Pogonip Club

A uniquely Californian swim club, and the lessons it offered in style, substance, and belonging

Dec 30, 2024

The Old California will always be entangled for me with a vanished place called Pogonip Club. Perched on top of golden hills above the Monterey Bay, this old ratty swim and tennis club in Santa Cruz was my childhood turf. It got its name from an earlier turn of the century iteration of itself as a polo (Po), golf (Go) and watering hole (Nip) establishment – an early sporting club at when Henry Cowell was busy chopping down redwood trees in Santa Cruz County to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

Pogonip in the late seventies and early eighties was storied but unfussy. It embodied a pure California glamour that is not easy to encounter these days. There was no flash whatsoever to the architecture of the place or the people who populated the hilltop property: at Pogonip one would find UC Santa Cruz professors who’d have driven up the club’s single-lane dirt road in their dusty square Volvos. And tanned mothers with degrees from Oberlin in L.L. Bean swimsuits reading Isak Dinesen and drinking Hansen’s natural soda. Kids were brought up the hill to Pogonip and then left to a feral existence in the pool or at the swing set, with their only parental contact all afternoon being a verbal OK to order an It’s-it (a San Francisco cult ice cream sandwich company) from the snack window. Cows often groaned from the fields just beyond the perimeter.

The architecture of the Pogonip clubhouse, a large 1912 shingled craftsman building, was aching with patina and history. As a child one felt the voices of the past in the polished redwood floors, the old carved bar, ladies powder room, and the big uneven stone fireplace in the main clubhouse. The interior of Pogonip was not employed nearly as much as the clubhouse’s porch, which extended out onto a deck that wrapped around the building facing the pool, offering shade under trees in the hottest part of a summer afternoon. A few ancient palm trees as sturdy as the building itself surrounded the primitive dirt parking lot and wild, unkempt land around the property. Set against the golden hills that swept down toward town, and up toward the clusters of redwood forest just beyond the club’s fence, a classical Northern California palette is burned into my mind’s eye: horses in a field of dry golden yellow, constellations of dark green oaks, and a singular squat brown shingled building emanating gravitas like a prize fighter with sloping shoulders.

Pogonip was a place where I observed that class had nothing to do with money. Beach town bohemian sprezzatura abounded at Pogonip. The most elegant of the old ladies at the club, Mrs. Podesta, glided around the pool deck in a fraying straw lifeguard’s hat, a modest black swimsuit and a blue cowboy bandana tucked into her décolletage as protection from the sun. You knew she was elegant because of how she spoke and walked. She was crisp in her diction, but western. She had a wry way that disarmed even little kids: “Easy, honey. Run on the pool deck and you’ll knock your front teeth out.” There were faded red sweatshirts and dads in navy Op shorts and kids in checkered Vans slip-ons. It was John Cheever meets Jack O’Neill. It smelled of Coppertone. I had never felt anywhere more at home than at Pogonip.

In the summer evenings, I would come straight from ballet class in my black leotard, ditch the pink tights, and jump in the pool and not come out until dark. Someone would finally lure me out by bribing me with Pogonip’s famous homemade potato chips, thin and curly and warm. They were served with a kosher hot dog, splayed down the middle and grilled on the big outdoor hibachi and then tucked into a sourdough baguette. Pogonip was the opposite of precious. It was messy, soulful and earthy. I have a near-spiritual memory of being at one of the summer’s weekly Thursday-night BBQs: after dinner, some of us scrappy kids slipped back into the pool after the sun had set. Shielded in the darkness from the critical eyes of others, my plump mother joined me in the pool. The pool, having soaked up the heat from the day’s sun, was embryonically warm. An Olympic sized jacuzzi. My pretty mother’s hair, twisted into a french knot, made it easy for me to wrap my little arms around her neck. We are weightless. She is soft. The enchantment was of being in her soft arms in the soft pool in the soft summer dusk. We swim against the bas relief of the chilly evening mountain air around us that smells of redwood forest and charcoal smoke.

At a certain point in the lurid, Dynastyesque late-eighties, the tenor of the club changed. New families had been admitted whose primary breadwinners were high-powered doctors, lawyers and businessmen from out of town. Their polished cars stood out in the parking lot like painfully white sneakers. They dressed loudly, ordered loudly, and wore jewelry to the pool. I remember thinking that they did not meld with my idea of shabby, dignified Pogonip. It had felt good to belong to something. Especially in a world where everywhere else I felt, in a pronounced way, my own family’s outsider status: an older, unhip mother, a dad who was ill and lived in the hospital, no siblings, a beat-up Honda with a rusted hood. Freckles, braces, glasses. But at Pogonip I had belonged. I felt a kinship with the other kids who, like me, were only allowed to watch PBS on TV and ate Pepperidge Farm chessman cookies and sat in the back seat amongst their folks’ issues of The Paris Review made crunchy by the sun. These new families were of a different culture. They were too glossy for Pogonip. It felt good to scorn them and turn the tables of rejection for once.

At one point in the mid- eighties, Pogonip made it to the big screen as a film location – the clubhouse was transformed into the home of the eccentric grandpa in the cult-favorite teen vampire film The Lost Boys (1987.) They shut the club down for a couple weeks and held auditions for local kids for roles as extras. Once the L.A. people left, we got our summertime headquarters back. Until, that is, the clubhouse was shut down after the 1989 earthquake. The grand old clubhouse withstood the shaking, but was condemned by the city for being too dangerous to rehabilitate. The building and palm trees are still there, overgrown with weeds. The tennis courts have eroded, boasting cracks that house thirty-year-old bushes. It’s still a sight to behold, encircled by a chain link fence: a grand carcass surrounded by hiking trails that sprout wild narcissus.

Pogonip c. 2017 with abandoned tennis courts and historic clubhouse building.

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