Santa Cruz Changes - 1: 555 Pacific Avenue

Now that most of the local history content has migrated over to the Santa Cruz County History wiki,  this blog can be home to another sort of local history project. In 2016, I began to notice that the pace of new development in Santa Cruz was picking up as we climbed out of the 2008 recession. Realizing how easy it is to forget what came before when something completely new replaces it, I decided to start documenting those changes with before-during-after photos.

One of the first changes to attract my attention happened at 555 Pacific Avenue, on a parcel that had held only a pile of broken concrete rubble for at least fifteen years. The long, narrow strip facing Pacific Avenue was what remained of the former Prolo Chevrolet dealership property after the larger rear portion was split off and developed as the Sycamore Street Commons apartments in the late 1990s. I'm still looking for a photo of the Prolo Chevy establishment, and will add it here when found, but in my memory it's always been a vacant lot. That may demonstrate how easy it is to forget what used to be, plus the fact that I didn't often get to this part of town before starting to hang out at the Firefly Coffee House (shout out!) in 2011. The Google satellite view at left from March 2016 shows the dogleg-shaped empty lot, with the green-roofed apartment buildings to the left. 

The first development proposal for this property was presented to the city in 1999, but failed to advance. Various other ideas came and went, until the current Barry Swenson (who else?) project finally broke ground in 2016. The photo at right was taken in November, 2016, from a position just off the bottom of the photo above.

The 2020 photo at left shows the completed project from about the same position.

Locations in the Santa Cruz Changes blog can be found on this Google Map.