After the 1955 Flood devastated much of Santa Cruz County, recovery efforts focused on a redevelopment agenda. Local leaders were advised that the county’s leading industries of Tourism and Agriculture produced only seasonal jobs, and a shabby reputation as a “rinky-dinky boardwalk town” in a “cow county” of farmers.

Their solution was high-density urbanization, decentralizing pedestrian-centered communities along freeway corridors of suburban sprawl.

Farmland would have to give-way to multi-lane high speed freeways, linking smokestack industries and remote chain stores to gated subdivisions, most inaccessible to public transportation. This catered to the nation’s new “car culture” demands to shop on motorways instead of main streets, stay at motels instead of hotels, and replace landmarks of local character with chain store uniformity. This belittling diagnosis was oft repeated by those made ashamed of Santa Cruz for being behind the times, when a gas-guzzling future was believed inevitable in the march of progress.

Santa Cruz was trying to keep up with San Jose, a former Quality Fruit Capital who, in its drive to become the “Los Angeles of the North,” more fully embraced the car culture, and sprawl dynamics. San Jose would more than double its population from just under a million in 1950 to just over two million by 1960. That was more than the population of Santa Cruz County, which went from 66,000 in 1950 to 84,000 by 1960. And Santa Cruz City barely registered, with a population of 22,000 in 1950, rising to 25,000 by 1960.A new university

In April, 1957, Dean McHenry reported on the number of new campuses needed to meet the tripling of enrollment projected in a decade, and UC regents decided to found three new University of California campuses. The state Senate voted that the Central Coast region should consider the Monterey Peninsula, while the state Assembly voted it should consider the Santa Clara Valley, as a growing population center.

UC alumni associations in Santa Cruz and Watsonville felt a UC campus might be a better fit for Santa Cruz than heavy industry, since students could fill empty tourist rentals in the off-season. City manager Pete Tedesco became an early advocate of hosting a UC campus, and groups explored possible areas where enough land could be assembled to create a campus and a transportation network. The Henry Cowell Ranch (which some expected would be donated to the adjoining Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park), was considered a prime campus candidate. But after a group of UC officials toured Central Coast sites, they recommended the Almaden Valley location southeast of Los Gatos, gaining the regents unanimous approval.

While disappointed, Cabrillo College joined others in planning a persuasive argument for the Cowell site. Glen Coolidge was quite articulate as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the California State Legislature. Coolidge was Republican, like many fellow Santa Cruz lobbyists from the Chamber of Commerce. But to broaden their appeal, they needed to partner with a prominent Democrat, and chose the head of the Democratic Central Committee, Henry Mello.

Having given their tentative approval, the regents’ Site Committee now came to see the proposed finalist properties in person. They went first to Almaden during an uncomfortable heat wave, arriving through smoggy air, and toured with their coats off, mopping their brows. Then they came over the mountain to Santa Cruz, where they felt a cooling ocean breeze. A reception was held at the Frank Lloyd Wright-style Congregational Church, built on land donated by Henry Cowell. It looked out on a panoramic view of the coast, and after a 20-minute discussion of the site’s possibilities, they went to explore the ranch. By the end of the visit, they had to put on sweaters.

While just a scenic cow pasture, Santa Cruz fresh air versus sweltering San Jose smog had UC president Clark Kerr convinced. More persuasive was the fact Almaden had 63 owners, one being the Catholic Church, while the Cowell property had only one. The Cowell Foundation made an agreement where the state would buy the 2,000 acres for $2 million, but the Foundation would then donate the funds back (in gift-deductions for the Cowell Foundation) as grants for new construction. Thus the first college was named for Henry Cowell.

Kerr’s college roommate while graduate students at Stanford, was Dean McHenry. McHenry had been Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s speech writer in his run for governor in 1958, then became president Kerr’s academic assistant, and in 1960, helped him write the “California Master Plan for Higher Education.” Gov. Brown committed $3 million in state appropriations for the new colleges. In May, 1961, Kerr learned of McHenry’s dreams for the ideal college, that it should follow the “Oxford Collegiate Model” of small autonomous colleges united on a larger campus.

That would provide the resources of a major research university, to an intimate college experience. Each college would have 400-to-800 students and a provost, with faculty living in the student housing, and eating with students. McHenry had opposed the Santa Cruz site, thinking it too far from the political and financial assets the college needed. But when asked if he wanted to be the founding chancellor, he said “Boy, would I,” and was appointed that June.

Building a dream

Santa Cruz was ready to demolish its historic downtown and replace it with freeways, parking lots, chain stores and high rises. Resistance to this plan seemed futile, until new-comers Chuck and Esther Abbott around 1964, promoted restoring the unique character of the historic downtown buildings, and tie them together with a pedestrian-oriented garden mall. Businessmen worried this was only going to alienate the nation’s new car culture clientele, and reinforce the impression Santa Cruz was backward.

Yet at the same time, planning for a university campus was grappling with the same issues. The initial concept was to build on the Great Meadow in a sprawl of speedways and parking lots, serving boxy, widely spaced automobile destinations. Yet Pasatiempo landscape architect Thomas Church advised locating the buildings in the forest, while Kerr counseled to cluster structures into pedestrian centers, building around the existing redwoods. McHenry wanted to create a Sense of Place with a different architectural identity for each college, separated by greenbelts of forest and open space.

Even with the regents’ budge and state funds, this multiple college concept would require skimping on quality. But McHenry felt the idea important enough to raise the extra funds independently to fulfill his vision. Yet would donors want to fund an experimental utopian campus? There were to be no major sports teams, fraternities or sororities, nor grades (just pass or no-pass, with an evaluation instead). McHenry found modern architects open to out-dated Humanist concepts, designing colleges as more Town Centers than Corporate Headquarters, more pedestrian serving than auto-serving, more individualized in style than monotonous, more nestled into the landscape than dominating it.

Construction started in 1964. There would be no bobby soxers and boys in argyle sweater vests, rushing fraternities, and cheering sports heroes. Grievances about the alienation of UC Berkeley students from faculty, and unrest over the Viet Nam War, erupted into the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus on December 2, 1964. The Counter Culture had been born.

The first 652 students arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1965, with housing in trailers laid-out in daisy patterns. There were more campus cattle than scholars, yet interest was so high in this revolutionary new college that 4,000 college professors inquired for positions. The National Observer reported that “Santa Cruz is perhaps the most eagerly-awaited new institution in the history of higher education.” (Aug. 30,1965)

By 1968, UC Santa Cruz was an epicenter of the Counter Culture. The San Jose Mercury News called it “…the most popular of all UC campuses…” and “…a plateau of idealism far from the madding crowd. Wild clothing, flowing hair, professors who are dearly beloved, an oft heard denunciation of materialism. But unlike Columbia and Berkeley…anger is usually absent. These are gentle people….” (Oct. 28, 1968). And commonly heard is the desire to “keep the world from committing another Los Angeles…” (Harpers, July 1969).

The Pacific Garden Mall opened in 1969, a Humanist historic district popular with students. These first four years focused only on establishing UCSC undergraduate programs. Yet they joked about “Pass or No-Pass” system of grading did not lead to sloppy academic performance. “On the contrary,” professor John Fischer noted. “Santa Cruz’s first four-year graduating class received six of the coveted Woodrow Wilson awards , as compared with 12-each for Berkeley and Harvard-Radcliffe, which have senior classes many times as large.”

Additional reading

“Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz,” by Irene Reti, Cameron Vanderscoff, & Sarah Rabkin, 2020, UC Regents.