Bulldozers and Hard Hats: Aftershocks in Santa Cruz : Earthquake: An artist tells of the devastation to his quaint seaside town and of its efforts to deal with the damage and the task of rebuilding.

More than three weeks after the Oct. 17 earthquake, we are still feeling aftershocks in Santa Cruz--about one strong tremor a day. The town clock remains stopped at 5:04 and our beautiful old buildings continue to fall to the wrecking ball. Last Tuesday, Bookshop Santa Cruz, the cultural focal point of our community, was demolished. Though some people are already drawing plans for reconstruction, we have no idea what post-quake Santa Cruz will be like.

When the earthquake struck, I was operating my printing press in an old garage in Capitola Village, a beach town about halfway between Santa Cruz and the quake’s epicenter in the mountains behind Aptos. Further north, in the Bay Area, people described the earthquake as a growing rumble, but in Santa Cruz it struck with the intensity of a bomb blast. The garage lurched, a heart-stopping jolt, and I yelled “Get out!” to my fellow worker, Mindy, as I sprinted for the door.

Glass was shattering, chimneys were toppling and timbers were cracking as I ran into the street where people danced circles on the bucking pavement. Clouds of dust rose from the crumbling cliffs surrounding the town, and time was frozen in a long, deafening roar. Then the shaking stopped and I realized Mindy had not made it to the street. I scrambled back into the garage over piles of fallen timbers and found her crouching, white-faced, under a worktable in the ruins of my pressroom. The 2,000-pound press I had been operating 60 seconds earlier had toppled on its side exactly where I had been standing; racks of metal type littered the floor, mixed with broken glass.

Mindy stood up just as the first of a series of stomach-churning aftershocks hit. I grabbed her and and we ran down to the beach where everyone in the area had gathered in clusters, gazing wide-eyed at rows of shattered shop windows and cars crushed beneath chimney bricks. Someone screamed hysterically on one corner; outside a bookstore, the town’s three on-duty firemen bent over an elderly woman whose heart had stopped when she was buried by falling books. Water flooded the streets from broken mains and teen-agers with wrenches scrambled to shut off gas lines.

Santa Cruz pulsed with a mixture of fear and love the night of the earthquake. There was no power, no gas, no water and no cars, because the bridges and causeways that cross the town’s lagoons had buckled. Everywhere people moved outside to sleep in the warm darkness, gathered around lanterns with friends and neighbors.

Santa Cruz was cut off from the rest of the Bay Area by massive landslides on Highway 17, the road winding over the mountains to San Jose. A friend who was stuck on the other side of the mountains borrowed a bicycle to ride 25 miles in the dark to see his children. The earth trembled all night, and at about 3 a.m. a big aftershock jolted awake the few people who were able to sleep. During the night people were isolated in their neighborhoods, aware of the damage in the Bay Area via radio, but informed about their own community only through the stories of friends.

Everyone knew something terrible had happened to downtown Santa Cruz, however, where the tree-lined shopping district along Pacific Avenue contained scores of old, unreinforced brick buildings. In the morning, hot and clear, much of the town’s population converged by bicycle on downtown, where Pacific Avenue was cordoned off by National Guardsmen as rescue workers dug through rubble searching for bodies.

Santa Cruz is a college town--UC Santa Cruz sits amid redwoods on the hills to the north--and the most popular businesses on Pacific Avenue were the bookstores. During the quake two old brick bookstores collapsed onto adjacent shops, killing three people and maiming several others. The centerpiece of Pacific Avenue was the old county courthouse, the Cooper House; its brick arches and turrets had been converted into restaurants and boutiques 15 years ago. Within a week of the quake, Cooper House was demolished with everything still inside it.

Days after President Bush toured Pacific Avenue, accompanied by a media army, most merchants still had not been allowed to see their buildings, let alone enter them. Neal Coonerty, the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, was choked with tears as he described how his store might be demolished with its entire inventory, worth $650,000, still on the shelves.

Santa Cruz is a small county and not a particularly rich one. The earthquake closed more than 300 businesses employing 4,000 people, many of them on Pacific Avenue. To demolish buildings with their entire inventory on the shelves seemed rash, if not suicidal, despite the city manager’s invocation of an overriding concern for public safety. After the outcry over the demolition of Cooper House, however, and several court injunctions, owners of the three major bookstores got permission to shore up their structures and remove their inventories.

On Nov. 4, I entered Bookshop Santa Cruz with 20 other volunteers clad in hard-hats, dust masks and security badges. Over the day, we carted out most of the books to tables where other volunteers sorted and packed them for storage. The volunteers represented the entire community--artists and writers, university students and professors, members of the city government and the Rotary Club. The work was hard, but at the end of the day we felt we had salvaged something from the earthquake and we had begun the long task of rebuilding.

Today, nearly a month after the quake, Pacific Avenue remains cordoned off behind a cyclone fence as cranes and bulldozers destroy, one after another, the Victorian-era brick and wood buildings that gave this town its charm. The mayor of Santa Cruz, Mardi Wormhoudt, has reminded us that “the heart of Santa Cruz is its people, not its buildings,” yet we feel a deep sense of loss when we stand outside the fence that separates us from what was once the social and economic center of our community.

After helping move the books last weekend, I took a few minutes to walk down an eerily deserted Pacific Avenue, past shattered storefronts, piles of rubble and the gaping holes where buildings had already been demolished. Beyond the demolitions, nothing had been moved since the earthquake; the smell of plaster dust and rotting food hung amid the broken trees. I paused in front of the empty space where the Cooper House had stood and looked across the rubble toward a stucco shopping mall untouched by the quake. Would this be the image of the new Santa Cruz?

Buildings do not make a community, but people are drawn to places because of their charm, and many Santa Cruz residents came here when the old buildings were being renovated in the early 1970s. The downtown was full of small businesses that could not afford the high rents of modern shopping malls, and many impoverished elderly people lived in residential hotels that occupied the upper stories of Pacific Avenue. Will any low-rent rooms or offices survive?

At a wake for the town’s weekly newspaper, the Sun--forced to close after loss of advertising revenue from devastated downtown merchants--I heard several longtime residents talk about leaving Santa Cruz, saying it will never again be the community they knew before the earthquake. But the majority of us will stay and pick up the pieces, trying tofind the way to build a new downtown as beautiful as the one we lost at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17.