Walking Tours Reveal Santa Cruz in the Old Days

It’s always a trip to see a photograph of a Santa Cruz street as it looked a century ago, back when Soquel Avenue was just a wide dirt strip or when Live Oak was an expanse of flower fields and poultry lots.

Several walking tours, thoughtfully put together by history buffs in town, are an interesting way to imagine the past.

Brochures for five different tours of downtown Santa Cruz are available at the city's Planning and Community Development Department, or online. The tours take anywhere from 45-90 minutes and offer detailed information about up to 20 different buildings each, as well as definitions of architectural terms and styles. 

These tours, created over the last seven years by the city’s Historic Building Survey, include many of the Blue Plaque buildings.

“The plaques are honorary plaques awarded to someone who has a historical house that’s over 50 years,” says Donn Lauritson, senior planner for the Historic Preservation Commission of Santa Cruz. Citizens interested in applying for a Blue Plaque can apply at the Museum of Art and History, which hosts an award ceremony and walking tour each May during Historic Preservation Week. 

The walking tours for downtown include one of the Mission Hill District, which has been called the “birthplace of Santa Cruz.” This part of town includes the first European settlement in Santa Cruz County. And before the Mission was built, the area was an Indian habitation. There are also interesting and convenient tours of Walnut Avenue, Ocean View, Beach Hill and downtown areas.

Live Oak, too, is rich with history, and local historian, Norm Potevin, has put together five tours for that area. You can find them at Deli-Licious Cafe in the Live Oak Plaza on Portola Drive.

“I kind of realized that people in Live Oak didn’t think they had anything historical,” says Potevin, who put the tours together over the last seven years. “All of the really old historical sites here are often houses behind houses, so nobody really sees them,” he says.

The layout of Live Oak also provides a bit of a challenge for walking tours, but Potevin was able to find historical sites close enough to each other to create the tours. 

Potevin usually conducts the tours during the summer on Tuesday evenings, although anybody can do them on their own time. 

The Live Oak Tours takes walkers through the flower fields and poultry farms of the past. Begonias, tulips and other bulb flowers were a huge crop at the end of the 19th century, but they floundered during the Depression and World War II. 

“After the war, the large poultry lots and fields began to be subdivided into smaller lots,” says Potevin, who also talks about the Spanish settlement on the other side of the River, called Branciforte, long before California even became a state. 

“If you look into newspaper articles from that time, you won’t find much about Branciforte,” says Potevin, who has studied genealogy and researched Santa Cruz history for many years now—and is a member of Researchers Anonymous.

The Santa Cruz Planning and Community Development Department is at 809 Center St. For more information, call 831-420-5416