Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, 1936 Pageant

Mon Jun 25, 11:24 AM ET

This photo shows the 1936 Miss California Pageant on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The boardwalk - an old-fashioned seaside amusement park - celebrates its centennial this year.

Over the years, the boardwalk has seen its share of beauty pageants, movie sets, roller coaster fanatics and every phase of the bathing suit (or lack thereof) you could imagine.

But rides, foods on a stick and pocket-change entertainment are still the main attractions along a strip of shoreline that first hosted a string of bathhouses in the late 1800s.

The Santa Cruz boardwalk itself was born in 1907, and it has survived even as similar attractions - like Toledo Beach on Lake Erie in LaSalle Township, Mich., and the original Myrtle Beach Pavilion in South Carolina - have gone under.

And while Santa Cruz doesn't have 100 mph roller coasters like Six Flags or Cedar Point, or rides themed on movies like Disney and Universal, it still attracts an estimated 3 million visitors a year. In fact, it is considered one of the last remaining gems of its kind.

About 75 miles from San Francisco, Santa Cruz was a logical place for such an attraction in the early 1900s, when trains brought vacationers in from the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, as well as farther afield.

The Giant Dipper roller coaster, a National Historic Landmark, remains the signature ride at the boardwalk. It began thrilling visitors on May 17, 1924 and its 500 feet of twisting track and wooden construction survived the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.