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Bruce Fukuji has what appears to be an impossible task: bringing order and cohesion to California Ave., an eclectic commercial strip that is famous for its boozy past, unsteady present and uncertain future.
Fukuji, an urban architect who recently joined the office of City Manager Ed Shikada, is leading the effort to “activate” the car-free portion of California Avenue, between El Camino and Birch Street. The city’s vision for the strip, which is often thought of as Palo Alto’s “second downtown,” has been in flux since June 2020, when city leaders responded to pandemic-era social-distancing directives by closing it to cars.
Since then, things have moved both too quickly and too slowly. Cal Ave. has lost numerous long-time businesses, including Antonio’s Nuthouse and Printers Café, and it came close to losing Country Sun, a supermarket at the heart of the strip. The street has become a constellation of tents, big and small and in different shapes and colors. There are new music programs, new development proposals for large residential complexes and new businesses like California Café and, as of next month, Mini Cat Town.
Yet when it comes to big improvements, the pace has been languid and, to many merchants, frustrating. Occasionally derided as “Skid Row” or “tent-city,” California Avenue maintains much of its pandemic-era sense of eclectic disarray. This includes the plastic orange barriers that are normally associated with construction zones, but which for the past five years have served as gateways to car-free Cal Ave. For those frustrated with the pace of progress, the orange barriers have become a running joke, albeit one that gets less funny with every month that they remain in place.
“What we’re trying to do is end the temporary aura,” Fukuji said during a May 21 public meeting in front of the City Council’s Retail Committee, which was discussing his proposal to “activate” California Avenue.
The goal of the exercise is to boost local businesses, activate the street through community events and improve the aesthetics of the car-free strip.
Under a proposal that the City Council will consider on June 17, Cal Ave. would have designated “activation spaces” that according to the new guidelines will create “opportunities for flexible, creative, and visually cohesive commercial use of the street.”
While the city is not forcing businesses to adopt any particular design for their outdoor dining areas, it is creating new requirements and prohibitions. The proposed design book that Fukuji presented to the Retail Committee contains a menu of design elements that restaurants are welcome to integrate into their new dining areas, which include umbrellas, sidewalls and railings of various specifications. All outdoor dining areas will be required to have planters that define clear boundaries, as well as the option of installing railings and sidewalls to further carve out their fiefdoms. Each dining area will be required to have trash and recycling areas and code-compliant electrical and heating fixtures, somewhat that has not been religiously enforced.
If the council adopts the new design rules, the look and feel of Cal Ave. will instantly and markedly change. Pop-up tents, which today stand out as a defining (and often derided) feature of Cal Ave. would no longer be allowed. Outdoor dining areas would no longer be permitted to have permanent wood-framed roof structures or umbrellas that extend into the street or the sidewalk. Corrugated plastic and metal roofs would also now be illegal.
Fukuji said that the decision to ban the tents was driven by both aesthetic and safety issues. During evening trips to Cal Ave., he has seen gas heaters operating inside closed off tents, a setup that he said “could’ve killed all the people eating there if it wasn’t well taken care of.”
Can our district actually survive the city’s inability to execute a plan?
Lara Ekwall, co-ownder of la bodeguita del medio
The new rules also ban branding on umbrellas, awnings or painted murals within activation areas or pedestrian zones. Businesses will, however, be allowed to feature their brands on sandwich boards and on the boundary elements of their dining enclosures.
The City Council plans to discuss and potentially approve these guidelines on June 17, its final meeting before the summer break. If it follows the recommendation of its Retail Committee and votes to adopt them, Cal Ave. would undergo yet another transformation.
A key goal is to reimagine how the street is used. Under Fukuji’s plan, the public right-of-way would now be divided into zones, each with its own set of allowed amenities and activities. Each side of the street would have a “frontage zone” right next to buildings that serves an extension of the businesses, a cleared-off 8-foot “pedestrian zone” near the buildings; a “curbside” zone that would accommodate street furniture, trees, lighting and bike parking; and an “activity” zone, with dining tables, retail displays and other public activities. The roadway would be the “access” zone for bicycles, pedestrians, in some cases, emergency vehicles and service vehicles.
The plan received a boost at the May 21 meeting when the Retail Committee recommended approving it.
“What I really like is that we are switching from what was once a temporarily closed-off street to the creation of an open and flexible pedestrian mall,” said Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims, who serves on the Retail Committee. “If we were starting from scratch it would be easier, but instead there are these existing constraints imposed by the built environment.”
MIXED REACTION
Not everyone is stoked about the changes. The council’s recent decision to permanently close Cal Ave. to cars proved to be contentious on the strip, with many business owners urging the council to retain car access, even if just in one direction. A petition in 2023 by a group of merchants and restaurant owners to reopen Cal Ave. to traffic failed to sway the council. Today, some of the business owners on the losing end of that debate have little faith that the council will fully consider their feedback on future improvements.
Michael and Lara Ekwall, owners of the Cuban restaurant La Bodeguita de Medio, expressed frustration with the city’s years of indecision when it comes to Cal Ave. improvements. Council members had repeatedly approved one-year extensions to car-free status before opting to make it permanent. Even with the decision now made, business owners like the Ekwalls are unhappy with how long it’s taking Palo Alto to clean up the clutter at the entrances to the car-free district and to install wayfinding signage and other needed amenities.
“We survived 9/11, the Dotcom Bust, the recession and the pandemic,” Lara Ekwall said. “Can our district actually survive the city’s inability to execute a plan?”
Both have become somewhat disillusioned with the city’s shifting plans and plodding pace over the past year.. Lara Ekwall said she has become embarrassed by the city’s inability to make Cal Ave. safe, welcoming and attractive.
In April, the city finally made some streetscape enhancement, hiring contractors to repave portions of Cal Ave., paint a green bike path and install planters near the entrances. But the planters, which are meant to function as a barricade, have their own problems, Ekwall said.
“It looks like a playground,” Lara Ekwall said. “You watch kids run around them at the farmer’s market.”
And even with the planters in place, the orange barriers remain, much to the consternation of Michael Ekwall. Even after five years of closure, there still are no clear or prominent signs directing visitors to Cal Ave. or to parking areas on Cambridge Avenue and Sherman Avenue.
“I find it difficult to congratulate the city for putting up planters after five years,” Michael Ekwall said.
What I really like is that we are switching from what was once a temporarily closed-off street to the creation of an open and flexible pedestrian mall.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, palo alto city council member
Michael and Lara aren’t big fans of the tents. Creating a consistent, uniform look makes a lot of sense on Cal Ave., he said. But they also contend that the Fukuji plan misses the mark. Allowing tables with umbrellas but banning more extensive enclosures will make the dining areas fairly effectively useless when the weather turns cold.
“I think the limitations that they’re presenting don’t make sense for year-round dining,” he said.
Sahlik Khan, chief operating officer of Zareen’s, a popular Pakistani restaurant on Cal Ave., agrees. Over the course of the car-free debate, Khan and Ekwall were on opposite sides, with Khan joining the owners of Terun and Italica in championing the street’s closure to cars and Ekwall advocating for some car access. Neither, however, is a fan of the umbrella requirement.
While Khan lauded the city for putting in a lot of work into the new design standard, he suggested that the rules are too prescriptive and, in some ways, infeasible. One of the goals of the project is to help restaurants during the rainy and winter season. Umbrellas will not suffice.
“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 has been planning to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into building a semi-permanent enclosure but is now being encouraged to do something much quicker and cheaper. The city, he said, should be supporting restaurants like Terun and Italico that bring in thousands of people to California Avenue, not dictating the designs or making things too uniform.
“Why would you contain them? Why would you restrict them? Why would you make it so cookie-cutter? The uniqueness is what makes California Avenue,” he said.
That said, Khan said he would be fine with the city requiring certain design guidelines if these designs actually worked when it comes to protecting diners from bad weather. The options in the Fukuji plan don’t do that, he said.
“For me it’s just mindboggling that we wouldn’t support the businesses who are carrying the street, that are looking to reinvest in the community on the street. And they are saying, ‘No, we’re going to cap you. We’re going to hold you back.’”
TO BIKE OR NOT TO BIKE?
Another unresolved and hotly debated issue is the city’s transportation plan for Cal Ave. A critical question that the city has yet to answer is: Should the city encourage or deter biking on Cal Ave.?
So far, city officials have tried to have it both ways. The city’s updated Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Plan, which is set to be adopted later this year, envisions dozens of new projects, including protected bike lanes on car-free California Avenue. In Fukuji’s scheme, bikes are allowed in the “access” zone in the middle of the road. Not everyone, however, likes the idea of sending cyclists down the middle of a street that is also designated for dining, music performances and leisurely strolling.
Lythcott-Haims, who serves on the Retail Committee, suggested this week that the city may be on a “collision course” between the recommendations of the new bike plan for a more robust bike network and her committee’s work on designing a pedestrian promenade.
She pointed at the recent improvements on Cal Ave., including planters and bollards, which aim to encourage a slower pace and a more pedestrian vibe.
“We have concerns about cyclists piercing through the middle of that and creating a difficult situation for people of all ages, from seniors to young children and everybody in between,” Lythcott-Haims said at the June 2 discussion of proposed bike improvements.
Other council members have similarly questioned whether encouraging biking on California Ave. is really a good idea. Mayor Ed Lauing and Council member Keith Reckdahl, who chairs the Retail Committee, are among those who said they favor directing cyclists to Cambridge Avenue, which runs parallel to California Ave.
“Making Cambridge be the bike place is, I think, the real answer,” Reckdahl said during the May 21 discussion of Cal Ave. improvements. “And making it really bumpy on Cal Ave. So people can go down Cal Ave., but people wouldn’t go unless they really wanted to.”
Carol Garsten hopes that cyclists will find another route. Garsten is the founder of 3rdThursday, a monthly event that brings music and other activities to Cal Ave. This month, she is putting together an event called LoCal Libations, which will bring 10 Santa Cruz Mountain wineries to the car-free stretch (hanging out on 3rdThursdays is free but those who want to taste the wine will need to get $45 tickets in advance or $55 on the day of the event). Given the nature of her events, Garsten is not a fan of having bicyclists on Cal Ave.
“I almost got hit by a bike one day,” Garsten said. “When I’m out on Cal Ave. and I’m relaxed, it’s beautiful and there are no cars. And these bicycles come by so fast that I almost get knocked over. I don’t think there’s a good solution now.”
There are, however, some amenities that she would like to see on Cal Ave., including a public restroom and a water fountain. She also wants to see the city relax its rules about drinking outdoors. The council passed a resolution last June allowing open containers during 3rdThursdays but that expired at the end of the year. On June 17, the council will consider another such resolution, designating Cal Ave. an “entertainment zone” and allowing open containers.
“If there ever was a place and time for there to be an entertainment zone to make things easier for restaurants and bars, it’s 3rdThursdays,” Garsten said. “It means more sales and it fulfills the community’s need to relax and enjoy the car-free streets and the music festivities.”
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