Santa Cruz Takes Stock of a City Changed Forever

Emmett Rittenhause is trying to remain calm. It is no easy task.

At 5:04 p.m. Tuesday, Rittenhause owned five historic buildings in downtown Santa Cruz. At 5:05, he had just two.

“They just went kaput,” Rittenhause, 79, recalled wearily. “They’re all just lying there in one big heap. I don’t have insurance. It’s a plenty big loss.”

From businessmen to hippies, the people of Santa Cruz were nursing their wounds Friday, taking stock of the rubble heap that was all nature left behind after stomping on the soul of their town.

Much of the city rode out the temblor with ease. The Giant Dipper roller coaster--which has thrilled millions since its construction in 1928--came through like a champ, and many government buildings survived intact.

But damage to residential neighborhoods left nearly 1,000 people at least temporarily homeless, forcing them to bunk down with neighbors or in emergency shelters, hotels and makeshift encampments set up on front lawns and in local parks.

And downtown Santa Cruz--a place treasured by tourists and locals alike--has been ravaged, changed forever.

Hardest hit was the Pacific Garden Mall, an open-air, seven-block stretch of funky shops and restaurants. With its verdant gardens and red-tiled walkways, the mall has long been the city’s unofficial meeting and greeting place, where university students, transients and button-down locals mingled in an eclectic pastiche.

In a flash Tuesday, the shaking earth snatched all of that away, killing three people and leaving the quaint strip--which was to be honored with a 20th-anniversary celebration next month--an unrecognizable mass of bricks and glass.

As many as eight of the mall’s unreinforced brick buildings--many of which date to the 1880s--were teetering on the brink of collapse and will have to be demolished. Another six have major structural damage and might also be lost. About 250 businesses, employing 2,000 people, were damaged or destroyed.

“The mall was a place where counterculture was still alive, where street musicians played and everyone felt comfortable,” recalled massage therapist Lois Werbel, 29, of Sherman Oaks, a former Santa Cruz resident who was vacationing there when the quake hit. “All different types of people mixed there, and it was beautiful. . . . Now it’s all rubble.”

In 1983, city engineers warned that the downtown was vulnerable to earthquake damage. Not only were the buildings old and not up to modern seismic standards, but they were built atop the soft, sandy flood plain of the San Lorenzo River. Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt said the government was aware of the danger but neither the city nor individual merchants had the money to retrofit the buildings.

Reassuring worried business owners, the mayor pledged Friday that the mall will be rebuilt. But she conceded that the unique flavor of the place cannot be recaptured.

“The mall will never be the same again,” said Wormhoudt, who estimated that the reconstruction will cost $30 million. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be a wonderful place, but it won’t be the place we knew.”

Merchants, meanwhile, found little comfort in the mayor’s words. Prevented from entering the mall by police who sealed the area, many business owners circled nervously nearby, uncertain of the extent of the damage and fearing still more trouble as dark rain clouds thickened above the city.

“We can’t get in to find out what’s going on or how bad the damage is,” said a nervous Charline Shockley, who has operated a jewelry store on the mall since 1950. “We know the roof of the second story has collapsed on our ceiling. So far, it hasn’t gone through. But it could be teetering. A good rain could push it right through.”

Shockley said the disaster was particularly painful given its timing--just before the holiday shopping season.

“I know we won’t be (back in business) before Christmas,” she said sadly. “Maybe we can rent a room somewhere and sell our merchandise. If we can’t, we may have to write off the entire season.”

Similar worries prompted some merchants to suggest that the city help them set up temporary quarters in tents on downtown parking lots. “We want to get back to business before we go bankrupt,” said John Lisher, executive director of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce.

Surrounded by disaster, residents of Santa Cruz, expressed typically eclectic reactions.

“Buildings that are a hundred years old are like old men who have lived to a ripe old age and are in good health,” Carl Abbott, a Taoist priest whose family owns several historic row houses that survived the quake, said as he studied the devastation of the mall. “If they die at 101, you can’t be sad because they’ve had a good life.”

Others were less philosophical. Five homeless people outside an emergency shelter played guitars Friday and plaintively sang the Beatles tune “Yesterday.” The refrain was written about lost love, but it seemed to apply to the shattered landscape in Santa Cruz: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now I need a place to hide away.”

Kelle Oblinger, a 20-year-old secretary, said the three-bedroom clapboard house that she and roommates rented for $1,200 a month is uninhabitable. The furnace rose through the dining room floor while the fireplace sank; the floor buckled, and the porch stairs flattened.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Oblinger said as she loaded some belongings into a car, en route to a friend’s house. “There aren’t any other houses to rent here in Santa Cruz because of all the students.” The town is home to UC Santa Cruz.

For officials, much of Friday was spent on the grim job of cataloguing the damage.

Five people were killed in the county, four of them in Santa Cruz, and hundreds more were injured. At least 280 homes were destroyed throughout the county, and an equal number were left uninhabitable.

In the city, losses were estimated at $350 million. Hundreds of people lost their houses entirely, were too frightened to return or lacked water, power and other necessities.

Predictions of rain and temperatures in the 30s threatened to create new problems. County officials worried that a downpour would cause additional landslides in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, where 60 homes already have been destroyed in Boulder Creek, a town of 6,800. About 100 residents were ignoring evacuation warnings.

“It’s a dangerous area, but all my stuff is here. My dogs are here. I figured you go down with the ship. Where do you go?” said Todd Viele, 27, of Boulder Creek.

Much of the trouble confronting Santa Cruz initially related to its isolation. The quake caused a collapse along a portion of California 17, the four-lane mountain highway linking Santa Cruz with the Santa Clara Valley, and a series of aftershocks created landslides that exacerbated repair work, expected to take three weeks.

With the main route into the community closed--a route used by the 20% of Santa Cruz residents who commute daily to jobs in Santa Clara County--relief workers took to the air to get help in. Helicopters from Mather Air Force Base ferried medical supplies into Santa Cruz.

President Bush’s midday visit Friday--though derided by some victims as a “publicity stunt”--seemed to provide a bit of lift to some local officials.

“The President was very helpful,” Gary A. Patton, chairman of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, said after Bush surveyed collapsed buildings under darkening skies. “He really took the time . . . to listen to our governmental problems. We think he is going to follow through.”

As they talked of the quake, many longtime residents recalled other calamities that their town has endured. On Dec. 21, 1955, a flood washed out many ground-floor businesses in the downtown mall, causing extensive damage.

Less than eight years ago, the surrounding mountain communities weathered another disaster, when a record one-day rainfall caused flash floods in its thick redwood forests. The deluge killed 22 people and caused $106 million in damage.