Helping Hands : Quake-Devastated Santa Cruz Merchants, Public Pull Together

SANTA CRUZ — Near the devastated downtown, a thriving business district before the earthquake, the Phoenix Pavilions rose out of the rubble to salvage the holiday shopping season for dozens of merchants.

The pavilions are not much to look at, just a collection of large, gray tent-like structures dotting a strip of parking lots. But they have played a critical role in the renaissance of downtown Santa Cruz.

About 50 businesses, whose buildings were demolished or condemned, have been able to stay downtown in the pavilions rather than filing for bankruptcy or moving to outlying malls or nearby cities.

After all the grim events that folowed the 7.1-magnitude earthquake on Oct. 17, the Phoenix Pavilions, named after the mythological bird that burned to death and rose again from its ashes, have provided Santa Cruz with some badly needed good news. Since the pavilions opened the day after Thanksgiving, its shops have been packed, with many stores having record holiday season sales.

Visitors from throughout Northern California have taken Christmas shopping trips to Santa Cruz to support local merchants. And many residents have vowed to do all their shopping in the pavilions instead of in malls.

“The day after Thanksgiving we had our biggest day since we opened 23 years ago . . . and business has stayed great since then,” said Neal Coonerty, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz. “We really feel this will enable us to survive.”

Before the earthquake, the open-air, seven-block Pacific Garden Mall was the focal point of downtown. With its red-tiled walkways, flower beds and turn-of-the-century buildings, the shopping district gave Santa Cruz’s downtown a distinct identity.

But the quake destroyed 20% of the 125 mall buildings, many of them historic, seriously damaged numerous others and killed three people. Several chain stores on the mall immediately abandoned Santa Cruz and relocated to other cities. A number of local businesses moved to nearby Capitola.

City officials worried that by the time the mall was finally rebuilt, they would be unable to lure shoppers back to Santa Cruz. And the landmark mall, they feared, would eventually lose most of its business to suburban shopping centers. A merchants’ association and city officials agreed to erect the pavilions, lease them out for up to 18 months, until much of the mall is rebuilt, and keep shoppers and businesses.

“If we couldn’t keep our downtown businesses, Santa Cruz would end up as a ghost town,” said Susan Groff, a member of the Downtown Commission and owner of a luggage store that moved to the pavilions. “The mall is our city’s tax base and where a lot of our residents work. . . . Take it away and our city is in serious trouble.”

But residents immediately supported the pavilions, and the project became a model of community cooperation. It can take up to two weeks to erect seven large pavilions, but merchants needed the structures by the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season.

Word spread about the merchants’ plight, and dozens of union locals decided to help. During a weekend in mid-November, about 150 union members from throughout Northern California arrived in Santa Cruz to volunteer their time. They worked all day Saturday and Sunday, erecting the aluminum frames, attaching the hard vinyl panels, framing doors, installing electrical wiring, carpeting and telephone lines. By Sunday night they had completed the job.

“Word spread fast among union workers that these people needed some help. Carpenters told sheet metal workers; sheet metal workers told electricians; electricians told plumbers,” said Johnathan Boutelle, coordinator for a union apprentice program near Santa Cruz. “Hundreds of guys showed up and said: ‘We’ll give you a day or two.’ It was amazing what we accomplished. We basically put up a medium-sized shopping center in two days.”

Hundreds of other volunteers also worked to ensure that businesses would open on time. Lawyers negotiated with the company that provided the structures. Realtors drew up leases for the pavilions’ tenants. Students helped merchants remove merchandise from condemned buildings. Residents with pickup trucks hauled the merchandise to the pavilions.

A few weeks ago the building that housed Bookshop Santa Cruz was scheduled to be demolished and Neal Coonerty faced the daunting task of removing 200,000 books in two days, transporting them to the pavilions and cataloguing and shelving them.

“We couldn’t have done it just with our staff,” he said. “But more than 300 volunteers helped us--and the community response was so tremendous we had to turn away another 300 who wanted to help. We had Rotarians packing books and moving boxes alongside radical political activists . . . all sorts of people working together to help.”

Local businesses donated forklifts, conveyor belts and thousands of boxes, Coonerty said. Six librarians volunteered to catalogue books. By the time Coonerty opened the day after Thanksgiving, he had transformed an empty pavilion into a full-service bookstore.

The pavilion area today bears little resemblance to the quaint strip of Victorian buildings and small shops that once lined the mall. Some businesses on the mall have reopened, but sidewalks are still fenced off, gaping holes where buildings once stood dominate the landscape and throughout the mall bricks and rubble are piled up in front of boarded-up buildings.

And the collection of gray pavilions, which resemble a pod of humpbacked whales coming up for air, don’t add to the aesthetics of the area. From street-level, downtown Santa Cruz looks like a war-ravaged city struggling to survive. But inside each pavilion, lined with Christmas lights and decorations, filled with shoppers, the ambience is the same as any busy shopping center.

Each pavilion houses a variety of businesses, and many merchants say the layout of the structures is helping sales. Because there are no walls between businesses in each pavilion, shoppers are exposed to a variety of stores. And the influx of visitors, merchants say, has boosted sales.

“We’re getting a tremendous amount of out-of-town shoppers--about a third of our checks are from outside Santa Cruz,” Groff said. “People are coming in from San Mateo, San Rafael, Sonoma--all over Northern California--saying: ‘We’re going to shop here and help you out.’ ”

In addition to the pavilions, a number of businesses nearby have found innovative ways to survive until downtown is rebuilt. A shoemaker has set up shop in his van and parked it downtown. A delicatessen moved a trailer to an empty lot and reopened. And about a dozen shops have relocated to an abandoned bank building.

Because merchants might be in the pavilions up to 18 months, they are devising a strategy to keep business booming beyond the holidays. They are working with local artists to use the empty spaces on the mall, where buildings once stood, until construction begins. Sculpture gardens and painted cloth images of buildings are planned, merchants say, in addition to kiosks displaying the various structures that have occupied the sites over the years.

“Everybody was worried about whether we would be able to survive after the earthquake,” said Coonerty of Bookshop Santa Cruz. “And the reason we’ve been able to is because the community gave us a great gift--the gift of patronage.”

BACKGROUND

The Oct. 17 Bay Area earthquake killed 67 people, collapsed more than a mile of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, knocked out a section of the Bay Bridge and caused widespread damage to residential and commercial structures. Property damage and destruction was particularly severe in Santa Cruz and nearby Watsonville, where hundreds of people remain homeless.