Quick Take
Two local event companies are bringing new life to two long-vacant downtown Santa Cruz buildings this holiday season. Collective Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Mountains Makers Market will host holiday markets at the former Logos Books & Records and Palace Art spaces, respectively, featuring dozens of local artists and food vendors. City officials hope the pop-ups will enliven challenging storefronts, which have sat empty for several years.
Two Santa Cruz-based event companies are kicking off the holiday season by filling long-vacant buildings in downtown Santa Cruz with a series of pop-ups.
Collective Santa Cruz announced on Instagram on Wednesday that it will hold two holiday markets on Dec. 21 and Dec. 22 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside the old Logos Books & Records building on Pacific Avenue. The daytime events will feature more than two dozen Santa Cruz-area artists, craftspeople and food vendors, as well as craft beer by Humble Sea Brewing Co.
On the north end of Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz Mountains Makers Market will hold weekly craft fairs with more than 25 artists inside the former Palace Art & Office Supply space on weekends through December starting Nov. 28-30. The events will be similar to the monthly markets the event company has hosted on Pacific Avenue every third Sunday for the past three years – just indoors. From January through April, the makers market will open once a month, with the possibility of holding more events with different themes, said the city’s economic development coordinator, Rebecca Unitt.
Collective Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Mountains Makers Market responded to a request that the city sent out in August for ideas for these vacant storefronts. “These spaces can use the love, and these are two really great producers in our community that we’re excited to be partnering with,” Unitt said.
Both Palace and Logos have left large holes in Santa Cruz’s main downtown corridor for the past several years, grappling with difficult footprints that don’t align with the current retail trends.
Palace Art sold a range of office and art supplies for 71 years before it closed at the beginning in 2021. At almost 9,000 square feet, the space at 1407 Pacific Ave. is too large for many smaller retailers and too small for most national chains, which would prefer at least 12,000 square feet, real estate investor and broker William Ow told Lookout in May.
The Logos building at 1117 Pacific Ave. has been empty since the book and record store closed in 2017 after 48 years in business. Finding a tenant for the large two-story space was challenging because the 7,000-square-foot ground floor can’t be leased separately from the 3,500-square-foot lower level, broker Nicolas Greenup with Cushman & Wakefield told Lookout in 2024. The two floors are connected by a staircase in the center of the building.
In April, the city announced that it intended to open a police substation in the space to increase law enforcement presence in the neighborhood. But the city ultimately decided that it wasn’t a good fit because of the building’s unique two-level layout. “We’re looking at some other locations for the substation and doing more events in Logos going forward,” said Unitt.
Childhood friends Jalen Horne and Kendall Denike founded Collective Santa Cruz in 2022, and have hosted themed events for the past three years at craft breweries, music venues, restaurants and parking lots in industrial areas. This summer, Collective hosted five monthly food-focused festivals each themed around one of the basic tastes – sweet, bitter, sour, umami and salty – with crowds that ranged from a few hundred to over a thousand.
They said they’re up for the challenge of reworking the former bookstore into a temporary indoor marketplace. “Our events are over the top. Every corner you turn, there’s something else to look at,” said Denike. “I see the unique layout, with the ground floor in the basement, and the twists and turns of the staircase, as an opportunity to create that experience of discovery and stimulation.”
Denike and Kendall are partnering with longtime collaborator Humble Sea Brewing to provide craft beer, wine and beer cocktails for the events. There will be around 30 vendors at the holiday markets, Horne said, and the lineups will be different on each day, with some overlap of businesses that will be there on both days.
Opening the doors to a formerly beloved space for the first time in almost a decade feels powerful to the two Santa Cruz natives – but they’re also feeling the pressure. “There’s a huge nostalgia factor for people, and we want to deliver a solid experience,” said Horne. “I think that’s what we try to do with all of our events. We’re going to keep that energy going in order to bring people together.”