Walk California Avenue on any Sunday morning and the farmers market is still doing what it has done since long before anyone argued about parklets: stone fruit at the El Camino end, coffee somewhere in the middle, a crowd that shows up rain or shine because the market has run every week, year-round, since before the street itself changed shape. That routine has outlasted a pandemic-era closure, years of streetscape redesigns, and a producer's very public firing.
Everything around the market, though, spent the better part of six years being called temporary. This is the summer that stopped being true.
Five Years of Orange Barriers
California Avenue closed to cars in June 2020, part of the wave of pandemic-era street closures that cities up and down the state adopted for social distancing. Most of those closures reverted within a year or two. Palo Alto's did not. The stretch between El Camino Real and Birch Street stayed car-free, and city leaders started referring to it as the town's "second downtown," a label that implied permanence while the infrastructure underneath it stayed deliberately provisional. The orange plastic barriers marking the closure's edges stood for years before the city started repaving the road and installing planters in February 2025, nearly five years after the closure began. Even then, the upgrade was incomplete. Longtime restaurant owner Michael Ekwall of La Bodeguita del Medio told the council he found it hard to congratulate the city for putting up planters after five years, and by his account the orange barriers stayed standing right alongside them.
Messy as it was, the shift from barriers to planters was still the first real sign that the city intended to stop treating the closure as a pilot program. The years in between were not gentle. California Avenue lost Antonio's Nuthouse and Printer's Café, and came close to losing Country Sun, the small grocery that anchors the block, before things turned.
A Parklet Standard, Finally
The city's original activation plan would have swept away the improvised parklets entirely in favor of open tables shaded by umbrellas. Restaurant owners pushed back hard. Palo Alto has a rainy season, and nobody sits outside through it without a roof. Zareen's head of operations, Sahlik Khan, put the objection to the council plainly.
"Either it's covered or it's not," Khan said. "If the problem is to solve for a rainy day and we're not solving for a rainy day, what are we doing here?"
Khan said Zareen's had already been planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a semi-permanent enclosure before city staff steered him toward something quicker and cheaper instead.
The pushback worked. On June 1, 2026, the City Council approved three parklet designs for the car-free stretch, and two of them are roofed after all: a cabana with a sloped roof and overhangs, and a pergola with a flat roof. Around the same time, the council resolved the parallel bike lane debate, dropping an earlier two-way bike lane concept in favor of thermoplastic traffic-calming bands meant to slow cyclists without formalizing a dedicated lane.
None of this reflects opposition to the closure itself. By Khan's own account, foot traffic has "increased tremendously since the closure," with visitors "enjoying the district as a destination rather than simply passing through." The disagreement was always about execution, not direction.
The Concert Series That Outgrew Its Founder
California Avenue's live music history is its own small case study in the same pattern. The 3rdThursday series launched in May 2023, produced independently by Carol Garsten, with the city council later allocating about $40,000 a year to help fund it. It built a loyal following before the city abruptly ended its relationship with Garsten in October 2025 amid a dispute over petitions and producer competence that played out publicly in Palo Alto Online's comments section.
Seven months later, the city launched its own version. Thursday Live on Cal Ave debuted May 28, 2026, with a ribbon cutting and a full season of themed nights running through Halloween.
| Date | Theme |
|---|---|
| May 28 | Inaugural night, ribbon-cutting |
| June 25 | A Taste of Cal Ave, world music |
| July 30 | Wine walk |
| Aug. 27 | Wellness and end of summer |
| Sept. 24 | Harvest festival with jazz |
| Oct. 31 | Halloween and Oktoberfest |
As of this writing, the series has already run its June world music night and July's wine walk. The wellness event on Aug. 27 is the next one on the calendar, with harvest and Halloween nights still ahead this fall.
The shift from an independent producer's grassroots series to a city-run calendar with an actual budget line is a small but real signal. A one-off event needs a champion. A recurring line item needs a bureaucracy willing to keep funding it, which is a different kind of commitment.
Storefronts That Sat Dark
Investment tends to follow certainty, and California Avenue's leasing numbers back that up. Recent city figures show Cal Ave's retail vacancy rate roughly halved over the course of 2025, dropping to about 5.4 percent from around 10 percent the year before. University Avenue improved too, but from a much deeper hole, moving from a decade-high vacancy near 17.4 percent at the start of 2024 down to about 13.4 percent by 2025, still more than double Cal Ave's rate.
That gap shows up on the ground. Croissanté, a French bakery with existing locations in Santa Clara and Los Gatos, is taking over 321 California Ave, the space long occupied by the shuttered Antonio's Nuthouse. Owner Sean Kang has been candid that the project hit "a huge delay," and he's now targeting a late 2026 opening, a reminder that even a hot leasing market doesn't make buildout timelines move faster.
A few blocks off Cal Ave proper, on Page Mill Road, The Rendezvous opened in June 2026 in a space that carries real history for the neighborhood. Restaurateur Giuseppe Carrubba and chef Maxime Roucoule, longtime friends who both have roots on Cal Ave, built the bistro and wine bar as something of a reunion with Pastis, the French restaurant that anchored the avenue for more than a decade before closing in 2022. Roucoule brought back the escargot, mussels, and pâté that regulars remembered, paired with a wine list split roughly 40 percent French, 30 percent Californian, and 30 percent Italian. Roucoule described the format simply.
"Usually a wine bar is boring," he said, "because there's no food."
Just off Cal Ave in the former TOMO Tea House space, the team behind Los Altos's Hiroshi opened Rikyu, a matcha and coffee cafe that also serves Japanese sandos. Around the corner on University, meanwhile, Bistro Demiya and Yutori are filling out that strip's own comeback, and La Corneta's fifth location opened on University Avenue just before Cinco de Mayo this year. Two commercial strips, walking distance apart, are filling up on different timelines and for different reasons. Cal Ave is closing gaps that sat empty for years. University is recovering from a much deeper vacancy hole and still has more ground to make up.
The Friction Nobody Designed For
None of this has been friction-free, and residents living on the street are the ones flagging it loudest. Around the same time the parklet standards were finalized, longtime Cal Ave resident Todd Burke raised the growing presence of motorized bikes on the car-free stretch.
"They're obnoxiously fast and super dangerous," Burke said.
Michael and Lara Ekwall, the co-owners of La Bodeguita del Medio, made a related point in writing to the council: the mix of bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, pedestrians, and delivery traffic has at times created what they called "congested, confusing, and unsafe conditions" on a street that was supposed to feel like a relaxed pedestrian environment. It's a fair complaint. A car-free street solves one kind of hazard and, without careful management, can quietly introduce another.
The Constant Underneath All of It
The parklets, the concert series, the restaurant leases, all of it has been renegotiated, redesigned, or rebuilt at least once since 2020. The Sunday farmers market has not. It ran through the closure debates, through the barrier-to-planter swap, through 3rdThursday's rise and firing, through every restaurant that opened and every one that didn't make it. It is the one piece of California Avenue that never needed a design standard to prove it was staying.
That's worth knowing if you live nearby and have been wondering whether any of this summer's changes will stick. The market answers that question just by showing up every week. The rest of the street is finally starting to act like it plans to do the same.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address on or near Cal Ave, Dana Rae Stone knows this stretch of Palo Alto block by block. Let's talk about your home.
