Upper Seabright, Santa Cruz, CA

Upper Seabright sits on the east side of Santa Cruz about a mile from downtown, where Seabright Avenue gathers into a short strip of restaurants and cafes near Murray Street. It belongs to the sunnier part of town that locals call the banana belt, and the blocks around the strip feel unhurried. Homes are beach bungalows, cottages and some Victorian designs from the early and middle decades of the 1900s, set on compact lots. Gardens fill the front yards, and the newer houses that are slowly replacing older ones tend to follow the same scale. Seabright Avenue holds most of the dining. Linda's Seabreeze Cafe, at 542 Seabright, is the breakfast and lunch spot, and Verve Coffee Roasters pulls in the coffee crowd in the same area. La Posta serves Italian food with a patio, Engfer Pizza Works bakes pizza in a wood-fired oven, and The Crepe Place is a standby for sweet and savory crepes and live music. For outdoor time, Frederick Street Park, at 168 Frederick Street, has a skate bowl, volleyball, fenced dog areas and views toward the ocean. Seabright State Beach is about half a mile away, and the San Lorenzo Riverwalk gives walkers a flat path toward downtown. Everyday shopping is simple. Both Whole Foods Market and the independent Staff of Life, a natural foods store, sit within the neighborhood along Soquel Avenue. The streets are flat and bikeable, Metro buses run through the area, and Highway 1 is about a mile away with Highway 17 behind it for the drive over the hill. Yards in Upper Seabright are small, so the garden is the whole outdoor room at home. Most people lean on the park and the beach for the rest. From the top of Frederick Street Park, the ocean shows between the rooftops, and that view says plenty about how close the water is.