When It Was Shiny & New: The Purissima House

Gone now—but here’s the Purissima House–saloon, restaurant, overnight rooms–south of Half Moon Bay.

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The Purissima House was the business anchor for the potato-growing town of Purissima, a place that competed with Half Moon Bay for political power. When a blight wiped out the crops, the economy collapsed and Purissima finally turned into a ghost town. At the end of Prohibition, when the buildings fell into disuse, they vanished from the country landscape. Today you’d be lucky to find any remnants of the past (other than a very cool and hard-to-find “antique” cemetery).