Cal Ave Was Always "Temporary." This Summer, the City Made It Permanent.

Walk California Avenue on a Sunday morning and the block still smells the way it always has: stone fruit at the El Camino end, coffee somewhere in the middle, someone's cello case propped against a stall. The California Avenue Farmers Market has run every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 400 California Avenue for years, and nothing about that rhythm has changed.

What has changed is everything sitting under that rhythm. Since the pandemic, the stretch of Cal Ave between El Camino Real and Birch Street operated on a plan that was never actually a plan. It was a closure extended one quarter at a time, with parklets built by restaurants who had no permanent design standard to build toward and a bike lane nobody could agree on. This year, in the space of about three months, the city resolved almost all of it. The street didn't get louder or busier by accident. It got permanent, on purpose, on a specific set of dates you can actually check.

Years of "Temporary"

When restaurants along Cal Ave built their first outdoor dining structures early in the pandemic, there were no rules to follow because there was no time to write any. Some parklets stayed small: a couple of tables, a planter. Others grew into wood-framed rooms that ran the length of a storefront. The city let the closure continue year after year because surveys kept showing residents liked it, but the underlying question of what a legal, permanent parklet on Cal Ave was supposed to look like sat unresolved for most of that time. In January 2026, the city was still describing the redesign effort as behind schedule, citing unresolved conflicts with gas utility infrastructure under the street and a public safety review that hadn't wrapped.

The car closure itself became permanent first. The City Council voted last March to make Cal Ave's car-free status permanent rather than renew it on another short-term extension, adding planters, bollards and colored pavement to the stretch. The parklets sitting on top of that permanent closure took a few more months to catch up.

That changed on June 1.

What the City Actually Decided

The City Council signed off on new design standards for Cal Ave parklets that day, ending the run of temporary extensions for good. Three structure types are now approved for the car-free stretch: a cabana with a sloped roof and overhangs, a pergola with a flat roof, and a roofless option for restaurants that want it. The earlier proposal, which would have swept away roofed parklets entirely in favor of open tables and umbrellas, died months earlier after restaurant owners pointed out that Palo Alto has actual weather and diners don't sit outside in it without cover.

The same meeting settled the bike question that had stalled the whole plan. Rather than build a dedicated bike lane down the center of the pedestrian zone, the city opted for thermoplastic bands laid across the pavement, a low-tech way to slow cyclists down without banning them outright. Vice Mayor Greer Stone, who has pushed the parklet program through years of contentious meetings, summed up the shift plainly:

"Through community engagement with residents, customers and businesses, I think we've found a nice middle ground that is going to activate Palo Alto in ways we haven't seen in the past."

Four days earlier, on May 28, the city had already inaugurated something new: Thursday Live, a free monthly concert series on Cal Ave that runs through September. Maico Campilongo, who owns Terun, played that first evening while the sound carried past Joanie's Café. Two more dates followed this summer: a Wine Walk on July 30 and a wellness-themed close to the season on August 27.

The Restaurants Betting on Permanent

The restaurant owners who spoke up loudest in favor of the new parklet rules were the ones with the most invested in the street staying exactly as car-free as it is now. Sahlik Khan, who runs operations for Zareen's, told the council that foot traffic has increased tremendously since the closure and that people are lingering longer rather than passing through. Owners of Terun and iTalico said the same. These are three of Cal Ave's largest restaurants, and none of them wanted to go back to cars.

Behind that support is a new bakery on the way. Croissanté, a French bakery with existing locations in Santa Clara and Los Gatos, is taking over 321 California Avenue, the former Antonio's Nut House space that has sat dark long enough that regulars mostly stopped checking. Owner Sean Kang is targeting a late 2026 opening after a significant delay.

Not every new opening this summer belongs to Cal Ave itself, and the distinction matters if you're deciding where to walk. A few minutes away on Page Mill Road, The Rendezvous opened as a French-Italian bistro and wine bar under restaurateur Giuseppe Carrubba and chef Maxime Roucoule, a different kind of night out than anything currently sitting inside a parklet. Downtown, on Lytton Avenue, two more concepts landed in spaces that had been vacant for a while: Rikyu, a matcha cafe from the team behind Los Altos omakase restaurant Hiroshi, moved into the old TOMO Tea House footprint, and Bistro Demiya took the former Poke One space with a menu built around yoshoku, Western dishes filtered through a Japanese kitchen. Both are downtown restaurants, not Cal Ave restaurants, and treating them as the same story flattens what's actually two different neighborhoods each working through their own version of change.

The Vacancy Number Actually Worth Knowing

Here's the figure that explains why restaurant owners fought so hard for permanent rules rather than another round of temporary ones. California Avenue's retail vacancy rate dropped to 5.4% in 2025, down from 10% the year before, according to city spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor. University Avenue improved too, falling to 13.4% in 2025 from a decade-high 17.4% at the start of 2024, but Cal Ave's rate is now less than half of University's, and it fell almost twice as fast in percentage terms.

That gap is worth sitting with. University Avenue is the bigger, more famous strip, home to the Stanford Theater and the kind of Saturday-night crowd that lines up for ice cream at Salt & Straw. Cal Ave has spent most of the last decade being described as the quieter, neighborhood-serving alternative. The vacancy numbers now suggest the opposite is happening: empty storefronts are disappearing from the smaller street faster than from the bigger one. If there's a space on Cal Ave you've been meaning to check out before it changes hands again, the math says don't wait too long. Turnover here is no longer slow.

Your Actual Summer Calendar

For residents who want the practical version, here's what's running through the rest of the season:

• California Avenue Farmers Market, every Sunday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at 400 California Avenue, year-round
• Thursday Live concerts, monthly through September, launched May 28 with Terun's Maico Campilongo performing
• Wine Walk, held July 30 from 5 to 8 p.m.
• End-of-summer wellness event, held August 27

None of this requires planning around road closures or checking whether the block is drivable that day. It hasn't been drivable between El Camino Real and Birch Street for years, and as of this June, that's no longer a temporary condition either.

What's Still Being Decided

If you've noticed more talk of tall buildings at council meetings, or construction fencing that wasn't there last year, the housing side of Cal Ave's story explains it. A new state law, Senate Bill 79, took effect statewide on July 1 and allows denser housing near Caltrain stations. Palo Alto's own restrictions on the law didn't take effect until July 16, leaving a two-week window during which nine developers filed applications for a combined 384 new homes near the downtown and California Avenue Caltrain stations. One of those, at 414 California Avenue on the former Bank of the West site, proposes 39 apartments across six stories with restaurant and retail space on the ground floor.

Separately, and predating SB 79, Redco Development has been negotiating a three-tower project at 156 California Avenue, the site of the current Mollie Stone's Market. The developer agreed to reduce its tallest tower from 17 stories to 14 after months of pushback from the city, with two additional 12-story buildings alongside it. None of this is finalized, and construction on either site would take years to materialize. But it's the piece of the Cal Ave story that explains why "temporary" is ending on the commercial side of the street at the same time something much bigger is just getting started underneath it.

The Street That Stopped Waiting

Cal Ave spent years being described as temporary because, technically, it was. The parklets ran on emergency extensions. The bike lane was undecided. The concerts didn't exist yet. This year closed most of those open questions within the space of a few months, and the vacancy numbers suggest the street is filling in faster than it's emptying out. Whatever California Avenue becomes over the next few years, the version that existed in 2019, all cars and open curb, isn't coming back. The version that exists now, permanent parklets and a Sunday market that hasn't budged, is the one worth walking.

For more on what makes this stretch of Palo Alto tick, our Palo Alto neighborhood guide rounds up the surrounding streets, schools, and daily-life details residents ask about most. And if you're weighing a move in or around this corridor and want a read on how these changes might affect timing or value, David Bergman is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.