Treasure Cove Almost Wasn't Called Treasure Cove

Walk into Jade Street Park these days and the first thing you notice is the surfacing. It used to be the standard woodchip-and-concrete combination that every Santa Cruz County kid over thirty grew up scraping a knee on. Now it's a run of colorful rubberized ground stretching across five distinct play areas, with a wheelchair-accessible merry-go-round parked where the old metal one used to sit. The playground equipment it replaced dated to 1999, with an expansion added in 2007. Some of it had been standing since before a lot of the parents dropping kids off this fall were out of elementary school themselves.

The city calls it Treasure Cove. What's easy to miss, unless you were paying attention three years ago, is how close it came to being called something else entirely, and what that near-miss says about how this corner of Capitola actually sees itself.

The Name Almost Nobody Expected

Back in 2023, the City of Capitola asked residents to suggest names for the new playground. Seventy suggestions came in. When the City Council voted that September, the decision came down to three finalists: Treasure Cove, Jewel Box Playground, and Lighthouse Landing.

Jewel Box is not a made-up name for the occasion. It's the name Capitola itself uses for the neighborhood where Jade Street Park sits. Naming the playground after its own neighborhood was a natural option, and it made the finalist list. The council chose a name tied to the design theme instead, a marine and shoreline concept that suits a coastal town.

That choice matters more than it looks. A playground named Jewel Box would have read as a neighborhood amenity, something built for the streets immediately around it. Treasure Cove reads as something built for the whole city to come find, which tracks with how the project was actually funded and who it was actually designed for.

Built for Every Kid Who Shows Up

The five zones at Treasure Cove have names too: Climb and Slide, Swing and Sway, Tot Zone, Sensory Zone, and Game Zone. Design firm Verde Design laid out the plan with direct community input, and the through-line across all five zones is that a kid who uses a wheelchair and a kid who doesn't can play at the same structure at the same time rather than being routed to a separate accessible corner of the park.

The wheelchair-accessible merry-go-round is the most visible example. Cozy domes and sensory play structures serve kids who need a quieter, contained space to regulate before jumping back into the swings and spinners. None of this was retrofitted onto old equipment. It replaced gear that had been sitting in that park since before universal design standards existed in their current form, which is the practical reason the 1999 and 2007 equipment had to go rather than get patched again.

What It Actually Cost, and Who Paid

When County Park Friends first started raising money for this project, the whole thing was budgeted at $1.82 million. By the time the city broke ground in October 2025, that number had grown by several times over, because the scope had grown with it. What started as a playground replacement became a playground replacement plus a full renovation of the adjoining Community Center, funded through a stack of sources that rarely show up together on one project.

The state grant came through with backing from Assemblymember Dawn Addis. The private fundraising leg ran for a year and a half and pulled in more than 1,500 individual donors, which is a meaningful number for a single neighborhood park in a city Capitola's size. Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown put it plainly once the project wrapped up:

This project, specifically designed to be welcoming to all, will truly be a Capitola treasure for generations to come.

Four community outreach meetings in the spring of 2023 turned into a September 2023 name vote, which turned into a June 2025 council approval to start construction, which turned into an October 2025 groundbreaking and an August 25, 2026 ribbon cutting. That's roughly three and a half years from the first public meeting to the ribbon, a long timeline for a neighborhood playground, and the reason it took that long is the same reason it turned out this well. Stacking a city contribution, a federal block grant, a state grant, and a grassroots capital campaign takes time to align, but it also means no single funding source had to carry a project this ambitious on its own.

One Park Instead of Two Buildings

The other change at Jade Street Park is easy to miss if you only look at the playground. The Community Center next door got renovated at the same time, and the two projects were deliberately connected with new patios and pathways that link them directly. Before, the Community Center and the playground functioned as two separate things sharing a parking lot. Now a family can walk out of a rec class or a community meeting straight onto the new patio and into the play zones without crossing a driveway.

That's on top of everything Jade Street Park already had going for it. The tennis courts are still there, four of them, still unlit and still open for anyone who shows up with a racquet. The basketball court, the softball field, the soccer field, and the community garden are unchanged. At just under 10 acres, it's one of the larger community parks in Capitola, and it's still open the same hours it always was, 6 a.m. to sunset. What's different now is that the park reads as one connected space built around the Community Center and the playground together, rather than a scattered set of fields with a building on one end.

Treasure Cove sits at 4400 Jade Street, in the Jewel Box neighborhood whose name it politely declined to borrow. If you haven't walked through since the ribbon cutting, the five zones are worth the trip on their own, and the tennis courts will still be there when the kids are done.

If you're curious what else is changing in this part of Capitola, or you just want a local's read on the neighborhood beyond the headlines, Jessyka Sommers is always happy to talk Capitola. Let's Connect.