Built along one of the most beautiful beaches in the country, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk has survived almost 100 years of political, economic, and natural hardship.  By Jessica Myer

On a perfect convertible day in early June, with a warm breeze off the water mingling with a host of scents and sounds from another time—roller coaster grease, sugary taffy, buttery popcorn, squealing seagulls, the clacking/cheering noises coming off the Giant Dipper—you’d never guess the boardwalk had been tormented by earthquakes and fire. And though it survived, what remains is a controversial site that creates heated battles within the city of Santa Cruz.

As one of the last thriving seaside parks of its kind in the United States—Pacific Ocean Park, Playland in San Francisco, Belmont Park in San Diego, and the Long Beach Pike near Los Angeles have all been laid to rest—the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk has done more than just survive. It’s blossomed. Three million pairs of feet strolled the boardwalk last year, most of them visiting during the park’s ninety-sixth summer season, though Santa Cruz gets tourists all year. To the dismay of many nearby residents, the boardwalk is the fifth-largest tourist attraction in California in terms of visitors, and the largest in Northern California.

Santa Cruz has somewhat reluctantly been a tourist town for 150 years. Sun worshipers come to its many beaches and surf addicts to some of its best breaks, but visitors also come to see Natural Bridges State Beach, where the wintering population of Monarch butterflies flitters magically in a small grove. And, most of all, they come to the boardwalk.

As the park approaches its centennial, it’s still struggling to overcome all the challenges that come with the territory—being on a sliver of land on one of the most beautiful beaches in the country can be a blessing and a curse. The tiny footprint makes it tough to expand, and the community and politics of Santa Cruz make it almost impossible.
Almost.

Footprints in the Sand

Tourists initially started coming to Santa Cruz when public bathhouses began populating the area in the late 1800s. Soaking in saltwater was thought to be therapeutic. Other attractions began popping up, including a merry-go-round (which now resides on the boardwalk and is a National Historic Landmark and is on the State Historical Register). Then in 1904, Fred Swanton’s Neptune Casino opened with a Plunge, a café, a ballroom, and two roof gardens. But this wasn’t a gambling casino. The $33,000 building was a social hotspot for locals. However, it began to gain momentum with the improvements on the railroad, which brought tourists from around the Bay area. Just two years later a kitchen fire burned the casino to the ground. Charles Canfield, CEO of the Seaside Company, which owns the boardwalk, says Swanton raised the money to build it back up after the fire at a rapid pace, calling it the Santa Cruz Beach Company. The Canfields have been running the business for 60 years.

The new casino was again promoted by renowned developer Swanton as a penny arcade, ice cream parlor, and ballroom, theater, and restaurant. The variety of attractions brought tourists mostly from the north, and they still do today. Out-of-towners often stayed at the Casa del Rey Hotel, a 300-room hotel built in 1911.

Over time, the Beach Company acquired some of the other businesses, including the hotel. But it went broke in 1915 and later started anew as the Santa Cruz Seaside Company. Over the following decade, SCSC acquired all the area attractions and built what has become the main course for visitors—the Giant Dipper, a wooden coaster that just celebrated its eightieth year
in operation and carried its 50 millionth rider.

The coaster, which community relations manager John Robinson calls “an absolutely elegant piece of artwork,” is the oldest remaining woodie in California. Operated by Arthur Looff, who also created the merry-go-round, the coaster was meant to give the sensation of a “combination earthquake, balloon ascension, and airplane drop.” Compared to today’s standards, the Giant Dipper is not very fast (55 mph) or very tall (70 feet), but the ride that took just 47 days to build has become an industry legend.

Other parts of the boardwalk became landmarks. The Plunge was a 400,000-gallon heated pool, which was filled daily with salt water from the ocean. “Back when the town was smaller and technology was simpler and you didn’t have TVs or electronics, the Plunge was where everyone came to hang out, a social center,” says Robinson.

While Robinson talks animatedly about the Plunge—the site of swim contests, famous performances, and early Miss California Pageants—Canfield rummages through a drawer. He pulls out a grayish wool tank top leotard, a remnant of fashionable swimwear from the 1920s. Some of these early swimsuits weighed 20 pounds or more when wet, which is why they held swim classes on land.

Hippie Corner

The park thrived under the Canfield management, though the city began to change rapidly in the 1960s, leaving a piece of history behind while embarking on a new era. In 1963, the famed Plunge closed its doors because people had virtually stopped coming. Tourists flocked the boardwalk, though, eating taffy, corndogs, and fried artichokes. So the management began to change its offerings, continually reinvesting in the park, adding video games, rides, new coasters, a sky glider, live entertainment, and, eventually, a bowling center.

Boardwalk personnel are seeking approval for a 125-foot tower ride, which would be a mere formality for most parks. But history says otherwise. Just four years ago Canfield tried to bring in a 186-foot drop tower, which caused uproar among citizens and politicians, and that plan was eventually abandoned. Citizens felt that the ride would be an eyesore, destroying a pristine and lovely skyline, Robinson says.

Despite its diminutive stature and idyllic scenery, Santa Cruz is also a fervently political town. With the average home price going for about $457,000, which ranks in the top 5 percent of the nation’s housing prices, Santa Cruz residents feel they have a right to be demanding about their city, Robinson says. “The community has a love/hate relationship with tourism,” he says. “Locals don’t always welcome outsiders as much as you think they would. They love to have their tax revenue; they love to have their business. But they don’t like their traffic. Politically, this is a very difficult environment.”



There are other, more mundane complications, too. For example, worries that bike paths surrounding the boardwalk will disrupt traffic have added to Canfield and Robinson’s list of concerns.

Politicians have based entire platforms on being anti-growth when it comes to the boardwalk. But in addition to having to grapple with a difficult political climate, its size and proximity to the beach make expansion nearly impossible, which is one of the reasons they are still trying to build a drop tower. But Canfield is still confident. “You just have to keep massaging them,” he says.
Robinson puts it this way: “We have a lot of constraints. We have the history. We have the political environment, and we have a small footprint that the community is not interested in seeing expand. We can’t bring in 200-foot roller coasters or mega-rides. But the positive aspect is that you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful setting.”

Survival of the Fittest

The setting is one of the major reasons the boardwalk has survived when so many others were either swallowed whole by huge corporations or simply crumbled under financial constraints. “We have survived, which is remarkable,” Canfield says. “A lot of the old parks are disappearing. All my friends in the business are getting taken over. But the boardwalk is still a family-owned business.”

He has survived by reinvesting in the maintenance of the rides and the look of the boardwalk and by continually upgrading without sacrificing its nostalgic appeal. By developing partnerships around Santa Cruz and purchasing stakes in a variety of businesses throughout California, the Santa Cruz Seaside Company has become very profitable. Most of Seaside’s properties are in Santa Cruz—two motels, partnerships in two auto dealerships, real estate developers, 160 rental units, apartment buildings, and single-family homes. Just one of the auto dealerships grosses more money per year than the boardwalk because there is no admission price, Canfield says. But after all these years, that’s not really the point.

Dark Days

But there have been some very dark days, even in sunny Santa Cruz.

“When a storm’s coming, the surf comes all the way out to the edge of the boardwalk,” Canfield says. “And you just know.”



Many Californians remember where they were on October 17, 1989, the day the Oakland A’s played the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, the day the largest earthquake to occur on the San Andreas fault rocked Santa Cruz and most of Northern California. Canfield was sitting in his office, which has a remarkable view of the boardwalk and the ocean. He knocks on the heavy wooden table in front of him—“This table in the earthquake was shaking so much it moved about that far,” he says, holding his arms about about four feet wide. “I was a little scared. It knocked this carousel horse over and broke its neck. . . . I looked out at the sky glider, and those cars were on a 45-degree angle. It was shaking so violently that it threw the cable off one of those towers. I don’t want to go through another one.”

Although Santa Cruz was badly damaged—the earthquake caused more than 1,000 rockfalls and landslides, killed 63 people, injured thousands more, and caused an estimated $6 billion in damages—the boardwalk came out reasonably well. “The roller coaster was unharmed,” Robinson says. “We did have earthquake damage in some of our work areas and some of our concrete areas, which were replaced. The 300-room Casa del Rey was left in a shambles. We had several million of uninsured damage, but the town of Santa Cruz fared much worse.”

The hotel was the biggest loss, Canfield says, but the log flume was also badly damaged because some of the columns sank. Retrofitting the rides, buildings, and structures for earthquake safety has been another ongoing struggle. “After the fire at the turn of the century construction started moving toward brick. . . until the earthquake,” Robinson says. “I was a reporter in 1989. I remember walking out and there was nothing but mushroom clouds rising from the brick buildings. They had just collapsed, creating huge clouds of dust.” Construction at the boardwalk is very expensive because it is located in a seismic 4 zone, and because they build foundations in sand and have to dig clear down to the bedrock for stability, it’s that much more difficult.

Whether or not the city is aware of it, Robinson says survival of the boardwalk has also been important for Santa Cruz. “Most of these parks like Pacific Ocean Park in Venice, Pike in Long Beach . . . they started decaying, and once they started looking shabby and stopped upgrading rides, the clientele changed, families stopped coming, and they became blights,” he explains. “The amusement parks are tremendously powerful not only in terms of the presence they have in people’s minds, but in terms of the businesses for the area and what they attract.

Canfield says there are no plans to sell the boardwalk, no matter how many issues they have to tackle. They’ve come too far to give up now.

He stands up from the table that shook so violently during the earthquake, stretches, and looks out the window.

“At least the view is always good,” he says.