BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto City Council will consider leaving California Avenue closed to cars for another year while a consultant studies the future of the street, which has the highest vacancy rate of any business district in the city.
A lot of restaurant owners support the closure because they get more outdoor dining space, while longstanding store owners say the closure is making them lose business.
Council on Nov. 6 will consider:
• extending the street closure beyond its current end date of Dec. 31.
• hiring a consultant to look at different designs for the street and come back with a report next fall.
• how the street will be configured in the meantime.
A coalition of businesses has formed to oppose the closure, particularly in its temporary state.
“It’s gone on long enough, so we need to make a choice one way or another,” said Jessica Roth, co-owner of the Cobblery, the shoe store leading the fight against the closure.
Councilman Greg Tanaka, who is the only council member to vote to open Cal Ave., invited Roth to talk about the closure at a live-streamed meeting on Sunday.
Cal Ave. is a wide street with a lot of asphalt and empty space, and it would be competing with other closed business areas, like Santana Row and Stanford Shopping Center, that have seen a lot of investment, Roth said.
“It’s going to cost a lot for California Avenue to be able to compete on a level playing field,” she said.
In its temporary state, the first two blocks of Cal Ave. are blocked off with orange construction barriers.
The city has put out games, like giant chess and Jenga, and allowed a company to set up a mini golf course. But most of the street remains open and empty, except on Sundays for the farmer’s market, and many of the buildings are vacant.
“What we have is sloppy compared to surrounding communities,” Councilman Pat Burt said at a meeting in March 2022.
Council has voted multiple times to extend the closure but hasn’t made a decision on whether it will be permanent.
Retail spaces around California Avenue are 15% vacant, according to a report on the city’s retail scene.
Cal Ave. has been hurt by workers no longer commuting to the office five days a week.
County Sun, an organic grocery store, will close in December, CEO Scott Otte said on a phone call yesterday.
“People won’t grocery shop here after work, on the one or two days they come in to Palo Alto. They’ll go to their local store,” he said. “If they do come over, they’ll get that one thing, not fill a cart.”
Country Sun has been open for more than 52 years but hasn’t been making money since the pandemic, Otte said. Ten employees will lose their jobs, including Otte, who has worked there since 1996.
“I love this store … It’s hard not to take this personally, like I did something wrong,” he said.
City Manager Ed Shikada said the street redesign won’t have the same impact for everyone.
“There’s an evolution that’s happening that will be more inviting for some types of businesses than others,” he said in March 2022.
Business owners in July sent a thread of council members on both sides of the closure. The owners of Zareen’s, Terun and Italico and the store Gamelandia want to keep the street closed.
“The restaurants really have done the lion’s share of keeping the flame lit on Cal Ave.,” said Berry Hatfield, the co-owner of Gamelandia.
I think all the streets in Palo Alto should be closed. If that’s not possible, anyone from Palo Alto should always wear a mask while driving their cars.
Haha, I see drivers with masks on all the time in Palo Alto. It’s bad enough many still wear masks in public. I want to snatch it off their faces.
Getting violent, aren’t we Alvin? Let them drive around with a mask on their face. It says volumes about them. It’s a fast way of identifying kooks.
Persuasion is always best, but remember these are among the people who yelled at others three years ago to “put on a mask!”, reported you to the police if you walked around maskless, and wouldn’t let you shop at their stores without a mask. If more people were like them, we would still be under lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and God knows what else in 2023. I also believe that normalization and “letting them choose” has long-term mental (and physical) health complications. We may not be able to help the older maskers but the younger generation can still be saved. I don’t want to lose them.
All the PUBLIC STREETS should be open. They were not meant to serve as golf courses or extra real estate for a few restaurants, while other businesses suffer.
These restaurants need to be kicked off the street now or they will start to think they own the street. Once a person starts receiving something for free, they’ll come to expect it in the future. Better to ween them now than wait until later, when it will be much harder.
With all the businesses that have failed on Cal Ave., I’m sure council members are worried they’ll kill these restaurants if they take away their outdoor space. But I think it can be argued that Cal Ave. was dying before the COVID-19 pandemic.