As they have for more than 100 years, thousands of visitors will head out to Santa Cruz’s beaches and famous wharf over Memorial Day Weekend, heralding the beginning of summer.

The sea lions, the clam chowder, the sunny weather and surfers all will be there. But this year, visitors also will notice something different. The Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, a historic wooden structure built in 1914 that juts half a mile into Monterey Bay — the longest public pier on California’s coast — is damaged.

On Dec. 23, a 180-foot section at its southernmost end collapsed dramatically into the ocean during heavy winter storms, making international news. City officials reopened the wharf 11 days later after engineering studies showed the rest of the structure was still safe. Now, even as some key questions remain unanswered, the landmark’s future is beginning to take shape.

Rebuilding all of the destroyed section — an area the size of three NBA basketball courts perched over the open ocean — will cost roughly $14 million. A restaurant, a restroom building and popular sea lion viewing areas are gone.

Some wonder whether the wrecked 180 feet should be rebuilt at all, as piers up and down the California coast from Pacifica to San Diego have faced increasing damage in recent years due to winter storms made stronger by climate change and sea level rise.

“The current preference of the city council is to rebuild it,” said Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley. “But we need to get a complete picture from public works, parks, structural engineers and other experts to see if that’s possible to do in a way that is going to last.”

The wharf receives more than 2 million visitors a year. Parts of it have been included in Hollywood films, like the 1983 Clint Eastwood film “Sudden Impact” and the 1987 horror movie “Lost Boys.”

Last month, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to spend $100,000 to hire Moffat and Nichol, a Long Beach-based engineering firm, to draw up plans for a $1 million partial repair. The design, chosen from five alternatives, would replace lost wooden pilings and about 1,100 feet of the roughly 15,200 square feet of decking that fell into the ocean during the storms. The plan also would rebuild one sea-lion viewing hole and replace some lost parking spaces.

The goal is to put the job out to bid in July and start construction in October, finishing by early 2026, said Tony Elliot, Santa Cruz’s city parks director, who is overseeing the project.

“We’ll be capping the broken end of the wharf, adding new pilings and decking,” he said. “That will strengthen it.”

But the big question is, who will pay for the rest of the work?

After the collapse, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a proclamation making Santa Cruz eligible for state funding under the California Disaster Assistance Act, which reimburses local governments up to 75% of their losses from floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other disasters. Santa Cruz applied for funding in March, but hasn’t heard back amounts yet from the California Office of Emergency Services.

Elliot and Keeley both said that once they receive a decision from the state on how much disaster funding the city will receive, they expect the council to make a final decision by the end of this year.

Visitors stand on the wharf at the Santa Cruz Wharf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group) 

On the wharf this week, many of the visitors to the colorful shops and restaurants said they hope it will be completely rebuilt.

“They should build it back,” said Gerald Martinez, visiting with his wife, Joanne Martinez, from Sacramento. “People from all over the world come to see the wharf and the boardwalk. It’s historic.”

“Maybe they could do a glass floor on part of it,” said Christine Daugherty, who drove down from Marysville, with her husband, John Daugherty for a few days at the ocean. “So you could see the sea lions. It would be a different view.”

Locals tended to agree.

Vince Tuzzi, a white-bearded longtime Santa Cruz resident wearing a Hawaiian shirt and riding a Schwinn cruiser bicycle, said he comes to the wharf every day. He said he would like to see it restored to its former glory.

When the collapse happened two days before Christmas, Tuzzi was dressed as Santa Claus, working at a business in Ben Lomond. He recalled the TV images of the broken decking floating in the ocean, with three city workers who were rescued, heavy equipment and the entire restroom building bobbing on top of the precarious raft.

“It was sure something to see that bathroom floating in the ocean,” Tuzzi said, smiling. “When it hit the beach, somebody put a sign on it that said ‘For rent: $2200 a month.’”

Part of the reason that particular section collapsed, Elliot, the city parks director, said, is that it was under repairs after a big storm had damaged pilings and decking the prior year, in December 2023. The city was forced to do repair work during the rough winter weather because the California Coastal Commission said workers couldn’t disturb western gulls, or seagulls, and another commonly found bird, pigeon guillemots, both of which make their nests in the wharf’s wooden beams, during nesting season.

“It was already damaged. It was in a weakened state,” Elliot said. “With fewer pilings, the wharf lost its shear strength in that area. It didn’t have the ability that the rest of the wharf has to withstand the kind of really big swells that we saw on Dec. 23.”

The city has already removed one of the pieces of lost equipment, a skid steer, from the ocean floor. But a 20-ton crane is still sitting under about 30 feet of water, roughly 150 feet southeast of the wharf. There are plans to bring in a barge and a much larger crane this summer to fish it out, Elliot said.

The wharf has more than 4,400 wooden pilings, made of Douglas Fir. They are pounded roughly 20 feet into the ocean bottom, and city crews replace several dozen each year. But piers come and go. There have been five others back to the mid-1800s in that area, noted Gary Griggs, a distinguished professor of Earth Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

Last fall, the city of Capitola reopened the Capitola Wharf after $10 million in repairs following damage from a January 2023 “bomb cyclone” storm. First built in 1857, that structure was also damaged in 1926, 1953, 1960, 1965, and 1982 storms.

“It’s a tough environment,” Griggs said. “There’s nothing we can do in the long run to hold back the Pacific Ocean. The ocean is always going to win.”

Visitors walk along the Santa Cruz Wharf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group) 
Visitors walk along the Santa Cruz Wharf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group) 
Visitors enter Stagnaro Bros. Seafood restaurant on the Santa Cruz Wharf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group) 
Visitors walk toward the end of the Santa Cruz Wharf in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)