Capitola's Neighborhoods
by Carolyn Swift - former Director, Capitola Historical Museum
While Capitola newcomers usually savor the historic setting of the village and the beauty of the seashore, the returning visitor might find time to wander through some of the side door neighborhoods along the edges of the community.
These resort attractions and residential subdivisions have their own legends adding to the richness of local lore and Capitola history.
One of the best known has the curious name of Pleasure Point. This is a little piece of the coastline to the east of Soquel Point, toward Santa Cruz. A popular surfing spot, locals have long told stories about a house of prostitution that supposedly once existed there in the 1930s. Although the story has been embellished over time and may be a total fabrication, it remains the favorite explanation of how this locale got its name.
Actually, the name comes from a mansion called The Owls that once existed on the site. At the time, the beach below was known as Houghton's. It was named for A.D. Houghton, who retired in 1903, bought 100 acres at Soquel Point, and built the mansion. After the home burned in 1914, the basement was filled with salt water and became popular as a local swimming pool. Later renovated as a health spa, it was called the Pleasure Point Plunge and continued as a local attraction until it went bankrupt in the mid-1950s.
Two other subdivisions with unusual names, also situated east of the village, are the Jewel Box and Opal Cliffs.
Both names are connected to a train stop and lumber yard named Opal, operated by the Loma Prieta Lumber Company just above Capitola Village at the end of what is today Prospect Street. A hundred years ago, the Loma Prieta logging camps in the mountains above Aptos and Soquel brought their lumber to Opal for shipment on the Southern Pacific Railroad to San Francisco.
Capitola's owner and developer, Frederick Hihn, deeded the acreage surrounding Opal to a grandson, Eulice Hihn. When Eulice died in an accident, his widow Kathryn inherited the farmland. She married J.T. McGeoghegan and subdivided her property during the real estate boom after World War I. In the summer of 1923, the land became Opal Subdivision 1 of the Fairview Tract, taking the name of the train stop.
Many of the streets of the subdivision were identified merely by numbers for years. After Capitola incorporated in 1949 and a demand for new homes grew in the Fifties, maps showed Opal Street joined by Garnet, Diamond, Jade, Topaz, Crystal and the other "gems" of the Jewel Box.
To the west of Capitola Village are New Brighton State Beach and a little stretch of the coastline known as Pot Belly Beach.
The state park took the name New Brighton from an old hotel that once existed on the nearby piece of land. The hotel was part of a resort developed in 1878 by Thomas Fallon, a son-in-law of Soquel Rancho grantee Martina Castro. Fallon intended to set up a vacation retreat like Capitola, attracting visitors in the summertime from California's hot interior valleys. He named his settlement Camp San Jose, because he kept his own home in that city and had once been its mayor. The result, however, was unsuccessful, lasting only a few seasons.
Fallon built and named his hotel for Brighton, the famous seaside resort in England. The state took the name when the park next door was developed in 1933. Previously, that beach had been known as China Beach, because a Chinese fishing community had existed there for a number of years during the 1870s.
About the same time the state park was established, John Sinclair, a descendent of Fallon, built a series of cabins on the beach below the site of the old Camp San Jose. It was called Pot Belly Beach because each of the cabins was fitted with a potbelly stove.
Capitola visitors interested in local place names may enjoy a book available at local bookstores called Santa Cruz County Place Names -- A Geographical Dictionary, written by the late Donald Thomas Clark, University Librarian, Emeritus, at UC Santa Cruz. The book was published in 1986 by the Santa Cruz Historical Society and has since been recognized as a valuable tool for historical research and visitor information.
