However, his brother, William, operated the bathhouse throughout the 1870s. Once son, Robert, appears to have been largely uninvolved with the property and served as the chief of police for the city in the 1870s. The home was located between Pacific Avenue and Main Street just above the beach, with the bathing houses erected atop the beach. The Liddell bathhouse below the Ocean View House and between the two wharves with the other beach bathing facilities in the distance, ca 1878. Presumably, their home served as the core of the new bathhouse and was expanded over subsequent years to add an ever-growing number of "bathing houses"-changing rooms with showers-to the facility. The timeline for this makes sense since Elizabeth's husband, George Liddell, had just died in April of that year leaving her with her eight children to manage the estate. The precise chronology of events is unclear but tradition has it that Elizabeth Liddell, alongside her daughter Mary, opened the first bathhouse on the Santa Cruz Main Beach in time for the 1864 summer season. The Liddell family's Long Branch Bath Houses between Pacific Avenue and Main Street at the Santa Cruz Main Beach, 1876. Indeed, Santa Cruz may have hosted the first purpose-built public bathhouses in California. On the West Coast, where there was a distinct lack of any such society in the 1860s, the idea of public bathing was less repugnant. Nonetheless, there was much resistance to public bathhouses of any nature, especially on the East Coast. Sulfur-rich hot springs that did not require artificial heating led to some of the first resorts. Salt water especially was thought to have medicinal properties and heated fresh- and salt-water baths began to pop up, first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States. Near the middle of the 1800s, however, doctors and scientists began to investigate the medical benefits of cleanliness and bathing. European modesty beginning around the time of the Protestant Reformation led to a clamping down on any public bathing, indoors or otherwise, and it became the realm of children alone for over three centuries. ĭespite a three-quarters-mile-long beach dominating the Santa Cruz waterfront, bathing was simply not something people did in the mid-nineteenth century. The Neptune Baths with a Pacific Avenue Street Railroad horsecar parked outside, ca 1890. Only the Americans were bold enough to erect permanent buildings on the hill above the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, and even they did so slowly and cautiously. The Spanish colonists and Mexican settlers did little to change this landscape, sticking instead to the interior where they were safe from the exposed coastline where pirates and Russian fur traders prowled. And the San Lorenzo River meandered lazily over the flats on its slow march to the Monterey Bay. No roads or rails crossed its ill-defined shores. No buildings stood upon its sand dunes and drifts. No wharves or piers marred its scenic views. There was a time once when the Santa Cruz Main Beach was simply a beach.
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