Santa Cruz Changes: 35 - Beach Street

 

The Santa Cruz beachfront area is rapidly changing, also. Best known of the recent changes - one that is still underway -  is the absorption of the courtyard-style La Bahia apartments into a huge hotel that will fill the entire block. At right is an early postcard view, when La Bahia was known as Casa del Rey Apartments, built by the Seaside Company in 1926.

Only part of the front building and its tower will be preserved and integrated into the new hotel. None of the new construction has yet begun, although demolition of most of the old buildings was completed in 2019. 

Since then, the entire block has remained fenced off, and pedestrians see the view at left from the Beach Street sidewalk.

There are other changes to either side of the La Bahia block - one not so recent, and one still under construction. To the left, across Main Street, the Casablanca Inn added a new wing of rooms climbing the hill about six years ago. 

The view at right looks up Main Street, where the newer building can be seen to the right of the original 1916 residence built after a spectacular fire destroyed the Sea Beach Hotel in 1912. Some of the stone retaining walls may be remnants of the extensive terraced gardens that adjoined the hotel.

On the other side of La Bahia, across Westbrook Street, the non-descript Coastview Inn (left) was torn down and is being replaced by a larger version of itself (right, below). Still under construction, it's too early to know what the new hotel will look like, except that it will increase from two stories to three. 

Part of the new Coastview Inn construction can be seen in the left-background of the La Bahia photo above.

The increasingly-common trend among hotel and multi-family developments is to replace buildings and their adjacent open parking lots with lot-filling larger buildings and underground parking. The very first Santa Cruz Change noted in this blog, at 555 Pacific Avenue, is an exemplar of the changing development thinking. 

It's hard to feel bad about the loss of acres of open asphalt and/or littered vacant lots, but the new sky-blocking buildings are perhaps a Faustian sort of "improvement". In a more perfect world...

Santa Cruz Changes locations can be found on this Google Map.