Quick Take
Business owners Michael Spadafora and Patrice Boyle reflect on a tumultuous year for their businesses as the Murray Street Bridge closure slashed summer traffic, left them struggling to survive and exposed what they describe as a lack of communication and meaningful help from the city. While their activism hasn’t gained much traction with officials, community support from customers and local organizations has helped them hold on through a precarious year.
This midwinter season, Lookout Santa Cruz is checking in with some of the people and topics we’ve covered over the past year.
For Michael Spadafora, the owner of Java Junction Coffee Roasting, 2025 was defined by hard conversations with his wife on whether they could keep the doors open at their coffee shops in Santa Cruz’s Seabright neighborhood and at the Santa Cruz Harbor.
“We have about 60 days, maybe,” before they have to close, he said, his voice thick with emotion. In December at his cozy Seabright café, Spadafora ran his hand along a wooden table, its edges softened with age. It was made by Soquel High School students for the coffeehouse in 1992, he said — one of many memories inside the 33-year-old establishment.
Over the past nine months, a major seismic retrofitting project on the nearby Murray Street Bridge has profoundly affected nearby businesses. Some, including Java Junction, say they’re on the brink of closure. Last spring, the bridge closed to one-way traffic. In June, it closed completely, cutting off a vital thoroughfare that 17,000 cars on average drove daily. All pedestrian traffic and eastbound vehicle traffic is slated to resume in February, but the project won’t be complete until January 2028.
At the beginning of the year, the bridge wasn’t on Patrice Boyle’s mind at all. The owner of nearby La Posta Restaurant heard about the project a few times over the years, but the city had pushed back the start date at least once. She thought the bridge would remain open, at least one way, for most of the construction.
In February, Boyle was shocked to learn that the city planned to completely close the bridge that summer. “It also surprised me that they hadn’t spoken to any business owners in the area. There was zero announcement to any of us,” said Boyle.
Both Boyle and Spadafora are frustrated with a lack of communication or meaningful aid from the city throughout the year, despite the dire consequences for nearby businesses. “What the city has done is foreseeable negligence,” said Spadafora. “Any reasonable person should know what they’re going to do and what damage it’s going to cause. And they should have known the damage when you shut down a road that has 17,000 cars a day.”
In August, Spadafora and Boyle spoke at a city council meeting alongside half a dozen other business owners, begging for relief. A few weeks later, when Seabright Social, a cornerstone restaurant for the area, closed, it blamed the bridge closure.
The closure of the bridge during the crucial summer season resulted in a drop in traffic at area restaurants and bars, which rely on income during the warmer months to pay their bills through the slower winter. “We’re like squirrels or bears. We gather up all our food in the summertime, and it has to last us all winter. We didn’t have that this year,” said Spadafora.
Business at Java Junction in Seabright dropped 5 to 10% in 2025, said Spadafora. While that might not seem like a lot, cafes and restaurants operate on such small margins. In 2025, he didn’t pay himself for his own labor at either the harbor or Seabright coffee houses, because neither location turned a profit, he said.
“It means I don’t make anything. Losing 10% means I’m putting money back in,” he said.
After that tense and frustrating city council meeting, Boyle launched a petition on Change.org to entice the city to at least open the nearby rail line to pedestrians and cyclists so people could walk or bike across the harbor. She was also trying to publicize her plight to rally customers and ease the economic suffering. At the time, the only way to travel between the once-symbiotic neighborhoods was to detour more than a mile through Arana Gulch.
More than 2,300 people signed the petition. Over the next two months, the city explored the idea, but ultimately scrapped it due to numerous issues, including opposition from the rail line’s freight operator, Progressive Rail, and safety concerns.
“There’s a saying that the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference. I feel like that’s where the city is with us,” said Boyle. “If we don’t push them, they won’t do anything.”
A bright spot in this political and financial storm is the connections that Boyle and Spadafora say they’ve made with their customers, fellow business owners and organizations such as Think Local First and Santa Cruz Neighbors that have supported them with their dollars, marketing and events.
While Spadafora and Boyle don’t believe their activism has made meaningful headway with the city, it has helped get the word out to community members who have gone out of their way to purchase meals, beers and coffee at Seabright and harbor businesses during the bridge closure. With their continued support, they hope to make it to the end of 2026.
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