Here's the Introduction from
The Sidewalk Companion to Santa Cruz Architecture
About Santa Cruz
Although the older commercial area is concentrated along Pacific Avenue and Front Street, it has infiltrated the residential neighborhood to the west as far as Chestnut Street. Ocean Street is the town’s prime example of strip development. In the section from the freeway off-ramp to Broadway, the street offers the typical array of gas stations, fast food franchises, and motels. Other strip developments are concentrated along Soquel Avenue and Mission Street.
Interesting nineteenth-century buildings can be found throughout the west central section of Santa Cruz, from Mission Hill on the north to Beach Hill on the south. Other groups of nineteenth-century structures are to be found along Riverside Avenue, Ocean View Avenue, west of upper Ocean Street, and in the Seabright area. Although the beach area lost its great resort hotel, the Sea Beach, it retains the unique casino and roller coaster.
The city has origins of a dual nature: as the site of the Misión de la Exaltación de la Santa Cruz and as the pueblo of Branciforte. The mission was established in 1791 on the lowlands next to Mission Hill and moved to the top of the bluff in 1793. The town of Branciforte was established in 1797 on the bluff east of the San Lorenzo River. By the beginning of the American period, both mission and town had almost entirely disappeared.
Americans were already beginning to exploit the area’s commercial and agricultural potential by the time gold was discovered on the South Fork of the American River in 1848. The start of the Gold Rush and Mexico’s surrender of California to the United States that same year resulted in a mild boom for Santa Cruz, which ended in the potato depression of 1854. During this period, the town became firmly established, and its commercial center moved from the Mission Plaza to the flatland to the south.
The early lumber, tanning, lime, agricultural, and seaport industries were supplemented by the resort trade as early as the mid-1860s. The town’s mild climate and proximity to redwood forests and beaches were major attractions. The development of Santa Cruz as a resort peaked around the turn of the century with the construction of the Sea Beach Hotel in 1890 and the casino in 1904. Another period of change occurred in the 1960s with the advent of the University of California and the growth of Santa Cruz as a counter-culture mecca.
Santa Cruz has an extraordinarily diverse collection of buildings from various periods. The majority date from the latter half of the nineteenth century, although the twentieth century is also represented by a small but significant number of Mission Revival, Period Revival, Bungalow, and Moderne buildings. Innovations in design were not made in Santa Cruz nor did major architects locate their offices here. The better known architects whose work is represented usually designed only one or two buildings in Santa Cruz. Nevertheless, these buildings were generally among the most prominent locally and often helped introduce new styles.
It is the city’s builder-architects who are responsible for the vast majority of structures which have determined the appearance of the town’s neighborhoods. Virtually all of these builder-architects received their training in the eastern United States and brought eastern building methods and styles with them. It is not surprising that there are so many distinguished Victorian-era buildings in Santa Cruz. During the Victorian period the city was a much larger population center relative to other towns in the state than it is now. The fairly steady growth since 1920 has not been of sufficient intensity to overwhelm completely its early architectural heritage.
Nevertheless, many square blocks of nineteenth-century construction have been obliterated in the central areas. Nowhere in Santa Cruz is there a neighborhood unblemished by ugly modern building. Over the years, it became increasingly uncommon to remodel a building for a new use or even to move it to another site. Stiffer fire and building codes made adaptation of older buildings more difficult. Victorian-era buildings were long out of favor in the twentieth century, often pulled down by their owners who preferred a vacant lot to the upkeep of an older building. Attitudes began to change in the 1960s with the opening of the university, the threatened destruction of much of the central area by a freeway, and the perseverance of photographer Chuck Abbott and other like-minded individuals. Efforts to secure legal protection for historically and architecturally significant structures were initially spurred by the impending demolition of a downtown landmark, the 1886 McHugh & Bianchi Building. After an unsuccessful first try at passing a historical preservation ordinance, an ordinance creating a historic preservation commission was approved by the Santa Cruz City Council in 1974.
