‘The community’s living room’: Bookshop Santa Cruz celebrates 60 years of endurance

When you visit Bookshop Santa Cruz on Pacific Avenue, you might glance over a wooden rocking horse in the children’s section. Against the backdrop of thousands of new titles and colorful covers, it’s a little unassuming, the wood pockmarked and worn.

What you might not know is that the rocking horse was one of the only objects saved from the store in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which decimated the downtown area.

Bookshop owner Casey Coonerty Protti was in middle school during the earthquake. The building was condemned. Her father, Neal Coonerty, who co-owned the store with her mother, Candy, was given 15 minutes to run through the store and grab important items.

He taped flashlights to his arms and rushed in, hurriedly grabbing financial documents and employees’ belongings. At the last minute, he picked up the rocking horse, emerging from the rubble of the building with it in his arms. 

Former general manager Patrick O’Connell called the rocking horse the “phoenix” of the store, symbolizing how Bookshop and the Santa Cruz community came together after the destruction of the quake.

“My first memory in life was on the rocking horse,” said Coonerty Protti, who has owned the store for 20 years. “I really grew up in the store.” 

Decades later, she and the Bookshop crew will celebrate the store’s 60th anniversary this weekend with live music, cake and a storewide sale. The celebration marks six decades of endurance in the face of change.

O’Connell worked at Bookshop from 1978 to 2020, watching the store survive decades of upheaval, from the Loma Prieta earthquake to the rise of big box stores that tried to edge Bookshop out and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s a tribute to the Bookshop staff largely, to ownership, but more than anything, there’s a huge indebtedness to the Santa Cruz community that has rallied time and time again not only to keep us going, but to keep this whole community alive and well,” O’Connell said. “Bookshop owes its existence to the loyalty of its patrons.”

O’Connell recalled the devastation in the aftermath of the 1989 earthquake. He had left work early to watch the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, but drove right back downtown after hearing the news.

“The immediate aftermath was just horror, and the fact that people had been killed and hurt,” he said. “At that point, it seemed like that was the end of the store and the end of many of the businesses downtown.”

Neal Coonerty eventually convinced examiners to give him 48 hours to get everything out of the store. He went on the local radio station to ask for a couple volunteers. The next morning, 400 people showed up at the rubble, ready to take action. 

Everyone had to sign a liability waiver in case of aftershocks. Volunteers formed a giant human chain to safely retrieve books and fixtures from the store, and business resumed in temporary pavilion tents. After three years working out of the tents, volunteers formed yet another human chain to move all the books into Bookshop’s current location. 

“If we had not gone through the earthquake experience together, where the community started to feel like they owned the store as much as we did because they had given so much to the store, I’m not sure we would have survived other crises and challenges that happened later on,” Coonerty Protti said. 

Jax Caldwell-Dunn, Bookshop’s general manager, said the store has always felt like family. After giving birth, Caldwell-Dunn said her coworkers would take her newborn daughter for walks around the store. She also said the team has banded together during “tough times” in the world.

“After the 2016 election, which felt really devastating in so many ways, Bookshop came together to create all of this programming to help people move through their feelings on it and respond and fight back,” said Caldwell-Dunn, who’s worked there for the past 12 years. 

Bookshop has always been politically active, she added. The store proudly displays books that have been banned across the country, as well as sections dedicated to queer authors and anti-racist books.

Coonerty Protti said that some of Bookshop’s political activism has come in the form of satire. In the late 2000s, her dad came up with the idea for a clock that counted down the time until President George W. Bush was out of office. 

The store ended up selling over 65,000 clocks to Bookshop patrons as well as other book and gift stores across the country. 

“We were close to bankruptcy,” Coonerty Protti said of selling the clocks in the middle of a nationwide recession. “My dad ended up mortgaging his house to keep the store open. Those clocks probably saved Bookshop Santa Cruz.”

When conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh’s book was released in the 1990s, Bookshop sold it for the price of bologna and donated the proceeds to the National Organization for Women and the Santa Cruz AIDS Project. 

While the Coonerty family has gotten pushback for being so vocal — Limbaugh himself called them out — Coonerty Protti said bookstores are “inherently political.”

“We talk to our employees about creating a brave space and just being OK with the dialogue that comes along with so many different viewpoints on our shelf,” she said. “It is a balance between upholding those core values and then also reflecting our community.”

Caldwell-Dunn said that while the store gets a lot of support from tourists, the most business comes from its Santa Cruz County community. 

“Santa Cruz is full of people who really get the main street idea of, ‘If we don’t support the stores that we love, then they will go away,’” Caldwell-Dunn said. “Every book they buy is to support us as an event space, as a community space, a place where their kids can come and feel safe and explore the power of reading, or UC students can come and chat over a cup of coffee.”

Coonerty Protti agreed, saying that Santa Cruz residents are “acutely aware of the power of their pocketbooks” and the importance of supporting local businesses. After working so hard to create a space that community members are proud to support, she said, seeing the daily bustle of the store is her ultimate gratification. 

“People come in, they meet friends, they have discussions in the aisles about ideas. The shelves reflect the diversity of our community. Our relationships with our customers are more about the exchange of money for books, but are actually about this long-lasting relationship of helping each other to be here,” Coonerty Protti said. “It’s the community’s living room.”

Bookshop has won various awards over the years, including Best Bookstore as voted by Lookout Santa Cruz readers. Perhaps its most unusual honor, though, is the Potty Prize for Best Bathroom, presented by the city in 2018. 

While being one of few public restrooms in a bustling downtown area has had its challenges, the staff said it’s an important service to the community.

“Especially with the day services shutting down over at Housing Matters, for some people, it’s literally the only safe bathroom that they can use,” Caldwell-Dunn said. “It’s sometimes crazy to try to keep it clean and ensure safety for everyone, but it is something that I’m really proud to offer.”

There’s also a donation box posted outside, where visitors can help contribute to maintaining the restroom or leave notes.

“We had one formerly homeless individual who said he used the bathroom here and there, and it provided him a sense of dignity,” Coonerty Protti said. “And then when he got back on his feet, he gave us a $1,000 donation to thank us for providing that.”

The symbiotic relationship between Bookshop and its patrons has helped keep the store alive over the decades. When Borders moved in downtown in 2000, Coonerty Protti said Bookshop lost about 35% of its business overnight. 

“A lot of community members made a point never to step foot in there and to support us through that time. That’s the only reason why we could survive that decade,” Coonerty Protti said. 

When Borders closed in 2011, Coonerty Protti “finally had the breathing room” to create programming and expand outreach, primarily for the next generation of readers. She launched Bookshop’s holiday book drive, the authors in schools program and the young readers program. 

When O’Connell retired in 2020, Coonerty Protti commissioned a mural above the store’s poetry section featuring a message O’Connell often shared with trainees: “Books are magical objects, capable of changing lives. To have a role in connecting someone with such a book is the opportunity, purpose, and meaning of bookselling.”

“I think bookselling is one of the most honorable professions there is. It’s not a lucrative one, but it has other rewards,” O’Connell said. “I feel like I received a lot more than I gave in the time that I was there.” 

Coonerty Protti said the 60th anniversary has been a “really special moment” to reflect on the generations of her family and community that have supported Bookshop through so much change.

“We now have people that talk about how they rode the rocking horse, their kids rode the rocking horse, and now their grandkids are riding the rocking horse,” Coonerty Protti said. “Growing up, my parents always talked about how Santa Cruz allowed them to have their dreams come true. There’s really no place like it.”

Bookshop Santa Cruz will celebrate its 60th anniversary Friday, Nov. 6, with a cake and music by local band Squirrels of Wisdom. During the weekend, everything in the store will be 20% off. Customers can also leave messages on a rotary phone as part of an audio guest log.

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