For seventeen summers, if you wanted to know where Scotts Valley gathered on a given weekend, the answer was the same short stretch of Kings Village Road. The Farmers' Market set up outside the Scotts Valley Community Center on Saturday mornings. Skypark, the old airstrip turned recreation field one address over, hosted Food Truck Friday most evenings the following week. A resident could do a full loop of the town's social calendar without changing which road they parked on.
That changed this year. In June, the market packed up its stands and moved half a mile away, to a parking lot on Mount Hermon Road most people had never thought of as a gathering place. Skypark stayed put. For the first time in the market's history, the two habits that used to share a street now live on different ones, and residents who show up on autopilot are finding an empty lot where their Saturday used to start.
Same Street, Different Errands
The old market address was 360 Kings Village Drive. Skypark's address is 361. That's not a coincidence of memory. It's the actual civic address book: the Community Center and the recreation field sit essentially across from each other, and for as long as the market has operated there, Saturday morning and Friday evening ran on the same short block.
The market itself dates to 2009, when it launched as a partnership with the city and grew into what its organizers call a seasonal highlight for the community. Skypark's Food Truck Friday, run separately by Food Trucks A Go Go, built its own following on the same stretch, drawing families for live music, a beer and wine garden benefiting local schools, and face painting most Fridays from spring through October. Two different organizers, two different events, one shared road. Locals didn't need a map. They needed a Saturday and a Friday.
Why One Anchor Moved and the Other Didn't
The market's move traces back to a renovation. The Boys and Girls Club, which shares the Community Center site, is expanding, and that construction pushed the market to look for a new home. Nicole Zahm, who manages the market for Santa Cruz Community Farmers' Markets, said as much when the move was announced, describing the club's impending work as the push that sent organizers looking for a new spot.
What made the new spot stick wasn't just necessity. It was the businesses already on Mount Hermon Road who invited the market in. Zahm framed it as a partnership from the start, telling the Press Banner that local businesses embraced the possibility of relocating there. The market didn't get displaced into a random lot. It got recruited into one.
Skypark, meanwhile, kept its role as the town's default outdoor room, and this year gave it an extra reason to matter. In August, Scotts Valley marked 60 years since its 1966 incorporation with a weeklong celebration anchored at Skypark, including a storytelling program where residents shared memories spanning six decades, from Santa's Village to the old airport itself. Mayor Donna Lind led the celebration, and the history behind it traces back further, to a 1960s civic fight led in part by local organizer Agnes Knox Lewis over a proposed cemetery and a truck stop that residents didn't want built into the middle of their town. Skypark isn't just where the food trucks happen to park. It's the site the city itself chose when it wanted to tell its own origin story.
What Mount Hermon Road Already Had Going For It
The market's new corner of town wasn't empty ground before June. Mount Hermon Road already carries Heavenly Roadside Cafe, a sushi counter tucked into a strip mall that most people would drive past without a second look, until they notice the fossilized shark teeth set into the sidewalk out front. It's the kind of detail that turns a quick stop into a story you tell the next person who asks where to eat in town.
That instinct, small independent businesses shaping where people choose to linger, isn't new to Scotts Valley. Across town near the Highway 17 Granite Creek Road exit, Victor Square has spent nearly two decades building its own gravitational pull around Jia Tella's, a Cambodian restaurant local restaurateur Jason Revino opened in 2007, which he later expanded into JT's Next Door and JT's Two Doors. Revino built a three-restaurant cluster out of one idea: that a place people already trust for good food will keep pulling them back, block after block. Mount Hermon Road's businesses made the same bet on the Farmers' Market, and so far it looks like the right one.
The Practical Version: What Changes for Your Saturday
If you're used to the old routine, here's what's different starting this fall. The market now runs every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon at Graham Plaza's upper parking lot, 219 Mount Hermon Road, and organizers have confirmed it will continue on that schedule through Thanksgiving. The Market Match program is still in place, so CalFresh and EBT shoppers still get their benefits matched dollar for dollar on fresh produce.
A few dates worth marking down as the season turns:
- Saturdays through Thanksgiving: Farmers' Market, 8 a.m. to noon, Graham Plaza, 219 Mount Hermon Road
- October 24: the last Food Truck Friday of the year at Skypark, with costumes encouraged, a pumpkin patch from Scotts Valley Fire, and a Howl-o-Ween dog costume contest hosted by Parks and Rec
- Ongoing through October: the SVEF Beer & Wine Garden at Food Truck Friday, with proceeds supporting Scotts Valley's public schools
The Two Addresses to Remember
None of this is a story about loss. The market didn't shrink or fade, it traded one shared block for a corner of town that wanted it, and Skypark didn't lose relevance, it spent the summer proving it's still where the city gathers when the occasion actually matters. What changed is simpler and, for anyone who's lived here a while, a little more disorienting: the habit of assuming Saturday and Friday happen in the same place no longer holds.
For residents, that just means updating a mental map that's stayed the same for seventeen years. For anyone getting to know Scotts Valley for the first time, it's a small but useful lesson in how this town actually works. The people who run its markets and its event calendars pay close attention to where the town is already leaning, and they're willing to move to meet it.
Margaret Julien has spent more than three decades paying attention to exactly this kind of shift across Santa Cruz County, the quiet moves that tell you more about a place than any listing photo can. If you're weighing a change of your own and want a read on a neighborhood that goes beyond the obvious, Margaret Julien would welcome the conversation.
