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In This Issue...
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The Pleasure Point Roadhouse: Historic or Just Plain Old?
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The Pleasure Point Roadhouse: Historic or Just Plain Old?
By Monica Woelfel and Michael Thomas
At their Mar. 27 meeting, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will consider whether to list a building that once housed a saloon, speakeasy and brothel as a local historic resource.
With that date approaching, the building’s owners have evicted a dozen tenants in a race to make repairs, while history buffs fear the building could be lost to development.
The residence, commonly called the Pleasure Point Roadhouse, is located at 3905 East Cliff Drive between 38th and 41st avenues, and has become the center of a heated debate. At issue is the question of what makes a site historically significant.
At a Mar. 27 Board of Supervisors meeting, the County’s Historic Resources Commission recommended that the Roadhouse did not warrant listing as a historic resource. Usually, in a case like this, the county supervisors accept the Commission’s recommendation.
But this has become a special case. Supervisors opted instead to continue discussion on the Pleasure Point Roadhouse at their March meeting.
A group of Roadhouse neighbors, along with a number of local historians, feel strongly that the Roadhouse is an important historic site in Santa Cruz County and deserves to be protected.
“To not define that as historic,” said Charles Paulden, organizer of the group called People for the Preservation of Pleasure Point, “is like saying the ocean is not wet.”
Paulden’s group has collected hundreds of signatures on a petition to preserve the building. Their petition reads, in part, “The Pleasure Point Roadhouse … with its barn and out buildings … is a link to our past.”
However, the Roadhouse is privately owned by Leila Naslund and her two daughters. The family, while expressing a desire to work with the county, does not see the building as particularly historic, just run down and in need of repairs.
Wendy Hoffman, one of Naslund’s daughters, feels that the case is clear-cut, based on the Historic Resources Commission's recommendation and on a report by Circa Property Development, a consultant commissioned by the County.
“We’re trying to figure out, how people can call it historic when it’s not,” Hoffman said.
Owner Says Past Remodels Dilute Historical Value
In Hoffman’s opinion, and that of the Circa consultant, the Roadhouse has been changed too much over the years to constitute a historic structure. Carolyn Swift, director of the Capitola Historical Museum, sees it differently. She addressed the supervisors at the January meeting.
“This really is an important building,” Swift said after the meeting, of the roadhouse. “It’s the only framed roadhouse building of its type and age I know of left on the coast.”
After examining a vintage postcard photo of the 1902 structure, Swift also feels that the consultant may have been mistaken regarding the extent of alterations over the years.
“It has been changed very little,” she said. “It has a [newer] porch on it, but that could be removed later.”
If, after further deliberation, county supervisors decide to give the Roadhouse a historic designation, it will mean a degree of increased protection for the site, according to Steve Guiney, County Planning Department staff for the Historic Resources Commission. If a building is listed, Guiney said, the owners need county approval before making changes to the exterior.
If, on the other hand, the supervisors decide not to list the property, the owners are free to renovate as they choose (once obtaining the usual building permit). In that case, the owners would even be free " if they chose " to tear the building down.
While the owners have not announced any plans to raze the Roadhouse, that is exactly what Paulden and other County history buffs fear.
Naslund has rented out rooms in the house to local artists and students over many years. There are currently 12 residents.
“She has been good to us over the years,” said artist and Roadhouse resident Aaron Van de Kerkove. “For 10 years I have lived there and been able to do pretty much whatever I want, including putting a sculpture out front.”
But now things are changing.
“We’re getting evicted,” said Van de Kerkove.
He and all of the other Roadhouse residents received eviction notices telling them they need to be out by Mar. 15.
“They didn’t give us a reason,” said Van de Kerkove, but he suspects the eviction came in response to the community pressure to get the property listed. “We probably would have had another few years,” he said, of his residency in the house, “but they [the owners] got spooked.”
The owners haven’t given the tenants any indication of what they plan to do with the property.
”It’s pretty much a total mystery,” Van de Kerkove said.
Will Termites Seal Fate for Roadhouse?
Naslund did not want to comment, saying only, “My daughters are taking over my affairs.”
In a November interview with an area newspaper, however, she was quoted as saying that she would like the property to eventually be developed by her daughters “in a nice way.”
Her daughter, Hoffman, is distraught over what she feels is anger directed toward the family about the property. According to Hoffman, the eviction notices have a simple explanation.
“We got a structural and a termite [inspection] on the house,” she said. “[The infestation] was worse than we realized.”
Given the inspection results, the family agreed that the building needed serious maintenance work, so they asked the tenants to move out.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Hoffman said. “That’s the honest truth. We didn’t realize the backlash there would be.”
Hoffman said the evictions were taken out of context.
“This has been such a strange experience for us,” Hoffman went on. “We were doing nothing there, and all of a sudden we had people writing letters. Everything we’ve said has just been twisted around. This whole thing has taken us by surprise. We’ve had a lot of sleepless nights.”
County supervisors will consider listing the Roadhouse at their meeting Tuesday, Mar. 27 Supervisor Jan Beautz is leaning towards approval of the listing.
“It seems to me that it is historic,” she said, adding that local residents sometimes know more about local landmarks than do out-of-town people, such as the consultant.
In the meantime, according to Guiney, the Planning Department will not consider any applications to alter the building.
A site’s historic relevance, Guiney said, does not necessarily relate to the architectural or even structural integrity of the building there.
“The significance can be based on its association with a person, or people or an event or an activity,” said Guiney.
In the words of local historian Phil Reader, the Pleasure Point Roadhouse may have just such associations “[T]he Pleasure Point Road House…,” he wrote in a story for The Post, “remains the enduring symbol of the long colorful history of ‘The Point.’”
An account of the Roadhouse’s colorful past can be found in our July 11, 2006 issue online at www.mcpost.com.
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