Santa Cruz Victorians

Santa Cruz is a lovely place, famous for its boardwalk, its gritty street life (it is the Bay Area bookend to San Francisco after all), its surfing (Steamer Lane and the Surfing Museum) and of course UCSC whose mascot is the banana slug.

That’s the boardwalk

Surfing museum

makeshift memorials at Steamer Lane

The history of Santa Cruz begins of course with a mission, and indeed Santa Cruz has the oldest surviving building from a mission, although it is NOT the mission church.

But what always strikes me in Santa Cruz are the Victorian homes. The place is lousy with them and there are several landmark districts.

This Second Empire just down from the mission is one of the classics, but the modest ones create a wonderful streetscape….

Of course, many have new uses, like Dr. Miller’s, which would be the epitome of hipsterdom if the world were ironic enough to allow such to exist:

And this awesome 1880 Italianate that sells vaping supplies (It’s Santa Cruz!)

I guess flowers too. Anything green. Or green-like.

And of course B & Bs…

The beachfront, which is obviously primo property, also features many Victorians, although I sometimes have to look twice to see what is actually 120 years old and what is a modern addition or detail. Can you spot these below?

This one is a little easier because you can see the concrete foundation – the whole left half is modern. That precious turret is a bit harder to figure, though.

Ah, and the classic garage underneath – this is actually a Bay Area-wide phenomenon, seen in the Italianates of San Francisco, the Shingles of Berkeley, and every post-1900 rowhouse you can find

I will finish with this little church, one of several from the era. Why do they always have two doors? I mean, if it were a Quaker meeting house from the 18th century in Southern New Jersey I could see it, but….

Advertisement

In Search of Luxury

For thirty years I gave tours of the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor outside Chicago and talked about the earliest European history of the area, which was the French trade, the couriers de bois who paddled through the wilds of the upper Midwest from Montreal in search of one thing: beaver pelts. Why? To make fancy top hats for the European upper class.

Dude is starting a fire with flint and steel on a real island in Illinois

Now I give tours of Monterey, where the earliest European history is of course the Spanish, who were sailing to California from the Phillipines and China in search of one thing: sea otter pelts. Why? To make capes and caps for the Chinese upper class.

wicked sea otter snapback dude!

If you look at key trade items that led to the creation of new places, they tend to be luxury goods. It ain’t the Polyester Road that goes through Samarkand, it’s Silk. Heck, some places are even named after these goods: Java, Spice Islands, Cote d’Ivoire. Penang in Malaysia evinces the layers of trade from Portuguese and Chinese to English. The Spanish and Portuguese spent two hundred years looking for gold in the Americas.

And they found it. Even if they had to pry it out of your cold, dead nose

Even the second and third waves of settlement are often focused on luxury goods. When you visit the Custom House in Monterey, the oldest public building in California, you learn about the cowhide trade during the Mexican era in the 1820s, where boats were laden with hides and then shipped much farther than China: to Boston and New York, where the markup was about 10 times the price in California.

hidebound and hell bent for leather

Here’s the Custom House.

And of course once the Americans manage to take over California from the Mexicans – in fact about exactly three weeks later, the Americans get all hot and bothered for gold as well, and basically San Francisco and all of Northern California get created in like a year.

which is why there are still like a thousand of these despite the earthquakes

Interestingly, the 19th century witnesses the rise of industrial economies and trade becomes more a quantity thing. The European top hats stop being beaver and start being, of all things, silk. The hides being shipped from Monterey are used not so much for boots and jackets as for belts to power factories. Malaysia becomes more interesting for rubber and palm oil, Illinois runs out of beaver and starts growing corn by the crore, and dear old Monterey starts whaling on whales to produce the oil that lights and heats everybody’s house.
This sidewalk is made of whale vertebrae. Honestly

Now, between the Gold Rush and the discovery (which oddly eluded the Spanish for a century) that San Francisco was a WAY better harbor than Monterey, little old Monterey became a backwater. No more hides, no more whales. So, they turn to tourism, which is, in itself, a luxury good. They do it way back in the 1880s, when only the wealthy get more than one day a week off.

They called this one Casa de Oro

And this was a hotel and…

Pretty soon with the tourists come the artists. Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austen, and a local guy named John Steinbeck who turned tales of the Inland Empire into a Nobel Prize. He published Grapes
of Wrath just two years after Monterey created their historic district of downtown adobes in 1937 – basically the same time as New Orleans’ created the Vieux Carré.

And then he writes another book called Cannery Row, about another industrial operation, which then collapses and gets turned into yet another tourist attraction, although this time on an industrial rather than exclusive scale.

My tour continues through Cannery Row, past the 1984 Monterey Bay Aquarium which cemented its tourist position to 17 Mile Drive, the fun way to get to Carmel, the town the artists flocked to 100 years ago. There is plenty of luxury at Pebble Beach and the houses of 17 Mile Drive.

Carmel itself has a history dating to 1771 when Fra Junipero Serra established his second mission on El Camino Real (he actually established it a year earlier in Monterey) and there you can see the heavily reconstructed Mission, mostly dating from the 1930s.

I suppose today PLACE is the luxury item, and with most houses starting at a million despite their über-cute diminutive scale, Carmel is a luxury good and its trade is booming.


The houses have no numbers, only names. You have to get your mail at the post office.

What Hath God Wrought

This is last March before the drought

Living in Silicon Valley is fascinating in a variety of ways, from the absurdly non-existent weather (we think “Polar Vortex” is something treated with antidepressants) to the car culture, massive amounts of wealth, and the odd internationalism of the computer industries which draw people from every nation on earth. There is also the famously laid-back West Coast ethic and a blissful isolation from the vapidity and noise of national politics. California is the world’s eighth largest economy, and like the second, it has a functional single-party system. Also like the second, it is the most capitalist place on earth – it’s not how much money you make: it’s how much money your money makes…

Even the appliances are laid back. My washer and dryer stay outside

I like to joke that in Palo Alto there are two types of businesses: start-ups and wealth management. There is also Stanford University, although I suppose it also falls under the category of wealth management as the most successful fundraising entity on the planet. But there is something to the ethic of innovation that characterizes Silicon Valley, that drew Zuckerberg from Harvard, that formed Steve Jobs, that made garages the seedlings of the world’s biggest corporations for several generations.

add a sense of Mission

The famous Jobs quote where he talks about understanding that the world is made by other people and can just as easily be re-made by you – is true every day around here. If you go back in this blog, you can see my struggles with technology. I didn’t understand the iPad when it came out, but I understood that within a week every fifth person in China had one and now I can’t eat a meal, contract a service or even talk to another human without an iPad.

You only think cars need wheels because other people say they do

Innovation and that old “thinking outside of the box” really are everyday here. In fact, they are tradition. A tradition of not thinking traditionally.

Plenty of traditional architecture, though. Which, as every preservationist knows, is where new ideas come from

Yet despite the promise of the wireless world and the depth of our relationships with our smart phones in 2014, this is still a place, and the tradition of this place goes back before the garage of Jobs to the garage of Hewlett Packard, which was actually preserved as a relic of 1939 and birthplace of Silicon Valley. Why a place when we live in a wireless network – why not another place?

well, this helps

But that is the logic of capitalism, which overrides the apparent logic of technology any day. You know the idea that professional people can live anywhere they want thanks to the communication network that connects us all – how old is that idea? 2000? 1996? Try 1844. Samuel Morse’s telegraph. What Hath God Wrought? They all predicted there would be no cities now that you could communicate over wires. Which is why there have hardly been any cities built anywhere since 1844.

not

You see there is a logic to concentration that overrides the ability to be distant. This is why H-P and Intel and Apple and Google and Twitter are all here. The logic of capitalism states that if there is a successful business, the best place to build a similar successful business is right next door – you have the talent and treasure to make it happen. We thrive in this sea of collaboration, in this physical network that has transformed the world into a virtual network.

Because the most high-tech way of moving things is to run a wire underground and keep it constantly moving. Grab on for a ride, let go to stop.