Ask Lookout: What’s going on at the Westside’s Old Wrigley Building?

Drop the word “Wrigley” to just about anyone over 40 who grew up on the Westside of Santa Cruz, and you’re likely to get that wide, relaxed grin that often precedes natterings of nostalgia. You might hear that, on some days, the whole Westside carried the faint whiff of spearmint or Juicy Fruit, the dominant brands of chewing gum produced by the Wrigley Company in those days. You might hear that you could ride your banana-seat bike over to the Wrigley factory and you could score a free pack of gum just for asking.

In 1997, the Wrigley Company closed its Santa Cruz plant, its only plant in the western U.S., after 40 years in business. The sweet aromas and the free gum disappeared, as did the jobs — Wrigley was, for a while, the largest private-sector employer in Santa Cruz County. However, the abandoned factory building, a massive leviathan of steel and concrete, was left behind, a brooding and forbidding symbol of the decline of American manufacturing.

Today, locally produced chewing gum is a distant memory, but the Wrigley name and the building associated with it are alive and thriving. Like a mighty felled oak that has become an opportunistic home to a dizzying array of woodland creatures, the former gum factory has been repurposed as a thriving ecosystem of small businesses, laboratories and studios, a compelling symbol of Santa Cruz’s innovative creative culture. 

The old Wrigley building is now the Old Wrigley Building, a branded workspace of more than two dozen businesses on the far western edge of town. (The building’s address is Mission Street, but that’s a bit misleading. It’s on the part of Mission Street that breaks off from Highway 1 at Swift Street.) But unlike that old rotting log, the Wrigley building was engineered to be what it has become. And the engineer is Santa Cruz native and prominent commercial real-estate entrepreneur William Ow. 

In his role as a broker and part of Santa Cruz’s most prominent real-estate family, Ow oversees many interests around the county, but he keeps an office at the Wrigley building. (His spacious personal office even includes a few lockers designed for the line workers of the old chewing-gum plant.) The building has served as a kind of experiment in local entrepreneurism for many years, and Ow admits that, among his interests, the Wrigley is closest to his heart. As the Wrigley’s managing partner and active curator, Ow has not only transformed a white elephant on the Santa Cruz real-estate landscape, he’s been a primary force in the reinvention of the entire Westside commercial district.

In 2004, no one wanted to come to the Westside. It was not a destination, in fact, it was the opposite of a destination. So, when we started the process of enticing tenants to come here, it was like pulling teeth. “I’m not coming to Mission Street.” “I’m not coming this far into the Westside. It’s like the end of the Earth here.”
WILLIAM OW

In 2025, the Wrigley is poised for a new prominence on the Westside. It’s not only got a new coat of paint — a massive undertaking in its own right — it also has new outdoor signage and is in the early planning stages for a new front entrance.

How gigantic is this behemoth? The building stands at 385,000 square feet — to use an already overused unit of measurement, that’s nearly seven football fields of space. Ow tells a story of the time when his family’s real estate company was first considering purchasing the abandoned gum factory in the mid-2000s. Beguiled by the possibilities, he asked his father — family patriarch George Ow Jr. — to come take a look. William, then only in his 30s, was standing out front of the building when he watched his dad drive up, and then just keep going.

“I was like, ‘Hey Dad, what just happened? Where’d you go?” remembered William. 

The Ow family had plenty of major properties, including the Kings Plaza shopping center in Capitola, and Kings Village in Scotts Valley. But this thing? It dwarfed anything else in the portfolio. Later, George Ow told his son, “I just can’t think about this. It’s too much. It’s too big.”

Eventually, William’s enthusiasm overcame George’s reluctance, and in 2004, the Ows took a leap on the building anyway.

The community of the second floor

The first floor of the Wrigley consists mostly of the showroom and factory of Santa Cruz Bicycles, and the United States Geological Survey’s Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center. But it’s the building’s second floor that much better illustrates its eccentric community of creative businesses. As home to the R. Blitzer Gallery, the Idea Fab Labs and a few fitness/dance studios, the second floor, which currently has about 25 tenants, isn’t merely a warren of offices. It often attracts people who don’t actually work there, but come to gaze at some art on a First Friday or to work out at Steel & Grace, a pole-dancing studio. This makes it a quasi-public space, and it feels something like a strange crossbreed between an industrial workspace and a shopping mall. 

On a typical day, when there is no special event to necessitate temporary signage, the entrance to the Wrigley isn’t obvious. But once you find your way to the second floor, you’ll notice wide corridors, more than 20 feet wide, providing room for a number of thrift-shop sofas and overstuffed chairs. You’ll find not one but two upright pianos, lots of art on the walls and, a bit incongruously, several vintage racing motorcycles. 

The motorcycles are Ow’s, reflecting a longtime passion for classic brands like Moto Guzzi and Ducati. In one side corridor, the motorbikes are stacked on racks, like paint cans in a suburban garage. “They’re all operable,” said Ow, giving me a tour of the building as he gestured to his bikes. “I think of them as a kind of functional form of art.”

The motorcycles coexist with the more traditional kind of art, namely paintings and photographs from a wide variety of artists, all lining the corridors. With one of Santa Cruz’s most prominent art galleries in the building, as well as other artists studios, there might be more art hanging for public perusal in the Old Wrigley at any given time than in any other building in the county.

Ultimately, what makes the second floor so beguiling is not the motorcycles or the sofas or even the art, but the names of the businesses along the corridors that evoke cutting-edge tech or scientific innovation or creative elegance — “CodeStringers,”  “SwellCycle,” “Beyond Circuits,” “Headspace.” The names tickle the curiosity. What are these businesses and what do they do or make? (For the record, software, surfboards, electronics engineering, and protective headwear, respectively.)

Small businesses come and go at the Wrigley; some go under, while others grow bigger and need bigger space. But many more businesses stick around for the long haul. One of the Wrigley’s signature businesses is Idea Fab Labs, a membership-based workshop that allows its clients use of 3D printers, laser cutters and other sophisticated machinery for their manufacturing projects. Many of the members at Idea Fab Labs are hobbyists, but many others are entrepreneurs themselves who depend on the tools at the Labs to make a living.

Just as the Wrigley itself sits on the farthest fringe of Santa Cruz, Idea Fab Labs is in the farthest remote corner of the Wrigley. In fact, IFL offers a kind of microcosm of what’s going on at the Wrigley generally, said its co-founder and director, Jordan Layman.

“William has this eclectic group of businesses and projects — because not everyone here is a business, right?” said Layman. “We’re doing that too, on a smaller scale. We bring people in who are doing all sorts of different things. You get this mix. It’s business, it’s hobby, it’s art, it’s design, it’s industry, it’s all of it. We are the closest thing to a micro version of what’s happening in the building.”

Many of the businesses at the Wrigley work to cohere as a community. It’s become a custom that every Friday afternoon, some of the managers, owners and employees of the business come together to walk over to nearby Humble Sea Brewing Co. for tacos. Others who work in the building will cross paths at Alta, the coffee vendor just across the street. 

“We help each other out,” said Layman. “We make stuff for each other. People come to me all the time and say, ‘Hey, can you cut this?’ ‘Can I use the chop saw to do this thing?’”

Idea Fab Labs also works as a lure to draw in the public, with its weekly open house nights, during which anyone can come see the tools and resources the lab has to offer. On the opposite side of the building is the workspace for Visual Endeavors, a small company engaged in what has to rank as one of the coolest enterprises imaginable: The company supplies visual effects and light shows for musical concerts and other events. Business owner Aron Altmark uses his Wrigley building office as a kind of showcase for the visual effects that his company offers. VE is doing its part in attracting the outside public to visit the Wrigley. Altmark will open up the office for a special event as part of the next First Friday art tour, on Feb. 7.

Altmark has worked as a light artist at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s biennial Frequency festivals, and his artwork is often interactive. “My whole passion is tech,” he said at his Wrigley studio. “Technology makes some cool things that people can play with. So instead of making a painting, something you can just look at, my kind of digital artforms only come to life when people play with them.”

Altmark opened the studio at the Wrigley last spring. “I was looking for a creative community locally,” he said. “I do shows all over the place and my collaborators are all generally in the entertainment industry elsewhere. But what I really wanted to do was to dig into the creative community here in Santa Cruz. And the building seemed like a good way to do that, especially the way [Ow] talks about it, how he wants to bring in really interesting people.”

The O.W. Building

The Wrigley has been at the center of William Ow’s business life and creative imagination for more than 20 years now. He is able to see the long arc of local business trends and how the old gum factory played a role in those trends. For example, he said, the burgeoning commercial life rising from the nearby Swift Street Courtyard and its surrounding business district did not exist back in ’04 when he took on the Wrigley.

“In 2004, no one wanted to come to the Westside,” he said. “It was not a destination, in fact, it was the opposite of a destination. So, when we started the process of enticing tenants to come here, it was like pulling teeth. ‘I’m not coming to Mission Street.’ ‘I’m not coming this far into the Westside. It’s like the end of the Earth here.’”

But over the years that view has shifted, thanks largely to new developments that Ow had a strong hand in bringing about, such as the establishment of the Westside farmers market and the relocation of Pacific Collegiate School, both near the Wrigley. The late videographer and media entrepreneur Marty Collins was one of the pioneer tenants in the Wrigley, opening his Digital Media Factory in a building that still very much felt like a drafty and haunted abandoned factory. Meanwhile, Ow was looking at a wide variety of ideas to fill the place, from converting the second floor to UC Santa Cruz student housing to recruiting a big-box retailer. 

Generally, a commercial real estate vendor would prefer one big tenant to move into a big space, instead of subdividing the space for many smaller tenants. And eventually, Santa Cruz Bicycles and the USGS were big enough operations to at least occupy the first floor. But on the second floor, Ow had to adapt.

“I was getting tons of phone calls from people saying, ‘I’d really like to be in that building and I need some space, but a much smaller space.’ And maybe after the 100th call, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I should probably subdivide it.’”

Subdividing a large space is a puzzle. It involves balancing a number of factors from logistics to code compliance to safety to managing noise and odor. It also involves something not quite so obvious. It requires a kind of flow and design that makes it a pleasing place to come to work. Ow considered more than a dozen designs for subdividing the second floor in search of something that captured that vibe.

“I would use my wife and my kids and other people as a gauge,” he said. “Like, ‘How comfortable do you feel here? When you walk in, does it feel industrial and big and cold? Or does it feel inviting and soft?’”

Today, the second floor of the Old Wrigley Building still feels like a work in progress. There is no doubt that a cold, industrial vibe still predominates. It’s a long way from warm and fuzzy. But it does feel alive and lived-in, a place of quiet concentration and industry, in the Ben Franklin sense of that term. 

On the outside of the building, a big new lawn sign is reversing the building’s anonymity. For years, the building was a docile shade of sepia brown and sandy beige. A new paint job — Iron Ore black, Still Water gray, Natural white — gives it a sleek new look. For years, finding the entrance to the cold, echo-y stairway that leads to the second floor took a bloodhound’s nose or an insider’s knowledge. 

“So, this is all going to change,” said Ow standing before the small door that serves as the building’s entrance. “I’m about to put an elevator in here and change this whole entrance, make it a more pedestrian-friendly environment.”

For years, the building was officially known by the lifeless moniker “University Business Park.” The rebranding to the “Old Wrigley Building” not only provides a clever acronymed reference to its managing partner and curator — the “O.W. Building” — but also acknowledges the building’s past while staking a claim for its future. The rebranding, said Ow, was inspired by another Santa Cruz landmark, beachside hotel The Dream Inn, which had abandoned its original name before eventually returning to reclaim it. 

“It’s the same for here,” he said, the leviathan looming behind him. “It’s a landmark, people know what it is. It’s a location that people know. Why would you try to change that, or hide it?”

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