Ask Lookout’s guide to Santa Cruz County’s most intriguing questions

The first thing you learn as a young reporter in the journalism game is that humanity’s most abundant resource is not air nor water nor varieties of Oreos, but questions. 

Everybody’s got ’em, some more than others. Often, questions beget more questions — simple questions, and complicated ones, yes-or-no questions (often with maddeningly yes-and-no answers). The baby’s first cry is a question, as is the dying person’s last sigh (both a variation of “What exactly is happening right now?”).

Here at Lookout, we’re in the question-answering business, at least as it applies to Santa Cruz County. Our ongoing series, Ask Lookout, gives us an opportunity to address questions — often questions we ask ourselves — about the landscape and the environment across the county, the kinds of questions that might occur to anyone as they drive/bicycle/walk around the county. Such questions usually begin with some “What’s the deal with …?” or “What’s up with …?”

As an effort to conjure up a few more interesting questions from our readers, we are revisiting some of our past efforts to make sense of our community, in case you may have missed them the first time. There are, of course, several elephants in the room when it comes to questions about life in Santa Cruz — housing/development, local business, traffic, the rail trail — and those questions are the cornerstones of our daily coverage. But Ask Lookout is more about the cul-de-sacs than the well-traveled thoroughfares. 

It’s all in service for an even greater purpose, to build a kind of “WikiCruz,” a body of knowledge and information about the life and culture of Santa Cruz County, a kind of perpetually changing field guide to the people, places and things that give this place its distinct personality. Sure, it’s a quixotic endeavor. It’s a Winchester Mystery House kind of project, something that might never reach a finishing point, which is exactly its glory. 

So, we’re in the market for more questions. Put us on the job with an email to news@lookoutlocal.com. 

Wait, the Grateful Dead’s archive is in Santa Cruz? How did that happen?

Well, c’mon, it’s not that crazy of an idea. After all, Jerry Garcia remains a walking, breathing, guitar-playing embodiment of a significant part of Santa Cruz culture, even if he is no longer walking, breathing or guitar-playing. Still, it’s true, many Bay Area places have a deeper connection with the Dead’s history than Santa Cruz. (The band’s first-ever gig was in the Peninsula town of Menlo Park, but it was on Santa Cruz Avenue — that’s something, right?)

Even if Santa Cruz’s claim on the Dead is pretty flimsy, about a dozen years after Garcia’s death, the surviving members of the band granted UC Santa Cruz the right to be the eternal resting place of the band’s considerable archive of printed material — letters, posters, photographs, Garcia’s amputated middle finger. (For the record, that little piece of Dead memorabilia still, we assume, lies moldering somewhere in the dank soils near Lompico where Jerry lost it as a child in a wood-splitting accident. But as soon as it materializes, you can bet it’ll be front and center at the archive.)

Journalist Christopher Neely was on hand at the archive when a young fan, wandering through the permanent exhibit at the McHenry Library, said out loud what we’re all thinking: “I wonder why this stuff is here?”

Wonder no more. Chris has got you. 

Do you have to be Buddhist to visit the Land of Medicine Buddha?

No, of course not. But I would say you should behave like a Buddhist — that is to say, be respectful, if not reverential, of your surroundings when you’re there. The Land of Medicine Buddha sits on about 108 acres in the Soquel Hills with miles of beautiful soul-nurturing hiking trails, and the public is invited to explore it. The center itself is a vibrant place where visitors participate in programs to learn more about Buddhist philosophy and tenets, including how to meditate.

You’re certainly welcome to visit, but keep in mind this is a pilgrimage site for Buddhists from around the world and a genuinely sacred place. Leave your booze and weed, your Bluetooth speakers and your bad attitudes at home. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to visit there, but be aware, you just might lean that way when you get back home. 

Why is there a “door to nowhere” on the bluffs overlooking Front Street?

It’s one of the first things that a newcomer or a visitor to Santa Cruz will notice as they try to seek out the clearest path from downtown to Main Beach (not an easy thing for a newbie!). And, you know what? Locals have noticed it before, so spare us your that-first-step-is-a-doozy jokes. 

A little way back, Lookout’s Gwyneth Holcomb gave us all the full lowdown on the weird door on the Beach Hill bluff that leads to a 35-foot drop to the street below. You’re actually looking at the back of a grand old Queen Anne-style home called the Golden Gate Villa, originally built in the 1890s and whose early visitors included Thomas Edison and Theodore Roosevelt. We can’t confirm that Teddy was the first to use that first-step-is-a-doozy line, but you could see it, right?

The bottom line is that the door connects to the basement of the home’s carriage house, in which the horses were stabled, and it was used to get rid of manure, which must have been a super fun experience for Victorian-era bicyclists and power walkers along Front Street. Let’s note here that the Golden Gate Villa was the site of a horrific murder-suicide in 1907, so ironically the “door to nowhere” might be the least weird thing about the old house. 

Who was the model for West Cliff Drive’s famous surfer statue? And is he single?

Depending on your social circles, the likelihood that you have in the past, or will in the future, come across some sandy-haired beach dude who claims to be the model for West Cliff’s iconic surfer statue is probably higher than you think. At the unveiling of the statue in 1992, its sculptor, Thomas Marsh, playfully asked the assembled crowd if the model for the statue was present, and about 10 hands went up. 

Only Marsh knows the truth, which he shared with me in an interview a couple of years ago. The actual model, not present at its unveiling, was a 20-year-old surfer and soccer player Marsh knew in San Francisco when he was creating the piece, around 1989. That means the model for the surfer statue would today be somewhere in his mid to late 50s. Whether he is now coupled or not is unknown. But one thing we do know is, though he might still look pretty good, the idealized youthful handsomeness frozen in that statue looks better. The whole point of such art is to preserve what the passing years will inevitably take away. 

What’s going on inside the old Wrigley gum factory?

Is chewing gum still a thing that kids do? When I was a kid, back in the McKinley administration, gum was considered major contraband in schools. In that sense, the Wrigley Gum factory on the far west side of Santa Cruz, which in the latter part of the last century supplied much of the western U.S. with its Juicy Fruit and Double Mint, contributed to countless disruptions in classrooms and principal’s offices from here to Omaha. 

Anyway, Wrigley abandoned Santa Cruz decades ago and left behind a hulking industrial building that has turned into an unlikely kind of pet project in entrepreneurship and community for the building’s owner, Santa Cruz native William Ow. The Wrigley’s second floor is a quasi-public space that feels a bit like the arts building at a big state university — Ow’s motorcycle collection is a theme in the broad corridors. But it is, in fact, an incongruous collection of businesses, many of them with a creative bent, from the R.Blitzer Gallery to the Idea Fab Labs maker space. One thing you can’t find there, however, is gum. 

Here’s the whole story.

Who in Santa Cruz County most deserves to be immortalized with a statue, monument or street or other place named after them?

Well, the Cabrillo College renaming kerfuffle certainly taught us that naming stuff after people is, to use a well-worn euphemism of critics of such things these days, “problematic.” Still, there is one person who has left a mark on what Santa Cruz County looks like today who doesn’t receive nearly enough credit: William H. Weeks.

Weeks, a native of Canada, was an architect who was most active in the first decades of the 20th century. He designed hundreds of buildings throughout Northern California, but he made his home in Watsonville. Quite literally, both Watsonville and Santa Cruz would look radically different, even today, if Weeks had never been born. 

The sheer volume and variety of what he designed locally is staggering, including the grand ballroom at the Cocoanut Grove, the Palomar Hotel in downtown Santa Cruz, the breathtaking Tuttle Mansion in Watsonville, the grand old People’s Bank building now housing Sockshop on Pacific Avenue, the London Nelson Community Center, the Darling House on West Cliff Drive, several schools and libraries, including Santa Cruz High and Watsonville High, and countless private homes, many of them among the most valuable real-estate properties in the area. 

I mean, c’mon. Maybe Weeks has some skeletons in his closet, but you know those closets are going to be beautiful in the most classic sense. I say whoever Watson is has had his glory — let’s rename it Weeksville.

What’s the deal with “red tides” on local beaches? Is there an Instagram filter that will turn all those muddy reds a dazzling shade of turquoise?

It might mean a football team in Alabama to most Americans, but to coastal Californians “red tide” is quickly becoming a part of our everyday vocabulary, right there next to “atmospheric river.” The term is a colorful shorthand for phytoplankton blooms, sudden or gradual bursts of algae growth in coastal waters that manifest in a dull and frankly quite menacing rusty mud color. 

OK, but is this just an aesthetics problem? In fact, red tides can cause health issues not just for swimmers but for those who eat mussels from affected areas of the sea. And yes, red tides are seasonal, and yes, that season is set to begin in the spring, right about now. 

Last summer, Lookout’s Hillary Ojeda took a deep dive into red tides — figuratively speaking, of course — after a flare-up on local beaches, to find out the microbial backstory on the phenomenon. As for Instagram filters, well, you’re on your own there.

Was the “Cement Ship” in Aptos actually a party boat?

Oh, baby, was it ever. The so-called “Cement Ship” — it was actually concrete, but we’re not going down that rabbit hole — was officially known as the S.S. Palo Alto, a decommissioned but never used World War I tanker, that was rescued from mothballs and dragged down to Aptos. There, in the waning days of Prohibition, it was converted into one of the area’s hottest nightspots. It opened in the summer of 1930 with a grand ballroom, a swimming pool, a cafe, an arcade with slot machines and several other backroom retreats designed for gambling and the enjoyment of contraband hooch. The old ship attracted scenesters from all over the Monterey Bay area and beyond — the ballroom’s opening night alone attracted 3,000 people. 

But, like so many of the hottest spots, it didn’t last, just two brief years. The Great Depression was already taking its toll on the place in 1932 when a winter storm slammed against the Palo Alto and cracked its hull. Two years later, it was stripped for parts and sold to the state of California for one dollar, making it the Jim Morrison of Santa Cruz hotspots. It lived hard, died young and left behind a legend we’re still talking about. 

What’s with all the ornate religious displays in one small area at Pinto Lake? Did the Mother of Christ really appear in Watsonville in the ’90s?

Apparitions of holy icons and the metaphysics of faith are well beyond the limited investigative abilities of your friendly neighborhood news reporter, I’m afraid — though I suddenly have an idea for a Netflix TV series. But, apparently, many people believed, and may continue to believe, that the Virgin Mary appeared by Pinto Lake one summer day in 1992, dressed in the humble garb of the campesina, to comfort a grieving local woman. She didn’t stick around for questions, but after the incident, an image was discovered on a nearby oak tree that looked suspiciously like the famous Mexican-folk-art depiction of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

Back in the Clinton years, Pinto Lake drew in tens of thousands of visitors, believers and otherwise, to gaze at the image on the tree. The woman who witnessed the apparition has since died, and the holy tree itself came down in a winter storm in 2015. (Funny, but no one particularly wants to debate the spiritual significance of that.) What remains are the tiny shrines and relics that even today are weighted with grief, hope and other testaments of faith, all making for a compelling after-image of a miracle.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.