Some Old Postcards

I probably won't be able to write much this week because of the strike so here are a few old views of Santa Cruz to amuse you until I get back.

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This is "Chamber of Commerce Park" which I've never heard of, and can't figure out a location for. I'll just got this card on eBay haven't had time to really research it. I see the word "Olive" in the corner, so perhaps it is near Olive street. But we changed our street names several times, so "Olive" today might not be "Olive" of yesterday.


This is another new card for me. It has a date on it of "192?" but it must be the early twenties or even nearlier judging from the length of the women's dresses and the cars. There are so many things to notice in this picture. Cars and horse carts. The drug store shop window that some of us remember as the original site of Bookshop Santa Cruz.


Here's another downtown photo, this time probably a little earlier.


The old "St. George," this time from the late 1940s or early 1950s. (I'm not good with car-model dating.) I like this photo because you can see how the end of Pacific avenue was not opened to a plaza as it is now, but it ended at an auto garage and other nineteenth-century commercial buildings. Santa Cruz has long wished that Pacific Avenue were longer, but no matter what we do, it ends at Water street at one end an Laurel at the other.




This card promotes the new Wrigley's gum factory. How fresh! how clean! how wholesome! The vision for the West Side in the 1950s included several more factories just like this, but somehow, it just didn't work out did it? Santa Cruz has been trying to attract outside business for 150 years, and yet what people really want to pay for here is Sun, Sand, Water, and Forests. When are we going to learn at tourism is the only thing we can actually make money on?

Perhaps this is where it went off the rails?



The Seabeach Hotel burned in the summer of 1912 and so Monterey became the travel destination for the rich folks. I have several more postcards of the Seabeach that perhaps I'll post some day, but what I love about these two views is that they were created from the same photograph.

I especially love the three children sitting in the foreground on the beach. The artist of the burning hotel gave them a mother.