![]() The Catalyst specialized in deli sandwiches served in an idiosyncratic, artsy interior. As its name implied, the Catalyst was a café that was a kind of meeting place for students and faculty at the new UC campus. George Hotel, roughly where Bookshop Santa Cruz exists today) and it had an entirely different orientation. But when it opened in 1967, it was in a different spot (in the old St. Today, Santa Cruzans know the Catalyst as the town’s most prominent live-music venue at 1011 Pacific Avenue. The restaurants of the era reflected that change, none more dramatically than the Catalyst. In the 1960s, the University of California came to Santa Cruz and profoundly changed the town’s culture. During its heyday-it lasted just a few years before it burned to the ground in 1957-Saba attracted some of the biggest names on jazz circuit, including Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. The Saba was inspired by San Francisco’s immortal Trader Vic’s, with ornate tiki and Polynesian trappings, and it featured an enormous dance floor. On the cover of Pollock’s book is an image of one of the more beguiling local restaurants, the Saba Club and Caribbean Ballroom in the heart of Capitola Village. In Watsonville, the go-to spot was the Pronto Pup on Main Street, famous for its corndogs. Spivey’s featured its trademark “broasted” chicken, cooked in a high-temperature pressure fryer to seal in the juices. ![]() The Cross Roads, with carhop service and a jukebox that played the hits through outside speakers, specialized in barbecue and milkshakes and, in the summer, stayed open until 3am. And they would just go back and forth (from Cross Roads to Spivey’s).” When Pacific (Avenue) went both ways, people would cruise the drag, looking for girls or whatever. “Everybody raved about Spivey’s,” Pollock says. ![]() What followed was the age of the “carhop,” the name applied to waiters or waitresses that served customers sitting in their cars, usually in roller-skates and spiffy uniforms.Īs Pollock relates in her book, Santa Cruz had at least two major drive-in places that catered to teens and families: The Cross Roads Drive-In, near where Depot Park is now, and Spivey’s 5 Spot on Ocean and Water streets, now the Chase Bank building. Car culture boomed, teenagers ruled the night, and new ideas in restaurants flourished. The story of the postwar years in Santa Cruz specifically, and the country as a whole, was a vast throwing off of the limits and restrictions of the war. The spot where Casa del Rey once stood is now the vast parking lot across the street from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Navy commissioned the hotel as a convalescent facility for wounded servicemen, more than 18,000 of whom recuperated there through the end of the war. One of Santa Cruz’s signature sites at the time was the grand Casa del Rey Hotel on Beach Street, known for its ballroom and cocktail lounge Il Trocadero. The government’s heavy hand also extended to price controls and even to wartime commandeering. Her story begins in the 1940s, at the height of World War II, when restaurateurs in Santa Cruz had to face food rationing due to shortages of staples, and government-mandated travel restrictions, which limited tourism. Such was the story in Santa Cruz County, which gave Pollock a handy framework to write about defunct restaurants. Postwar SceneĪs the 20th century progressed, many restaurants became emblematic of certain eras: burger joints and drive-ins in the 1950s, tiki themes in the ’60s, vegetarian places in the ’70s, sushi bars in the ’80s, etc. I emailed, did some sleuthing, you name it.”įrom 78 interviews of restaurant owners, managers, chefs, bartenders, line cooks, wait staff, and loyal customers, Pollock produced a portrait of 194 extinct restaurants in Santa Cruz County, from the landmark Davenport Cash Store to the Pronto Pup Drive-In in Watsonville, and all points in between. “I sat down in people’s living rooms, was on the telephone for hours. “I wanted to do a kind of Studs Terkel Working oral-history point of view,” she says, referring to Terkel’s classic 1974 book. At the table with her is a box filled with old menus and matchbooks from her collection that revive names that make for an incantation of the past for any Santa Cruz old-timer: the Ship Ahoy, Spivey’s Five Spot, Malio’s, the Tea Cup. “I am just the person to write this book,” she says, at a table by the window at Gilda’s on the Wharf, one of Santa Cruz’s best-known old-line family restaurants.
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