission down; Holy Cross Church went up on the site in 1889, and a half-size replica of the original chapel was built in 1932 with Gladys Sullivan Doyle's money. The city incorporated in 1866. Down at the mouth of the river, the beach had been a bathing destination since John Leibrandt opened his bathhouse there 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, which has been running every season since and is today California's oldest surviving amusement park. Charles I. D. Looff delivered his hand-carved carousel from Long Beach in August of 1911, with a 342-pipe organ already eighteen years old at the time of installation. Charles's son Arthur Looff built the Giant Dipper, a 70-foot-tall, 2,640-foot-long wooden roller coaster, and opened it on May 17, 1924 — today one of the oldest operating wooden coasters in the United States, the fourth-oldest in the country. On February 24, 1987, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior designated the Carousel and the Giant Dipper, together, as a National Historic Landmark, and the entire Boardwalk is California Historical Landmark No. 983. On October 17, 1989, at 5:04 in the afternoon, the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake on the San Andreas Fault struck with its epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and downtown Santa Cruz's Pacific Garden Mall was rebuilt afterward as the pedestrian district that runs Pacific Avenue today. Steamer Lane breaks off Lighthouse Point, Pleasure Point breaks at the eastern end of town, and Natural Bridges State Beach holds the sea arches and the monarchs. Big Basin, the first state park in California, was set aside in 1902. The redwoods start where the boardwalk ends. On Monterey Bay since 1791.
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.
