Whither the Pacific Cultural Center? A Seabright landmark faces an uncertain future

Before the pandemic, the Pacific Cultural Center in Santa Cruz was a thriving hive of activity in the Seabright neighborhood. Today, the forlorn building on the corner of Seabright Avenue and Broadway is empty and unused, with a for-sale sign in front of it. 

Because it was owned and operated by the Hanuman Fellowship, the nonprofit that also runs the yoga retreat Mount Madonna Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the activity at the PCC almost always inclined toward spiritual enrichment — yoga, kirtan, ecstatic dance, drum circles, meditation. It was a performance space as well, and the visiting performers — multi-instrumentalist Jai Uttal, vocalist Jaya Lakshmi to name just a couple of prominent names — were in keeping with that spiritual orientation.

Going back for more than three decades, the PCC was a kind of Midtown community center, serving a similar purpose as downtown Santa Cruz’’s London Nelson Center. 

Those days appear to be over. 

The Hanuman Fellowship has put the building up for sale, and it is now in escrow for an impending sale to the Santa Cruz City Schools district for about $2.7 million. News of the impending sale has some in the community singing ruefully that old Joni Mitchell song — “You pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”

The school district has two priorities for the property and, yes, one of them is parking. Gault Elementary School, right across the street, is the only school in the district that has no dedicated parking, a situation that has caused frustration for Gault parents and teachers for years. But the district’s other need is a meeting space, a dedicated room or building for regular meetings among administrators, teachers, parents and community members. Now, district meetings take place in a number of makeshift spaces around town, including spaces borrowed from the County Office of Education. The district believes that the Pacific Cultural Center property can fill both those needs.

But there is growing resistance to the district’s plans, including a petition to save the building from demolition. 

The school district, however, says any talk about demolition of the building is premature. 

Sam Rolens, the chief of communication and community engagement at Santa Cruz City Schools, said that the “path of least resistance” would be to preserve the building and retrofit it to the district’s needs. To be of use again, the building needs improvements to bring it up to code. The city is now undergoing an assessment on what retrofits are required and how much they will cost.

But, activists hoping to save the PCC as it is say that the district’s efforts to preserve the building are merely a pro forma gesture, that it really wants only to demolish the building and erect another in its place, more in line with its needs.

Rolens said that, in its letter of intent to the seller, the district wanted to be clear that the building might have to be demolished. “Then [at the time of the letter of intent] and still now,” he said, “our facilities team is very skeptical that the old building can be brought up to code.”

The other wrinkle here is that the Pacific Cultural Center building has a historic building designation, and the district, or any buyer, would need approval from the Santa Cruz City Council to demolish the building. It was originally dedicated as The Church of God in the late 1940s, and was later known as The Seabright Church. 

MichaelDavid Creamer is spearheading the petition movement to resist the district’s plans and keep the Pacific Cultural Center as a community center focused on yoga and yoga-related activities. He said that there were three other groups who put in formal bids for the building, including one group of investors in which he was involved. He said that his group’s bid was just $5,000 short of the district’s bid.

Creamer, a local dance instructor who leads an event at Santa Cruz Yoga every Tuesday evening, says that losing the Pacific Cultural Center is symbolic of a larger transition in Santa Cruz away from community-centered places. Without physical spaces like the PCC, he said, communities can easily lose the will and energy to fight rising rents and the general isolation of urban life. “We slowly move away to places where it’s cheaper to live, with better community gatherings, and Santa Cruz fills in with folks on their laptops from Silicon Valley, and we lose our dance community, our movement community, and ultimately our arts community.”

As it stands, the Pacific Cultural Center is built as a dance facility with a 40-by-70-foot oak “sprung” floor, ideal for dance and movement. The floor does have a slope in it that needs to be fixed, but Creamer said that his research shows the building to be structurally sound. “You just feel the vibrance in the room.”

Santa Cruz’s Carla Brown is one of many people who frequented the Pacific Cultural Center over the years for yoga classes and other activities. She first discovered the community of PCC almost 30 years ago. “It just always felt welcoming,” she said. “The vibe there was always really special, whether I was doing yoga, or taking writing workshops in one of the smaller rooms. It was just a warm, nurturing place, and I feel [places like PCC] are what sets apart Santa Cruz from many places in the Western world, and even in the Bay Area. Community is becoming more and more — what’s the word? — pasteurized. It’s just not as organic or genuine. And that’s how we stay nourished, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. That’s exactly what the PCC did for me.”

The school district’s Sam Rolens knows all about the PCC’s status in the community. He grew up in the Seabright area, just a few blocks from the building. 

“Even for people who didn’t frequent the place to do yoga or dance,” he said, “it is something of a neighborhood landmark. And the reaction of people saying, ‘If we can save it, let’s save it,’ has been pretty universal. But in the interactions we’ve had with people, I think they are pretty open to understanding our constraints at Gault School and our need for something like this.”

Rolens said that whatever the school district plans for the PCC site, it will be open and available for many uses. “You know, we’ve heard this idea, ‘Oh, this should be for community use. How did a big organization like the school district end up with it?’ And I’m quick to remind anyone that we are community use — for kids and families and teachers. We still want it to be a crossroads for community connections.”

Still, no matter how ecumenical the school district is in its intentions to open a new space for the community, it’s not in their interest to rebuild a yoga/dance studio. Whenever a new district-owned building opens — and it could be years from now — it might well turn out to be a vibrant community space. But it won’t be the kind of community space that the Pacific Cultural Center has been for almost 40 years. 

Creamer said that the proposal is the school district “doing a well-meaning thing at the wrong place.” Other groups, he said, could buy the property and restore it to close to what it’s been before.

“I can imagine a Sunday ecstatic dance and a potluck outside afterwards,” he said, “and Rumi poetry readings and jazz concerts. Just imagine all the things that could happen in there.”

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