Hundreds of Edwardian bathers crowd the glistening sand of Santa Cruz beach in this vivid early color lithograph — children splashing in the shallows, women in long skirts promenading at the tide line, while behind them the ornate Casino and Sea Beach Hotel dominate the beachfront with their red and gold domes, arched colonnades, and a forest of American flags snapping in the Pacific breeze. The Casino (built 1906, replacing one destroyed in the 1906 earthquake aftershocks) was the social heart of the Monterey Bay resort scene before the present Boardwalk structures supplanted it in the 1910s–20s; this postcard is therefore a rare visual document of a lost building. Postmarked Santa Cruz, September 1, 1910, at 7:30 AM, the card was sent to Miss Linda Brink at 624 Wallerstrasse [sic], San Francisco — a young woman whose German-inflected street address hints at the city's still-vibrant immigrant communities five years after the Great Earthquake. The handwritten message, in two hands and mixing German and English phrases, fills every margin.