Live on the Avenue 2026 has wrapped for the season. During the season, San Anselmo Avenue closed to cars at 4:30, music started at six, and visitors near Creek Park passed the chain-link fence around Building Bridge 2, the plaza platform that has been closed since September 2022. Four summers of the town's signature street party have now happened around that fence, not through it.
That is not a small detail. It is the story.
Four years on one closed platform
Building Bridge 2, known to most residents simply as Creek Park Plaza, was built during the pandemic when San Anselmo and Marin County removed a row of buildings along the creek and turned the foundation into a temporary gathering space. For a while it worked exactly as intended: outdoor dining, weekend closures, a genuine bonus space downtown never had before. Then in September 2022 a structural review found the platform unsafe, and the County shut it down.
What followed was not a quick fix. The Town and County spent years working toward a solution, and this February the Marin County Board of Supervisors and San Anselmo Town Council approved a new lease letting the Town use the platform again in a limited, carefully managed way once engineers signed off. That approval read like good news at the time. Then in June, a structural evaluation of the BB2 substructure found that repairs and reinforcement were still needed, and the Town announced the plaza would not reopen in time for this summer's Live on the Avenue season after all. Mayor Steve Burdo said as much when the announcement went out, calling the delay a necessary step to put public safety first before reopening the space for good.
So the platform has now sat behind fencing through a pandemic recovery, a lease negotiation, and a full engineering review, and it remained closed through the end of the 2026 season.
What the town's own sponsor list says
Here is what did not wait on any of that. Live on the Avenue ran every Friday and Saturday from June 20 through the end of its season, skipping only the Fourth of July, with the street closed from 4:30 to 9:30 and free live music and programming from six to eight-thirty. The season included themed nights, a Star Wars evening and a Grandparents Intergenerational Celebration among them, and it ran on a sponsor list that reads like a cross-section of the town's actual working businesses: Redwood Credit Union, Creekside Pizza & Taproom, The Baan Thai Cuisine, Kuro Nami Japanese Kitchen, Golden State Cider, Harvest Wealth Management, Marin Sanitary, Marin Family Medicine, Walking Mirrors Music, and several more.
None of those businesses needed the plaza to show up. The Avenue closure model, not the platform, is what has carried the event for four straight summers.
Two new restaurants bet on the same premise
The clearest evidence that private investment in downtown San Anselmo was never waiting on a public plaza opened on July 29 this year. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tụ Tập, a modern Vietnamese restaurant, took over a two-story space with a rooftop patio at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, and the patio looks out at Mount Tamalpais rather than down at the creek. Executive chef Justine Kelly grew up in San Anselmo and spent close to two decades working under the late Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before co-founding the meal kit company Sun Basket. Co-owner Adam Block lives in town and has called the restaurant a homecoming. The group behind it also includes Bill Upson of Real Restaurants, whose portfolio includes Bix in San Francisco and Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco in Marin. During construction, hundreds of people reportedly toured the unfinished space on weekend evenings while the Avenue was closed for Live on the Avenue itself, which is its own small proof that the crowds downtown draws are not contingent on the fenced plaza a block away.
A second opening is in the pipeline for the same stretch of downtown. Maison Nico, from Borhen Hammami, former owner of the Michelin-recommended Moroccan restaurant Berber in San Francisco, is slated to take over the Don Antonio's space on Magnolia Avenue. Two operators with real San Francisco pedigree chose to put money into San Anselmo storefronts this year, on a stretch of town that has spent that same year without its most talked-about public gathering space.
The plaza design has support, but no construction date
The plaza project did move this year, just not in the direction most residents would notice on a Friday night. On August 11, the Town Council gave unanimous support to a specific design for the plaza itself, the Curvilinear Concept, designated Option A, following a public comment period that included a design display during Live on the Avenue and a community survey. That is a real milestone. It is worth separating from an earlier one: the broader Creek Park landscape design, covering the creek restoration and surrounding park rather than the plaza platform, had already cleared its own 60 percent design approval back in September 2023. The plaza structure itself is only now catching up to that stage.
What the August vote did not produce is a construction start date. County Public Works Director Christopher Blunk described the next step as coordinating a funding decision with a well-defined project scope and actual costs, so funding, project scope, actual costs and a construction schedule remain to be determined. Council member Brian Colbert called it a positive moment for the town regardless, framing the plaza as a space that could eventually connect the Avenue with the creek and give downtown businesses a new center of gravity.
"This is a very positive moment for San Anselmo."
The vote marks a design milestone; funding and a construction schedule have not yet been established.
Hilldale Pocket Park's improvements
While the plaza project advanced through council votes and engineering reports, a different piece of San Anselmo's park system also moved forward. Hilldale Pocket Park, a small neighborhood space in the Sequoia Parks area built from a former dead-end court back in 2023, is getting a round of upgrades this fall, including a nature-based interactive feature and additional seating. The Town says the improvements came together faster than expected because additional funding and contractor donations became available, meaning the work is happening without a fundraising campaign. The Town is marking the occasion with a celebration on September 19 at 10:30 in the morning, with light refreshments and a craft activity for kids.
Hilldale Pocket Park is much smaller than Creek Park Plaza. The plaza project, by contrast, has involved structural reviews and a multi-agency lease.
What this actually tells you if you already live here
The plaza will reopen eventually, and when it does it will be a genuine addition to downtown. Four Live on the Avenue seasons have already proven the Avenue closure model works on its own. Two well-pedigreed restaurant groups have already bet real money on this stretch of town without waiting for a ribbon cutting at the creek. Hilldale Pocket Park's upgrades are taking place this season, while the plaza project has involved a second lease agreement and a second structural review.
If you want to actually track how downtown San Anselmo is doing, the plaza fence is not the gauge. The Avenue on a Friday night is, and it has been telling a pretty good story for four summers running. For a closer look at what the historic Hub looked like before any of this started, the Town runs a free docent-led walking tour of San Anselmo Avenue's railroad-era buildings, departing from Creek Park, which is worth an hour if you have lived here long enough to stop noticing the architecture you walk past every day.
If you are weighing a move within San Anselmo, or thinking about what a property near this stretch of downtown might be worth given everything opening around it, Tiffany Knef has spent more than two decades reading exactly these kinds of North Bay shifts. Schedule a free consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.
