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On a recent Saturday afternoon in downtown Mountain View, groups of people filled the outdoor seating at restaurants along Castro Street, dogs and their owners strolled the sidewalks, and minutes after the Don’t Eat Me storefront opened its doors, people shuffled inside.
The pop-up shop recently opened in a previously vacant space on Castro Street, selling original artwork, stationary, clothing, accessories and home decor from Bay Area artists. Don’t Eat Me is the culmination of a partnership between the city of Mountain View and MOMENT, a company that aims to help small businesses grow through brick-and-mortar projects.
“Activating vacant storefronts with entrepreneurship, with small businesses, really has so many benefits for the downtown,” said Amanda Rotella, the city’s economic vitality manager. “We really see this as an opportunity to bring new energy, drive new foot traffic, bring new businesses and entrepreneurship, and hopefully be a draw to bring people from out of the area into downtown Mountain View to check out something new.”
The Don’t Eat Me pop-up, MOMENT’s first installation in Mountain View, is a collaborative project among four different artists with small businesses of their own – Art by Julia, Notebeans Stationery, Derptiles and Karepango. It’s been open on a limited basis since the weekend before Christmas, but its hours are expected to expand following a grand opening celebration on Feb. 7.
According to Notebeans Stationery artist Madeline Liu, the name Don’t Eat Me came about because it’s “fun and nonsensical.”
“We were all really drawn to this kind of clever humor and nonsensical humor,” Liu said. “So we thought, why not make something so novel, like Don’t Eat Me, that just catches your attention?”
The pop-up program is the first of its kind for Mountain View, and it has been more than a year in the making, according to Rotella. The city is working to “activate” vacant storefronts, which have become much more prevalent since the COVID-19 lockdown, Rotella said.
“The pandemic was really hard on retail businesses,” Rotella said. “All of a sudden, almost instantaneously, foot traffic was stripped from downtowns. We did see a number of businesses leave the downtown, and since then, with online shopping and changes in consumer habits, it’s really challenging for small businesses.”
To help tackle this issue, the city contracted with MOMENT, which has a number of storefronts in San Jose. MOMENT and Mountain View worked together over the course of a year to find a downtown property owner willing to partner with them. Ultimately, they landed on 293 Castro Street, owned by Nancy Gee.
In a press release announcing the soft opening of Don’t Eat Me last month, Gee said that as longtime property owners, she and her family have always tried to add to the “vitality” of downtown Mountain View.
MOMENT felt that Castro Street was an ideal location for the pop-up storefront because it’s already a “bright commercial corridor,” said Audrey Yeung, the company’s director of business development.
“We saw this as an area that had a great potential to do something like this,” Yeung said. “There is natural foot traffic, there’s energy, there’s tons of food, and there is already some retail.”
MOMENT’s goal is to lower the barrier to entry for creative small businesses to sell their products in places like downtown Mountain View. If at the end of the year, one or more of the artists can continue operating a brick-and-mortar business, either at the same location or a different one, then the pop-up will be successful, Yeung said. She added that if the yearlong pop-up inspires a permanent tenant to fill any of the vacant spaces downtown, that would also be a success.
For the city, the pop-up program is just one facet of its efforts to fill empty spaces and create a “thriving” downtown, Rotella said. In 2024, the City Council adopted an Economic Vitality Strategy, which aims to make Mountain View more business-friendly. Currently, city staff are working to develop relationships with local property owners to better understand the challenges they face and potentially support them moving forward.
“Downtown is the heart of our city, and we really want it to be thriving and successful and welcoming, both to attract local residents, but also people from outside the area,” Rotella said.
