In 1981, a young Steve Wozniak nearly wrecked his Beechcraft Bonanza taking off from a general aviation airstrip in Scotts Valley. The strip is still there. It just doesn't have planes on it anymore. Somewhere along the way, that patch of open grass off Kings Village Road became Skypark, and Skypark became the only place in town big enough to hold the whole city at once.
If you've lived here more than a summer, you already knew Skypark hosts things. What you may not have connected is how much of Scotts Valley's actual civic life runs through that one field, and how little of it happens on the commercial strip most people would point to if you asked where downtown is. Scotts Valley Drive has restaurants. Victor Square has a brewery and a Cambodian place with a cult following. But when the town needs to gather as a town, it doesn't walk to a plaza. It drives to a former runway.
The Land Santa Cruz Almost Took
The reason Skypark carries this weight goes back to the fight that created Scotts Valley as a city in the first place. In 1960, this was still unincorporated mountain territory, and outside interests had plans for it: a cemetery near Santa's Village, a truck stop across the way, and the City of Santa Cruz moving to annex Skypark Airport itself. Neighbors packed a county planning commission meeting to object, and the pushback grew into the Scotts Valley Property Owners Association, with Agnes Knox Lewis stepping up as its first chairperson at a time when few women held that kind of public role. Voters approved incorporation on April 14, 1964, and after nearly two years of legal delays, Scotts Valley became a city on August 2, 1966, financed by a $20,000 loan from Santa Cruz County Bank.
The airport that Santa Cruz once tried to claim is the same ground the city returned to this August for its 60th birthday.
"The 50th anniversary of the city was really meaningful to everyone; you could feel the energy, and people were excited to participate," Mayor Donna Lind said ahead of this year's celebration. "I'm feeling that same level of support for our 60th."
The weeklong 60th anniversary kicked off Sunday, August 2, 2026, at Skypark with a program called Share Your Story, where residents told three to five minute memories of the place, from Santa's Village to the airport itself, before the crowd sang happy birthday and shared dessert. A business scavenger hunt ran August 7 through 9, sending shoppers around town for a selfie-and-social-post raffle tied to limited edition 60th anniversary merchandise.
One Field, Four Different Reasons to Show Up
What makes Skypark different from a typical city park is the range of things it's asked to hold. This isn't one recurring event that repeats. It's several unrelated occasions that all landed on the same acreage because nowhere else in town has the room.
Food Truck Fridays run there roughly monthly from spring through fall, drawing trucks like Tacos el Jesse, Kuki's Bowls, Pana, and Taquizas Gabriel, with proceeds from the beer and wine garden going to the Scotts Valley Educational Foundation. The Scotts Valley Art, Wine and Beer Festival took over the same grass August 15 and 16 this year, free admission, more than 100 artists, a Saturday classic car show called Cops N' Rodders, and a Sunday Dog Day competition with categories running from Best Costume to Fastest Fetcher. The Multicultural Fair, now in its fifth year and organized largely by volunteers and Scotts Valley Unified students and parents, brings cultural booths, an international fashion show, and student art to the same field every fall. None of these events share an organizer, a sponsor, or even a season in common. They share a location because Skypark is the one lot in Scotts Valley with enough open ground to fit a crowd.
What's Actually Left on the Skypark Calendar This Fall
If you're wondering what's still ahead this year, here's what's confirmed:
- Friday, September 19 — the next Food Truck Friday at Skypark, with live music and the Educational Foundation's beer and wine garden
- Saturday, October 3 — the 5th Annual Scotts Valley Multicultural Fair, free admission, cultural booths and performances organized by Scotts Valley schools and community volunteers
- Friday, October 24 — the final Food Truck Friday of the 2026 season, with a Halloween theme
Why the Farmers Market Went the Other Way
There's one recurring gathering that pointedly did not follow the pattern, and the exception is instructive. The Scotts Valley Farmers' Market spent years at the Boys and Girls Club site, but a planned renovation there pushed organizers to find a new home this year. Rather than move to Skypark, the market relocated in June 2026 to Graham Plaza at 219 Mount Hermon Road, a paved lot the Scotts Valley City Council approved that May.
The difference is functional, not sentimental. A farmers market needs pavement for tents, tables, and vendor trucks to set up and break down every Saturday morning, not open turf. Skypark's advantage, an unobstructed grass field, is exactly what a weekly produce market doesn't need and exactly what a beer festival, a birthday bash, or a multicultural fair does. The city's produce vendors, among them Companion Bakeshop, Beckmann's, Adorable French Bakery, Hidden Fortress Coffee, Empanadas La Linda, El Salchichero, and Freckles Pickles, now set up every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon through Thanksgiving at Graham Plaza instead. It's the one weekly gathering in town that didn't need Skypark, and that's precisely because it needed something Skypark isn't built for.
The Restaurants Orbit. The Field Anchors.
Scotts Valley's food and drink scene isn't clustered into a single walkable block the way some neighboring towns are. It's scattered across a handful of nodes, and each one has its own personality. Victor Square, off Highway 17's Granite Creek Road exit, holds a three-restaurant operation from local owner Jason Revino: Jia Tella's, a Cambodian restaurant he opened in 2007 with a menu built around fresh herbs and complex curries, JT's Next Door, a whiskey and craft beer sports bar he added two years later, and JT's Two Doors, a mountain bike themed pub serving Italian style pizza and gelato. Steel Bonnet Brewing Company, a family run taproom from British owners Donald and Sue, sits nearby in the same square, and it's become the natural stop for riders coming down off the Glenwood Open Space Preserve trails, more than seven miles of path the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County built and maintains on land the city protected back in 2003.
Elsewhere in town, Redwood Sandwich Co. has been serving farmers-market-fresh sandwiches on Scotts Valley Drive since 2015. Laughing Monk Brewing sits at the literal edge of Skypark, close enough that its beer garden becomes part of whatever event is happening on the grass that weekend. Adorable French Bakery, long known only as a farmers market vendor, now has its own patio under an oak canopy. Ambrosia Bistro brings Indian food with sister locations in Aptos, Los Gatos, and Monterey. Penny Ice Creamery and the furniture shop HOME by Zinnia's round out the stretch near the park, and 1440 Multiversity, with its Teaching Kitchen surrounded by redwoods, gives the town a wellness and food-education venue unlike anything else in the county.
None of these places sit close enough together to form a plaza on their own. What connects them isn't foot traffic between storefronts. It's that residents from every one of these pockets end up standing on the same field a few times a year, whether they came for a taco truck, a wine glass, or their kid's turn in the Multicultural Fair fashion show.
That's the part worth sitting with. Scotts Valley never built a downtown in the conventional sense, a strip you can stroll from bakery to bookstore to bar. It built something else: a single shared lawn that the city almost lost to annexation sixty years ago, and now returns to, on purpose, every time it wants to prove it's still one town.
If you're already living here, you don't need a reason to head to Skypark this month. But if you're the kind of person who reads a piece like this because you're starting to think about what your own corner of Scotts Valley might be worth, or whether it's time to move closer to that field yourself, The Portola Group knows this town well enough to talk it through. Get your instant home valuation whenever you're ready to see where you stand.
