SANTA CRUZ >> Community members gathered at the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market Tuesday afternoon to shop and commemorate the last market on the city parking lot known as Lot 4 before the market moves to Lot 16 next to the Santa Cruz Library Downtown Branch next Wednesday.

Lot 4, which has served as the weekly home of the farmers market for decades, will be replaced in the coming years with an eight-story mixed-use building, 240-space parking structure and library, with construction slated to begin on the project next month.

As the last farmers market in Lot 4 opened Wednesday afternoon, Santa Cruz resident Satya Orion wrapped strings of flowers around the towering liquidambar heritage trees on the lot, which will soon be uprooted to make way for the block-wide building.

“There are 10 trees on this lot that are going to be cut down for the new development,” said Orion. “The community tried to save these two liquidambars and presented a viable plan to the developers to save just these two, but the developers turned it down. It’s heartbreaking.”

Orion said that she knows it’s too late to save the trees, so she has been decorating them with flowers before they’re chopped down and torn out.

“I wanted to think of a way I could honor the trees, so I’ve been coming down, sometimes twice a week, and putting flowers up,” said Orion. “And for a while, they stayed up, but lately someone has been taking them down, the flowers and the ribbons too.”

Beginning next Wednesday, the downtown market will fill the lot next to the current downtown library along with a portion of Cedar Street, from Walnut Avenue to Church Street. The location is semi-permanent and there are plans in the works to make Lot 16 a more indefinite market and community space. However, the project won’t be breaking ground until the opening of the new Santa Cruz Library Downtown Branch, which is tentatively planned for the next few years.

Local activist Lisa Ekstrom with Our Downtown, Our Future, the community group that tried to keep the library and farmers market in their current locations with Measure O, mentioned that the notion of the two swapping places seemed ironic.

“One of the main arguments that the city had for not renovating the library at its current location was that it would cost too much and now we’re looking at a building that has blown way past anything that was originally talked about,” said Ekstrom. “And curiously and nonsensically, we’re now moving the library from over there to over here and moving the farmers market to over there at considerable expense.”

UC Santa Cruz sociology professor John Hall, of Our Downtown, Our Future, also mentioned the two entities switching locations.

“I continue to be struck by the irony,” said Hall. “I’m all for creating a dynamic farmers market and community space there, but it seems odd to replace this dynamic space and its trees with a building and then create the same space someplace else.”

Construction contractor and chair of the local ACLU, Lee Brokaw, who was picking up a few items from the farmers market Tuesday, said that he hoped the city would have chosen to keep the library at its current location.

“Soon we’ll have 15-yard trucks coming here lining up to fill this place up with concrete, belching diesel,” said Brokaw. “It’s the trees that make this place look good and it is a crime, in today’s global warming atmosphere, to cut down the liquidambars. They are just magnificent. There is no reason a creative architect couldn’t have built around those trees.”

Live Oak resident Mary Gerbic has been coming to the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market since 1989 and was sad but hopeful about the move.

“I am really sorry to see the move,” said Gerbic. “This spot is very convenient. But time moves on and things change and things are very different here in Santa Cruz. I will probably keep coming to the market because I’ve been coming since ’89 and over time I’ve made friends with the vendors.”

Santa Cruz resident Dan Phillips, who has also been a downtown farmers market regular for decades, said that he too wasn’t happy about the move but, like Gerbic, accepted that things change.

“We love this setting and if we can’t come back that’s too bad,” said Phillips. “But we have to accept it.”

According to a statement from the city, the wood from the heritage trees on Lot 4 will be prioritized for potential use in the mixed-use library project, and to replace the trees, the developers have committed to include 14 new trees on the project site and will plant 22 trees in other locations in Santa Cruz.