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Bubbling Up
Before Michael Goldman was a massage therapist, he was a night janitor at Wrigley’s gum factory on Santa Cruz’s Westside.
That was before the Wrigley company left the building in 1997, and a developer took over and built the University Business Park, today’s bustling commercial center.
Goldman recalls the building’s cavernous rooms and the conveyer belts carrying long, hot sheets of gum. Back then, sugar dust was everywhere, Goldman says. His crew had just four hours to clean the floors and machinery before the morning shift came.
“You have a brand-new, clean room that you just finished and here come the guys,” Goldman says. “There’s already tire tracks all over with the sugar dust, and you’re constantly covered with the sugar dust every day.”
Upstairs, the factory had spearmint, peppermint, and winterfresh “flavor vaults,” and the scent reached for miles, he says.
“You’d be going down the street and you could tell what they were making,” says Goldman, now 63, who began working at Wrigley in 1989.
Before that, Goldman found a bit of fame as the world’s fastest downhill skateboarder. In 1977, wearing a red and green leather suit with a Santa Cruz logo, he hurtled down a Los Angeles hill at 50 miles per hour, breaking the skateboard speed record. In an interesting twist, his son, Jamie Goldman, has inherited his daredevil talent. For years, the younger Goldman was a sponsored mountain bike rider for Santa Cruz Bicycles, one of several successful companies now headquartered in the former gum factory.
Today the Wrigley Building houses around 45 businesses, ranging from tech startups to art workspaces and fitness studios. At 385,000 square feet—the area of nearly seven football fields—it is Santa Cruz County’s largest commercial space. The building has also become a well-known Westside cultural landmark, drawing locals to its First Friday art events and Saturday farmers markets.
ATTRACTING TALENT
When commercial real estate developer William Ow and his family purchased the majority share of the Wrigley Building in 2004, he considered several plans for the space, such as student housing and large retail space for a home improvement store.
Market forces directed him elsewhere. Over the next few years, the building became an incubator for tech startups and artists.
“I think we’re quite a bit more advanced than an incubator now,” says Ow. “Those businesses that are here are established, and they’ve reached a maturity where they need a bigger physical space.”
His tenants include LifeAID, a four-year-old beverage company with 20 employees that ships 750,000 cans each month to 18 countries. The company sells three beverages, including FitAID, its most popular drink, targeted at CrossFit athletes. Its largest retailer is the Vitamin Shoppe, but its drinks will soon come to GNC and Whole Foods Market.
LifeAID’s revenue doubled in 2015, and the company is expanding its footprint in the Wrigley Building, exchanging its old 1,200-square-foot office for a 4,500-square-foot one with ocean views. The company also rents a warehouse in the building.
Ow rents his space for around $1.10 per square foot, which is not only more affordable than office space in Silicon Valley, but also closer to the beach and bike trails, attracting lifestyle-oriented clients, he says.
Westside resident Kyle Doerksen, CEO and founder of the electronic skateboard startup OneWheel, rides his invention to work. It’s a two-mile trail ride from home to his company’s Wrigley Building headquarters.
“I just put my headphones on and it feels exactly like snowboarding,” Doerksen says.
The Stanford graduate grew up snowboarding in Canada, and said he’s engineered a board that replicates the feeling of carving through fresh powder—unlike anything else on the market.
The board, which sells for $1,499 with a six-week lead time, can hit 16 mph and run for eight miles on one charge. With a single fat go-kart wheel, it handles off-road hilly terrain.
For five years, Doerksen tinkered with prototypes in his garage, while working as a project manager at IDEO in Palo Alto. When he finally launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2014, he raised $630,000—more than six times his goal—and left his dream job at IDEO to further develop the skateboard.
OneWheel was founded in Mountain View, but in late 2014 Doerksen moved to the Wrigley Building, in part for its proximity to trails. The team frequently tests the board on the dirt and sand at Natural Bridges State Beach, a block away from its current headquarters.
“We’re really creating a new action sport, so Santa Cruz is really the perfect place,” Doerksen says.
In the past year, the company has posted quick growth: revenues are up by 300 percent and 10 new employees have joined. OneWheel is also expanding its offices to include a research and development lab in the Wrigley Building.
WESTSIDE TRANSFORMATION
The Westside was once the city’s industrial center, home to not only the gum factory but also to Texas Instruments and Lipton Tea factories—representing around 1,500 jobs altogether. The latter two companies left Santa Cruz shortly after Wrigley’s did, Texas Instruments in 2001 and Lipton in 2002.
Light industrial manufacturing still exists on the Westside, but the balance has shifted toward retail and services, says Bonnie Lipscomb, Santa Cruz’s economic development director.
It’s not just Ow’s Wrigley Building that’s booming; it’s the neighborhood, she says.
Swift Street Courtyard’s restaurants, the Delaware Addition’s live-work space and the emergence of breweries and wineries have created a new feel to the community.
A Fairfield Inn & Suites is being built catty-corner to the Wrigley Building, and a block away, UC Santa Cruz is constructing a $54 million biology building, the first step in its long-range development plan for the area.
“I think the Wrigley Building is an amazing story of successful adaptive reuse,” says Lipscomb. “It’s been transformative in that area. What William has done is really remarkable. He’s a creative visionary leader and I think that the Wrigley Building—how large it is, and how eclectic and funky—you go in there and it’s its own little world.”
This month, nearly 2,000 solar panels were installed on its roof, and soon more will be added to its parking lot, making the Wrigley Building one of the largest solar projects in the city, says Ow.
Ow’s next plan is to create an incubator lab for spin-off businesses from UCSC’s Genomics Institute, which in 2000 was the first to sequence the human genome and publicly release it on the Web. So far, six companies have been born out of the institute’s research, including DoveTail Genomics, which was originally housed in the Wrigley Building.
Ow said he’s been in “deep discussions” with the institute’s director for about a year, and a deal is close. He already has a 5,000-plus square-foot space earmarked for the lab.
THE FACE OF SANTA CRUZ BICYCLES
The story of the Wrigley’s transformation into an economic hub is really the story of the people who have transformed it, and Rob Roskopp, CEO of Santa Cruz Bicycles, is one of them.
The metallic sign and floor-to-ceiling glass of his company’s storefront is the most conspicuous section of the Wrigley Building’s exterior, which is mostly beige and grey concrete expanses. Since 2012, the building has housed not only the company’s retail space and worldwide headquarters but also its factory, where workers custom-build each bike by hand. Previously, the company was in Santa Cruz’s old Seabright Cannery, but business grew so fast that the parking lot doubled as a warehouse.
Wearing a black long-sleeve shirt and an intense stare, Roskopp, 52, resembles a bald and athletic version of Steve Jobs. He sits on a black leather couch at the back of the company’s showroom, behind rows of colorful high-end mountain bikes.
Last year, Roskopp sold the company to the multibillion-dollar Dutch conglomerate Pon Holdings. The deal’s details are not public, but Roskopp says he sold so he could expand distribution to Europe and Asia. His role as CEO remains unchanged.
“It’s my baby and I want to see it grow to its ultimate fruition,” Roskopp says of the company.
Before Roskopp co-founded Santa Cruz Bicycles at age 29, he was a professional skateboarder. At age 19, with $600 in his pocket, he took a Greyhound bus from his father’s home in Cincinnati to San Jose, to begin his career. Within one month he met Rich Novak, co-founder of NHS, the iconic Santa Cruz skateboard company, who gave him a job and a sponsorship.
“He brought me up through the ranks. I did everything: tradeshows, sales, product management, R and D. I got business training with Novak as my mentor,” Roskopp says.
Roskopp was part of the hardcore punk skateboarding scene of the 1980s. He skated in half-pipe contests and movies and had his own NHS skateboard line, vintage decks which today sell on eBay for up to $350.
Toward the end of his skateboarding career, Roskopp began cyclocross bike racing. Novak approached him with the idea for Santa Cruz Bicycles, when full-suspension mountain bikes were still in their infancy.
Roskopp thought the market was ripe and jumped onboard. In 1993, the duo co-founded the company with engineer Mike Marquez.
“Our first bike sold in February ’94, and by ’96 we were doing a few million [dollars] in sales with 10 employees,” Roskopp says.
Today, the company employs 120 people in Santa Cruz, 350 in China, five in Taiwan and is still growing. Since 2010, the company has posted double-digit sales growth every year, Roskopp says.
Roskopp now lives in Saratoga, raising three teenage children with his wife. He commutes to Santa Cruz three days a week.
“I don’t skateboard anymore. I did with my son a bit when he was younger, but all my kids are in club soccer, which is a job in itself,” Roskopp says.
NEW BEGINNING
Painter Michele Giulvezan-Tanner works in her Wrigley Building studio four days a week. If she’s looking for inspiration, she sits with her enormous paintings of abstract figures or browses her piles of art books.
She jumps and paints furiously for a few minutes, then sits down again, waiting for her muse, like a game of hide-and-seek.
“There’s a trick you do. You come in, you don’t look at your painting. You maybe sweep the floor and you have 15 seconds to look at the painting with a fresh eye, and then it’s gone,” Giulvezan-Tanner says.
She moved to the studio in 2012, from a space near the Tannery. She says she gets better space for her money at the Wrigley Building, and more exposure.
More than a dozen people visit her studio each week, including one time when 30 people from the yoga studio down the hall wandered in, admiring her work.
Giulvezan-Tanner’s paintings are priced between $1,000 and $8,000, and her sales and commissions are up since relocating to the Westside, she says.
She paints people and faces, hidden behind thick blotches of color.
“I started experimenting with how much of the figure I could take away and how much I could leave there. It’s a constant battle,” she says.
In high school, an art teacher told her that she didn’t have talent, and she gave up painting for 20 years until returning to college in her 30s. Ever since, she’s been playing with the line between realism and illusion.
“I’m trying to push that abstraction further. It’s like I’m trying to annihilate the figure completely, which I think has a lot to do with aging,” says Giulvezan-Tanner, now 63.
Besides the nay-saying art teacher, Giulvezan-Tanner lists her mother as one of her biggest early influencers on her career.
“My mother was constantly working on the house, and I was fascinated by what she could do given the confines of wallpaper and paint. I love architecture and I love looking at rooms. It translates into more than just painting,” she says.
“When I walk into a room, I see the possibilities.”
SENSE OF MOVEMENT
One of Ow’s projects when he took over the building was adding interior walls to divide the factory’s immense spaces into attractive suites and offices for tenants.
Though signs with arrows direct customers through the industrial labyrinth, it still takes a few visits to grasp the serpentine layout.
Massive amounts of white walls means more room for art, says Ow.
“We said hey, we’ll make wall space available [for local artists] and we’ll rotate it about every two months, and we’ll do it for free,” Ow says. “We get the benefit of hanging beautiful art, and they’re getting some exposure.”
As Ow walks through the building, telling the stories of not only the companies, but also of the artwork he passes, he pauses in the second-floor lobby. Near the ceiling, dozens of brilliant ceramic fish have been hung by artist Andrew Ward. The fish circle the walls of the second-floor lobby and head down a long hallway toward Aerial Arts Santa Cruz, a studio teaching pole classes and acrobatic dance.
“You know that room at the Monterey Bay Aquarium with all the fish swimming in a circle overhead?” Ow asks. “If you hang it in a direction, you create a sense of movement.”
The Wrigley also features an exhibit of a dozen Italian vintage motorcycles—some from Ow’s personal collection—inspired by the Guggenheim show “The Art of the Motorcycle.”
“Why are these things stored away where people can never see them?” says Ow. “To me, it’s a shame. It’s just like good art. It doesn’t do anyone in the greater community any good if they’re hidden away.”
An offbeat, artistic community has arisen in the building, and includes the popular R. Blitzer Gallery headed by the renowned painter and sculptor Robert Blitzer.
Some of Ow’s tenants have traded technology careers for artistic businesses, such as Brian Kaufman, who worked at Amazon in Seattle for five years before founding Dog Days, a vintage guitar-strap company based in the Wrigley Building. All the straps are handmade by Kaufman and his parents, who also work at the company. Dog Days is also developing an electronic costume tail that moves to the beat of music.
Another techie-turned-art-entrepreneur is John Fleskes, a former Sun Microsystems system administrator who now runs Flesk Publications, an art book publishing company, in the Wrigley Building. Fleskes and his team design the books online, which are printed overseas then delivered to a distributor in Tennessee. A small subset of the copies, meant for direct customers, end up in Fleskes’ Wrigley Building warehouse.
Most of Fleskes’ publications are graphic novels and fantasy, and book-jacket posters of stylized dragons, elves and mythical creatures hide the stacks of boxed copies that nearly touch the 17-foot-high ceiling.
Ow also rents to tech geeks wanting a “hobby/passion” space, such as two brothers, both Silicon Valley programmers, who run a silkscreening company and luthier business in their free time.
“This is almost like their man cave,” Ow says, passing a bare anteroom with a curtain hiding the workspace behind it. “Unfortunately, they’re almost never here.”
A rock band called the Ghost Collective, comprised mostly of tech professionals, rents a studio.
“They all have lives and families. They’ve been a band since the ’80s, and they jam on Tuesdays,” Ow says.
Ow says that in the past decade, he’s seen an economic boost on the Westside. At first, he had difficulty attracting tenants, but now he has a waitlist for his few remaining spaces.
“Initially, this was the end of the Earth for people in Santa Cruz,” Ow says. “Since this has happened, we’re part of that big transition that has made the Westside the place to be.”
Beyond Belief
When climatologist Jeffrey Kiehl was giving a lecture 15 years ago about global warming, he tried something many scientists would see as revolutionary. He looked into the eyes of audience members, many of them skeptics, and stopped to ask them a question: “How are you feeling?”
People who might otherwise dismiss climate change as a joke or a phony political ploy started opening up about how all this information was scary and difficult to absorb. Kiehl, who will be speaking as part of a panel on climate change next month, started using this approach in discussions every chance he got.
“I often hear ‘I’m overwhelmed. This is helpless. This can’t be happening.’ All of these responses are natural for people,” says Kiehl, who studied Jungian psychology. “When you’re presented with extremely disturbing information, either personally or globally, a natural human reaction is to feel overwhelmed, feel sadness, feel it’s hopeless. I like to get people to talk about that, because one of the important things is to get people to open up to the fact that this is a problem that has a lot of emotion attached to it.”
Last year, Kiehl moved from Boulder, Colorado to Santa Cruz, where he serves as adjunct professor at UCSC.
On Feb. 5 and 6, he will be taking part in an event called Climate Change: The Moral Dimension at Peace United Church on High Street in Santa Cruz.
Kiehl was an expert focused on climate change predictions for the National Center for Atmospheric Research for more than 10 years before he began wondering why so many people were ignoring the mounting scientific consensus that global warming is real, and that it could alter the fate of our planet for centuries. “I decided there had to be psychological reasons to just march on toward the cliff and deny that this was going on,” he says.
That’s when Kiehl decided to go back to school for a master’s program in clinical psychology, which he finished in 2000. He now understands the psychological phenomenon of deniers as little more than cognitive dissonance—a discrepancy between facts and perception. It can be a confusing phenomenon, though, for someone in the throes of it. The emotions that deniers usually feel—shock, denial and re-directing of blame—match the signs of a trauma, all of which makes perfect sense, Kiehl says, because the findings sound earth-shattering, especially at first.
But as Kiehl starts getting people to talk about their emotions, encouraging them to ask him questions, something interesting happens. “It allows another way for people to hear the information about climate change and actually psychologically take it in at a rate or [in] a way they can assimilate it, rather than it being absolutely overwhelming,” he explains.
“I often hear ‘I’m overwhelmed. This is helpless. This can’t be happening.’ All of these responses are natural for people.”
“This makes it participatory,” he adds. “It’s no longer me talking to people. I get to hear what they think or feel about this issue. It’s a far more integrative way of involving people on this issue.”
Kiehl says, when talking to deniers, it is best to invoke what he calls “The Five Basic Facts of Climate Change”—four scientific observations and one law of physics. The first is that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere—a figure experts have been tracking since the 1960s. To go back before that, scientists refer to ice records in the Arctic, where deep in the ice core are bubbles filled with air that froze long ago.
Kiehl says that some people then ask how we know that growing carbon emissions are manmade and that they aren’t coming from natural sources, like volcanoes. He explains that the carbon in the air is a different and lighter kind than what’s found beneath the earth’s surface.
The third fact is that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which traps heat—as Irish scientist John Tyndall first discovered and laid out in 1860. And, as a result, the earth’s greenhouse effect is increasing along with carbon in the atmosphere, Kiehl’s fourth point. That increase is trapping more and more radiation inside the planet’s atmosphere.
The fifth and final fact is that physics shows us that energy cannot be destroyed. That means this radiation has to show up somewhere, and it will therefore show up as an increase in temperature.
After he has laid out these scientific findings and started a little discussion, he likes to end his lectures on a positive note, because climatologists, Kiehl says, often don’t talk about solutions.
Kiehl explains that there are ways of creating energy that don’t burn fossil fuels, and that many countries have started moving in that direction. He calls California the “gold standard for what you can do in the United States and what you can do to reduce fossil fuels.”
Not long ago, he notes, many people felt strongly that we needed oil and coal to sustain economic growth. Studies have since shown no correlation, however, between switching to renewable energy and economic struggles. More significantly, Kiehl says it’s now possible that the country might actually grow more stable if Americans decrease their dependence on fossil fuels, based on the current financial scare that’s being blamed on the declining price of oil.
“This is a tremendous opportunity to leave people with a better world. Really, that’s where I leave people,” he says. “If there’s one message that I can get across to people, it’s, ‘Yes, it’s a problem. It’s a very, very serious problem. But it is also a tremendous opportunity to transform society and create a world that will be so much better.’”
‘Climate Change: The Moral Dimension’ will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 5, and 9 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 6 at the Peace United Church, 900 High St., Santa Cruz. There will be art and performances. Kiehl will speak on Saturday. The event is free and open to the public.
Opinion
EDITOR’S NOTE
When I was working on a story back in 2013 about why Randall Grahm’s Le Cigare Volant restaurant failed in Santa Cruz, several people I talked to told me that they never went there “because it was on the Westside.” They said it like the Westside was an entirely different place than Santa Cruz proper, and they couldn’t imagine a reason to make the five-minute drive it would take to get there.
What a difference a couple of years makes. The Westside is hopping, and one of the most interesting stories there right now is the transformation of the Wrigley Building. Some locals have caught a glimpse of what’s going on there at First Fridays, others may have simply heard about it.
In this issue, Kara Guzman digs into the story of how the Wrigley became a thriving reuse project, and some of the personalities that are driving its successful rebirth. Personally, I like getting some insight into the history of Santa Cruz’s most iconic buildings, and, after reading this, I will never forget the sugar dust.
Also, don’t forget that voting for this year’s Best of Santa Cruz County Awards ends on Feb. 3. That’s just a week away! So if you haven’t yet, be sure to go to santacruz.com and vote for all of your local favorites. See you on the Westside!
STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Read the latest letters to the editor here.
Don’t Fence Us In
I was disappointed to see the letter in the Good Times (12/30/15 ) by Don Honda attacking Councilmember and former mayor Don Lane for his efforts to deal with the homeless problem in Santa Cruz. While I don’t always agree with Don on every issue, one should respect his good intentions and large number of hours that Don has spent working to help improve this situation over many years.
I doubt Mr. Honda’s statement that half of the homeless people here come from other areas; I remember the figure as being less than one third. Is that a fact that is relevant? People come here, rich and poor, for many reasons and their situations change for many reasons. Additionally, his statement that warming centers are not needed because “we don’t have much freezing weather here” has been thoroughly refuted by the past weeks’ weather, and winter has only just begun!
This “run them all out of town” attitude reminds me of a statement a friend once made to the City Council: “Many people that are fairly newly arrived in our town would like to live in a gated community for elites and they are trying to build walls around Santa Cruz.” Luckily, that is not the type of town we have here and I certainly hope it doesn’t become one!
I’m sure the majority of people in our community still believe “there but for fortune go I” and have hearts big enough to want to help those in need.
Susan Martinez
Santa Cruz
Who’s Who?
I read the recent GT piece on the local Congressional race (GT 12/15), and was left a bit confused by the candidates’ positions. The (party-anointed) Democrat [Jimmy] Panetta made statements about achieving common ground, even if it means crossing the aisle, and facilitating desal plants by securing more federal funding. Casey Lucius, the only Republican—at least for now—states “my husband and I are vegetarians, animal advocates and environmentalists,” and appreciates the need for affordable housing to help people achieve the American Dream. Additionally, the Republican appears to have experienced a much less privileged upbringing than the Democrat.
Do these two candidates need to switch parties? Or perhaps the voters should! As for me, I don’t have this dilemma—I’ve been a Green Party member for decades! This situation is a good example of how the Democratic Party no longer represents the interests of the common people in our country. Third parties are entering into positions of power in many countries in Europe recently. Hopefully, the time will arrive here soon!
Fred J. Geiger
Santa Cruz
Online Comments
Re: Word Quest
Thank you, Christina [Waters], for this excellent profile! I know Thad Nodine and Touch and Go is still one of my favorite books read recently. I mostly appreciate that you asked Thad about his writing process and routines. It’s great to get these insights and rare in a news weekly. Thad is also very honest and such a reflective person, the perfect writer to interview.
— Kate Rix
I remember his first book and thinking, this is pretty good. I hope this new book is pretty good. Congratulations to local Thad Nodine for finishing a second novel.
— Joe Reel
Re: Hot Seat
Why are Monterey Republicans like Jeff Davi endorsing [Jimmy] Panetta, a Democrat?
— Sam Adams
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GOOD IDEA
THAT’S SUPER
Santa Cruz topped TripAdvisor’s recent list naming the best places for tourists to stay during this year’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara on Feb. 7. The ranking, which put Oakland at No. 2, weighed cities’ hotel rates, as well as their proximity to the big game.
GOOD WORK
HOUSE WORK
Retired special-ed preschool teacher Brian Iles says Scotts Valley Toadal Fitness’ child program is a leap better than anything he’s ever seen. “The kids are really happy,†says Iles, who also used to give preschool programs formal evaluations. Iles, whose grandchildren are in the program, was moved to build a birdhouse for them, which he presented to the staff last week.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Good buildings come from good people.â€
-Stephen Gardiner
Jailhouse Knock
On the 23rd of each month, prison reform activists on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz hold up signs and banners reading “End Solitary Confinement.” The date signifies the number of hours many prison inmates spend in solitary confinement each day, in a windowless concrete cell barely larger than a king-sized bed.
Dolores Canales, co-founder of California Families Against Solitary Confinement, says the monthly protests in Santa Cruz and around the state are part of a movement that has made a big impact since inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City staged a hunger strike that spread through state prisons in 2011. Her son John Martinez was in solitary for 15 years in Pelican Bay.
“There were lawsuits and hunger strikes in the past, but they died down and went away. It has only gotten bigger since the 2011 hunger strikes,” says Canales.
On Monday, President Obama announced a series of executive actions that will ban the use of solitary confinement as punishment for “low-level infractions” by adult prisoners, and prohibit its use entirely for juvenile prisoners in federal prisons. In June, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, one of the court’s more conservative judges, denounced the widespread use of solitary confinement, a modern-day restating of the Supreme Court’s ruling 125 years ago that solitary confinement bears a “terror and peculiar mark of infamy”—although the court never abolished it.
Prisons have defended their use of these isolating units, saying the prisoners in them would otherwise pose a threat to staff and other inmates.
CFASC is part of Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition (PHSS), which organizes the community actions on the 23rd of each month statewide. Both groups formed in the aftermath of the 2011 hunger strike at the Pelican Bay State Prison, which led to more than 6,000 prisoners protesting solitary confinement conditions. There were three hunger strikes from 2011 to 2013, resulting in two deaths. While demands for better conditions were ultimately denied, the strikes brought attention to the issue.
So did a lawsuit that prisoners in solitary at Pelican Bay filed in 2012, challenging California’s use of solitary units. The plaintiffs settled in September of last year, but their case, Ashker v. Brown, secured significant reforms. For instance, the state agreed to limit prolonged solitary confinement and end the process of indeterminate detention.
During the trial, UCSC psychology professor Craig Haney testified that after interviews with numerous prisoners, he found that the negative effects of solitary confinement are comparable to those found in torture and trauma victims.
Word Games
But there is one surprising complication to the growing fight against solitary: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) says it doesn’t use solitary confinement and that it never has.
“It’s not solitary confinement, it never has been, and it certainly isn’t now,” Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for CDCR, tells GT.
“I came to realize the SHU was designed to break you physically, spiritually and psychologically. It wasn’t designed to rehabilitate yourself or make you a better person,” he says.
The department, instead, uses terms like “security housing unit” (SHU) or “administrative housing unit” (AHU) to describe cells where inmates spend a minimum of 22 hours a day. Prisons and jails across the state use acronyms for what essentially amounts to solitary confinement, according to legal experts.
Carol Strickman, an attorney and founding member of PHSS, takes issue with Thornton’s description, saying the CDCR is just trying to avoid negative buzz words. “Solitary is a dirty word, everyone’s going to deny it,” Strickman says. “It’s a semantic game to avoid admitting that they’re doing something that is disapproved of by a lot of people.”
The U.S. Department of Justice defined solitary confinement in 2013 as being confined to a cell for about 22 hours per day or more, alone or with other prisoners, in a way “that limits contact with others”—not necessarily eliminating it altogether.
Thornton says inmates in SHU units have meaningful human contact—that, for instance, they can talk to each other through the walls. Strickman disagrees, saying that yelling between cells or being forced to have a bunkmate doesn’t qualify.
Sometimes the CDCR houses two people in one SHU, but both are crammed into a unit the same size as those that hold one person—8 by 10 feet.
Thornton calls this another form of “human contact,” but Haney, the UCSC psychologist, has indicated otherwise. He testified in March that double-celled prisoners “have the worst of both worlds.” They are “denied opportunities for any semblance of ‘normal’ social interaction,” explained Haney.
Haney testified that inmates in these units, which he refers to as being solitary confinement, are “at grave risk of psychological harm.” He added that the term solitary confinement “is generally used to refer to conditions of extreme but not total isolation from others.”
Danny Murillo, who served seven years in an SHU, five of them at Pelican Bay State Prison, describes his experience as torture.
“I came to realize the SHU was designed to break you physically, spiritually and psychologically. It wasn’t designed to rehabilitate yourself or make you a better person,” he says.
Murillo, who graduated UC Berkeley in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies, says he knows of people who have committed suicide while in the SHU, and others who “lost it,” or showed signs of mental instability.
Strickman, one of several attorneys who prosecuted the Ashker v. Brown case, says the recent settlement ensures that fewer people will be in solitary and that they’ll be there for shorter periods of time. “That’s progress,” she adds.
There are roughly 1,500 prisoners in solitary units throughout the state, she says, and they are going to have their cases re-evaluated as a result of the Ashker lawsuit. She adds that more than 1,000 will join the general prison population.
Strickman’s team of attorneys and groups like CFASC are keeping a close eye to ensure that prisons abide by the new stipulations, which put an end to the prolonged solitary and the practice of holding someone indefinitely.
Prior to September’s court settlement, prisons were placing inmates in solitary based merely on alleged associations with prison gangs.
“We’re monitoring and pressuring them to do what they’re supposed to do,” Strickman says.
The United Nations defines solitary confinement as the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact, which is essentially the same as the Department of Justice’s definition. In May 2015, the U.N. adopted a revised text of the “Mandela Rules,” which prohibits solitary for more than 15 days at a time, as well as for persons with mental or physical disabilities.
The CDCR hasn’t indicated whether or not they will adhere to the new policy, which is not legally binding.
Strickman says prisons across the nation are locking inmates, including those with mental and physical disabilities, in solitary under the guise of innocuous-sounding acronyms for long periods, while fervently denying their use of solitary confinement.
Solitary in Santa Cruz?
The Santa Cruz Main Jail doesn’t practice solitary confinement, Chief Sheriff Deputy Craig Wilson says. Instead, it uses a similar system called Restricted to Cell (RTC), where inmates are locked in their cell for 23 hours a day.
“There’s a big difference between solitary. Solitary means you don’t have contact. That’s not what happens in a jail. Correctional settings are different than prison settings,” Wilson says.
“It doesn’t make sense to have a system where someone is so restricted and isolated that one day they’re in their cell almost all the time, and the next they’re walking down the street.”
Wilson says the key difference is that inmates in RTC are able to communicate through their cells with other inmates in their housing unit, which general-population prisoners are free to roam. (The county jail is split into 16 units.) Three times a week, Wilson adds, the mental health, medical personnel, corrections team, and chaplain visit and communicate with each inmate.
Three and a half percent of the jail population is in RTC status, down from 10 percent earlier this year. Wilson says the jail has adopted a more active management style where they’re willing to take more risks with the population, knowing there could be incidents.
“It’s always our goal to get people out of RTC, with a few exceptions. We have some people in the building who are assaultive toward other inmates and staff,” Wilson says.
Wilson has been working with Pam Rogers-Wyman, Adult Services Program Chief for Santa Cruz County Mental Health, to help inmates in RTC transition out.
With help from a federal grant, the county jail has outlined several steps to actively push people out of RTC and into therapeutic supportive environments. There is a modified RTC schedule, where inmates are let out for three hours to demonstrate that they can get along with others, and a half-RTC status where inmates are let out for half the day.
“We actually want people to be out and communicating with others, and problem solving, because almost everyone in county jail is going back into the community,” Wilson says. “It doesn’t make sense to have a system where someone is so restricted and isolated that one day they’re in their cell almost all the time, and the next they’re walking down the street.”
Two thirds of inmates in RTC status are self-requested. Wilson says these inmates are either afraid of potential enemies in jail, detoxing from drugs and want to be isolated, or have a mental illness and feel safer alone.
“A couple of the individuals who have serious paranoid schizophrenia who requested to be in a cell [RTC], for them they’re feeling so much better knowing that they’re safe,” Rogers-Wyman says.
On a recent visit to the jail, one prisoner, who recently transitioned out, told GT he faced a severe depression and “developed suicidal thoughts,” while in RTC.
Rogers-Wyman acknowledges that in some cases, being locked in isolation can cause mental illnesses, “but when you get down to the individuals,” she adds, “there’s specific reasons that people are RTC.” She says it is traumatizing for someone to be trapped in an open housing setting if they don’t feel safe there.
“It’s a balance between looking at the needs of the whole group,” she says. “If someone is aggressively violent, do we really want them fully integrated with other people who can be harmed and victimized?”
Some decry the jail’s RTC system as being inhumane and mirroring solitary confinement. “Changing the name to ‘restricted to cell’ doesn’t change the reality,” says Willow Katz, an organizer for PHSS.
Strickman says prisons and jails throughout the state deny the use of solitary confinement and rename it because of how stigmatized the word has become.
“They don’t want to admit it because people who have thought about it or studied it know that solitary confinement is inhumane and is akin to torture,” Strickman says.
Wilson adamantly denies the use of solitary in the Santa Cruz County Jail, and says they are “ahead of the curve” in terms of restricted housing practices compared to other jails. Activists like Katz say they’d like to see the RTC system replaced with a process of healing. “People who have mental health issues or are violent need therapy,” Katz says.
Wilson agrees, saying it would be “wonderful” if the county could build a psychiatric unit and place inmates who are RTC in a psychiatric hospital.
“You won’t find anyone who says that’s a bad idea, you’ll only find people who say that’s great, but how can we afford that?” Wilson says. “What are we going to invest in—prisons, schools, roads? That’s one of the actual criticisms in society right now, that we’ve overinvested in incarceration.”
Stark Contrasts
At the far end of the studio, a life-sized woman, daydreaming in a brilliant red skirt, fills a huge canvas. Her gaze turns away from me, and I am weightless again in the dreamy abstracted space, textured with atmospheric grids and patterns. Confident gestures, brilliant light and enormous swaths of color, layered in oil impasto and transparent slips—the compositions are unmistakably Linda Christensen’s. Christensen was struck by the work of Bay Area figurative painter David Park in the late ’80s, while a student in the UCSC Art Department.
“His impact was immediate, and it was emotional,” she says. Since then, and for many years now, she’s made a living reinventing the light and color of the Bay Area.
The day I visit her studio, which adjoins her Corralitos home, the petite Christensen is at work on four paintings. “I’m getting ready for several shows, one in Atlanta, another in Ketchum, Idaho, and a group show in Los Gatos,” she says.
These shows are part of the harvest of Christensen’s recent campaign to expand the visibility of her work. “I wanted to be more international in my reach,” she says.
Armed with a new website, a new artist statement, and more brochure packaging, her strategies are working. “I send out packets of images along with show announcements and catalogs. Then I wait,” she smiles. “In a few weeks, I do a follow-up, mention other galleries who are showing my work. Then I go back to work in the studio.” Then more office work, checking on responses, and doing more mailing. And with luck comes new interest. “A lot of galleries in New York now want realism,” she says. Sigh. “I fall somewhere in between expressionism and realism.” That signature style has found its way into many museums and private collections, including that of former Secretary of State, Condaleezza Rice.
After the end of her first marriage, Christensen went back to school while raising two daughters. Trying her hand at landscapes for a while, Christensen returned to freely abstracted figure paintings. “What repeats in my work is the solitary figure, always a woman. My daughter was my muse,” she says. “Then I add texture with patterns. I find repetition very soothing.”
Her predominant theme began as she watched a woman sitting at a car wash waiting for her car. “She was completely in her own thoughts, shoulders slumped, off-guard. That was the moment I was interested in,” Christensen says. The figures float in boldly abstracted spaces. “A lot of the time, painting is what you leave out.”
The painter worked with architects to design her large, sun-drenched studio. With state-of-the-art ventilation, and access to her adjoining office and storage, it is a painter’s dream. A small flat-screen TV is mounted on a bookcase over the studio sink. “I watch a black and white movie every day. I’ve got enough color in here as it is,” she laughs. And yes, Christensen works in her studio every day. “Because it calls me,” she says. “Plus, I’m driven by deadlines. I’ll come in and clean brushes, surfaces.” Then she’ll put out all her paints on a table-sized glass palette.
Working on three or four paintings at a time, her current works in progress —4′ by 4′ and 4′ by 5’— are vibrant with blues, greens and that brilliant crimson.
Intent on creating “happy accidents” that provoke an emotional response, she uses lots of self-fabricated stencils “just to mess with the work,” she explains. “I want to interfere with anything close to Disney-esque perfection. That moment of risk in my work—it’s inspiring for me.”
The painter takes care of obligations and phone calls in the morning. “Then about noon I’ll come in and work until dinner, or maybe no dinner—just keep working,” she says. “I love using a palette knife. That way there’s the least amount of control,” she reveals. “Also, that way the colors I apply stay fresh, they don’t blend and get muddy. Once I apply the large areas, then I do my magic,” she laughs. Christensen uses large brushes, palette knives, even huge carpentry trowels to apply paint, and she currently favors large tubes, fist-sized oil sticks and cans of Gamblin oil paint.
“I’m having a great time with it, but I let myself fall in love with my work,” she says. “I keep reaching, wanting to get at something that keeps eluding me.”
Born in the Bay Area, educated and based in Santa Cruz, Christensen and her work reflect our local landscape. “I like to think of it as ‘local girl makes good,’” she grins proudly. lindachristensen.net.
Enduring Treasure
How do they do it?
How can this Aptos landmark continue to enchant even the pickiest patrons? We weren’t the only ones who had decided to have wine with lunch on Martin Luther King Day. Cafe Sparrow’s long listing of wines by the glass tempted us, and we went with half glasses ($5.50) of Alfaro 2013 “A” Estate Chardonnay. Jack had never been to the Sparrow, a restaurant I’ve been visiting since even before the days of Bob and Julie Montague’s ownership. Ever appealing in its old-West-country-French way, the two dining rooms were lively when we took a spacious table for two in the sunny downstairs room. Jack approved of the lace-under-glass tablecloths, antiqued chairs and fresh flowers on every table. We both loved the long menus of special brunch entrees, Angus filet tip risotto, blackened Chinook salmon and luscious egg creations, but turned our attention to the house signature sandwiches and salads.
Always a draw for enlightened female diners, the Sparrow was well-stocked with men on the holiday afternoon of our visit, and everybody was clearly there to savor a long lunch.
Seared ahi on infant spinach leaves was Jack’s choice ($17.75), while I couldn’t resist the idea of a shrimp croissant ($13.75), especially since the grilled shrimp arrived in a creamy toss of dill-infused crème fraîche. Seriously, how could that not be fantastic? And it was! Our lunch began with fresh sourdough, presented in a thick white napkin along with unsalted butter. Accompanied with a tall glass of black currant iced tea—which tasted intensely of tangy black currants—Jack’s salad was huge yet beautiful. A thicket of thumbnail spinach leaves was threaded with thin ribbons of red bell pepper and a smartly spiced wasabi vinaigrette, then studded with long thin strips of crimson-seared ahi. On top was a central garnish of spun carrots and purple cabbage, everything dusted with white and black toasted sesame seeds. It was a salad made with care and expertise, presented to make the eyes as happy as the tastebuds.
Meanwhile, my shrimp croissant arrived with a side portion of spicy roasted red potatoes. The toasted croissant was arranged to reveal a nest of shrimp—perfectly cooked, still moist, yet toothsome—on a leaf of butter lettuce. A tiny pyramid of fresh fruit anchored the side of the pretty plate. This was another gorgeous dish that tasted even better than it looked. I adore the haunting sexiness of dill, and the combination of dill, tart crème fraîche and shrimp made a northern French (or perhaps southern Norwegian?) statement.
Our entire meal was delicious, very satisfying and refreshingly Old World (plus new California). How incredible that Cafe Sparrow continues to renew its reputation for country French cooking. I’ve never had anything but fine meals here in many decades of dining. Open nightly for dinner, Monday-Friday for lunch, and brunch on weekends. cafesparrow.com.
Award-Winning Spirits
Kudos to Sean Venus whose Venus Spirits Gin Blend No. 02 has won at this year’s Good Food Awards. From almost 2,000 entries, the citrusy, complex, and very unusual new gin was one of 176 winners in 13 categories. If, like me, you keep a bottle of Venus’ Gin No. 01 in your freezer, then this second creation will surprise you. Infused with botanicals such as orange and bay, this gin was aged in American oak. The color is caramel, the flavor is astonishing.
Wine of the Week
A light, charming, easy-sippin’ Dolcetto from Banfi. This high-value wine was made in cement tanks—no oak! Lots of pure strawberry fruit notes. A steal at $7 from the Shopper’s treasure trove of bargain wines.
Ace of Base
Through all his years as a professional baseball player, Tim Flannery had his guitar at his side. From his first minor league stint in Liberal, Kansas, through 10 years as infielder with the San Diego Padres, and another seven years as third-base coach for the San Francisco Giants, Flannery spent many nights on the road playing his guitar deep into the night.
“It kind of just let me breathe,” he says. “The baseball life is a glamorous life from a distance, but there’s a lot of collateral damage that comes with it. The guitar seemed to be my one constant.”
Flannery’s family emigrated to Kentucky in the mid-1700s, and Appalachian music provided a musical education. Flannery’s grandmother was a great banjo player, and the young Flannery picked up singing and playing early. He started writing his own songs on long bus rides with minor league teams.
When asked if he ever considered pursuing music rather than baseball as a career, Flannery talks about his uncle, Hal Smith, a major league infielder who was a home-run hero for the Pittsburgh Pirates in game seven of the 1960 World Series. Uncle Hal, as Flannery calls him, also carried around a Gibson J-45 guitar.
“I never thought there was a choice to make,” he says. “When people would tell me I had to make a choice between baseball and music, I’d tell them, well then, you have to make a choice between water and air. Which one do you want?”
A warm and funny man, and an excellent storyteller, Flannery was a fan favorite in San Diego. During his final game, he received a standing ovation that lasted so long the umpire had to stop play. In San Francisco, he developed a reputation for being the most excitable third-base coach in baseball, jumping and running alongside base runners to guide them to home plate safely.
Flannery was never a star on the field—he only hit nine home runs in his 10 years with the Padres—but his reputation in the majors is sealed. As one announcer said, “If there’s a better third-base coach in baseball, I’d like to see him.”
Flannery’s passion carries through to his music. A singer-songwriter with 14 albums, he writes about love, hard luck, the natural world, friends and joy. His songs fall comfortably into the folk/bluegrass vein, but Flannery’s music isn’t limited to roots styles. He was adopted by the Grateful Dead and has performed several times with Bob Weir, who is among the Bay Area’s rock music royalty.
Flannery has a deep appreciation for the people and music of San Francisco. His 2015 album Three Ring Circus is a love song to the city, and a snapshot of his own journey from pain and struggle to joy and acceptance. The album, which features of photo of Flannery’s three World Series rings on the cover, was released shortly after he retired from the Giants in 2014—something that he knew he needed to do.
“My last year before I left was a tough year for me,” he says. “It was time to come home. I was leaking oil and had an engine smoking. You win three World Series and I’m thinking, what else do I have to do? Can I do something else other than have a game every day?”
Flannery now focuses on music and one of his other great passions, the Love Harder Project, a nonprofit he started to help Bryan Stow, the local Giants fan who was beaten in the Dodger Stadium parking lot in 2011. Flannery and his band donate all proceeds from album sales, performances and merchandise to Stow and his family.
Flannery’s generosity and kindness can be heard in his music, which has a thread of spirituality running through it. The son of a “hillbilly Christian minister,” Flannery views life through the lens of someone who’s seen a lot and come out the other side.
“Someone once told me ‘religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who already have,’” he says.
For his Santa Cruz performance, Flannery is bringing his band, the Lunatic Fringe, which includes celebrated rock guitarist Doug Pettibone. The band loves coming to Santa Cruz and Flannery tends to stay awhile once he comes to town.
“My wife would say, ‘The gig was Friday and you’re back like a week later,’” he says with a laugh. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been at the Crepe Place, I’ve been at the Dream Inn, I’ve been out surfing with Wingnut down at the Point. I’ve got lots of friends there.’”
Tim Flannery will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 30 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $25/gen, $40/gold. 423-8209.
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor
Do you have any concerns about cell phones?
Yes, I’m concerned about the radio waves and how they affect the human body.
Jamil Johnson, Santa Cruz, Courtesy Clerk
What’s a national security threat that doesn’t get enough attention?
Solar storms and solar flares that could wipe out all electronic devices. Tina Bay, Santa Cruz, Actor There is a nuclear power plant in Japan that’s still leaking into the Pacific Ocean, but we forget about it because it’s on the other side of the world. Joff Jones, Santa Cruz, Artist ...
Bubbling Up
The successful transformation of the Wrigley Building is driving an economic engine on the booming Westside
Stark Contrasts
In the studio with Linda Christensen, whose bold interplays of color and light capture even Condoleezza Rice
Ace of Base
Tim Flannery found fame as the Giants’ third-base coach, now he finds his muse
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor When I was working on a story back in 2013 about why Randall Grahm’s Le Cigare Volant restaurant failed in Santa Cruz, several people I talked to told me that they never went there “because it was on the Westside.” They said it like the Westside was an entirely different place...
Do you have any concerns about cell phones?
Yes, I’m concerned about the radio waves and how they affect the human body. Jamil Johnson, Santa Cruz, Courtesy Clerk It just sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. Cell phones have been around, what, 20 years? And people aren’t dropping off from cancers, so I’m not worried about it. Colin...
