Santa Cruz County Place Name: Vue de L'Eau (July 22, 2026)
July 29, 2026 —
Thomas Van Ness Leavitt
One of the very few French place names in the county. This was a gazebo type structure with a pagoda style roof that was built along the cliff above Monterey Bay in 1892 as part of a promotion scheme of the Santa Cruz, Garfield Park & Beach trolley line. It was advertised as an “observatory, cliff house, waiting station, and depot.” Nearby was the Casino at the junction of Cliff Drive and Garfield Avenue (now West Cliff Drive and Woodrow Avenue). Vue de L’Eau, with its spectacular view of the ocean (hence, the name), became a popular attraction, but it slowly faded in interest and in 1905 Vue de L’Eau and six surrounding acres were bought for the winter quarters of the Norris and Rowe circus. The building burned in 1925.
What caught my eye was the French place name. L’Eau means “the water” in French, which makes sense in context (although the Clark assumes the reader understands this). This entry is also interesting, because of what it implies about the town at the time. A mansion and six acres could be used as the off-season quarters of a traveling circus (the circus in question is widely documented).
I’ve been in a couple of different conversations recently where the version of Santa Cruz the participants remember is very different. I arrived here late December of 1992, and started a company headquartered downtown at 903 Pacific Ave. when I was 22. My Santa Cruz is the 1990s, immediate post-earthquake version: scrappy geeks building pioneering Internet companies and organizations like IUMA, Cruzio, Santa Cruz Internet (and my company, WebCom) and LARPers playing Vampire on Pacific. Other people’s Santa Cruz is the pre-earthquake Pacific Garden Mall. For others again, it is the 1950s and 1960s, before the PGM and UCSC. The 1900s era version, with a circus’ winter headquarters on West Cliff Drive on 6 acres with a mansion, must have very different from any of these.
Here’s a photograph of them from the Santa Cruz Sentinel at their “winter headquarters”. Rowe himself, the ring master, is visible in it. A very diverse set of people, including 9 Japanese performers and a variety of “international acrobatic acts”.
I found this article published in the Morning Free Press (Ventura) (Volume 15, Number 2, 2 February 1909) via the California Digital Newspaper Collection of UC Riverside (text reproduced below) when searching for information about the mentioned circus. It appears that the building may have had a history after the circus before burning down in 1925:
NORRIS & ROWE CIRCUS
GOES UNDER HAMMER
Santa Cruz, Feb. 1.—The Norris & Rowe circus, with winter quarters in Santa Cruz, was sold this morning as a result of bankruptcy proceedings.
Arch Donaldson of the Donaldson Lithographic Co. a creditor to the amount of $50,000 bid the circus in for $15,000.
It appears from the Circus Historical Society that, after the bankruptcy, the equipment was “Shipped to Peru, Indiana, where it was sold in lots by the Peru Trust Co.” Must have been a traumatic experience for the performers, as my understanding was that they had very much a family feel, a home for misfits and oddballs not available otherwise. Their last sequence of performances being in Kentucky is probably why the equipment wound up in Indiana. Unlike in previous years, they “wintered” in Evansville, IN, which may have been a product of the owner’s financial plight, unable to pay to ship them home to Santa Cruz as normal.
Ross Gibson has a column in the Sentinel from 2022 on “The Westside circus colony” (paywalled), where he dates the circus' founding to 1882, although it appears they may have only started touring after purchasing the Vue de L’Eau in 1905 (at least the Circus Historical Society web site doesn’t list any earlier routes). If you have access, and are curious, the history is fascinating… did you know that Santa Cruz once hosted the “fourth largest circus in the world” (as per the Sentinel of that era)?
Again, the Place Names book is a treasure, not only for its contents, but the rabbit holes it can send you down. Santa Cruz has a rich and varied history to explore.
Tags: columns, place-names, bratton-online, writing