What happens to a town's favorite gathering spot when it disappears for four summers running? In San Anselmo, the answer turned out to be: the town builds two new ones and forgets to ask permission.
Last Saturday, August 1, the crowd on San Anselmo Avenue split itself in two without anyone seeming to notice or care. Down at Creek Park, Shana Morrison and Caledonia played to a lawn full of picnic blankets under the redwoods. A few blocks up, Koi held down Town Hall Plaza for the pedestrian crowd drifting between restaurants. Both shows were part of the same event, Live on the Avenue, and both happened because the plaza everyone actually wants back has been fenced off since September 16, 2022.
That's not a typo. San Anselmo's Creek Park Plaza, the wood-chip-covered gathering deck built on the old Building Bridge 2 foundation, has now sat closed through four consecutive summers. The town hoped this would be the year that changed.
The Plaza That Was Supposed to Reopen This Year
Town officials had real reason for optimism heading into 2026. Plans were moving forward. A lease framework was in discussion. Then the structural engineers weighed in.
In a joint announcement with Marin County released June 17, the Town confirmed that the BB2 substructure needs reinforcement before the public can safely use it again, which meant the plaza would stay fenced for the start of this year's Live on the Avenue season too. Mayor Steve Burdo did not dress it up:
"We were hopeful that Creek Park Plaza would be ready in time for this summer's Live on the Avenue season, but when the engineering assessment identified structural issues that must be addressed, we had a responsibility to put public safety first."
Fair enough. Nobody wants a wood-chip plaza built on a repurposed bridge foundation to be the thing that goes wrong. But four summers is long enough that "coming soon" starts to sound like a running joke, and long enough that the town's actual summer social life had to figure out a workaround.
How the Avenue Adapted Instead
The workaround turned out to be simple: stop waiting for one plaza and use the two public spaces the town already had. Live on the Avenue now runs on parallel tracks, with Creek Park Amphitheater hosting one act in its redwood-grove lawn setting while Town Hall Plaza runs a second act a short walk away on the pedestrian stretch of the avenue.
Here's what that looked like across three nights this month, drawn from the official August lineup:
| Date | Creek Park Amphitheater | Town Hall Plaza |
|---|---|---|
| Sat, Aug 1 | Shana Morrison & Caledonia | Koi |
| Fri, Aug 7 | Soul Ska | The Mad Maggies |
| Sat, Aug 8 | Hall Pass | Sunhunter Band |
Neither venue is a replacement for the plaza in any literal sense. Creek Park Amphitheater sits in a shaded grove built for lawn seating, not the wood-chip deck perched over the creek. Town Hall Plaza was never meant to be a standalone music venue. But together they've absorbed the exact function the fenced-off plaza used to serve: a place downtown where people gather, hear live music for free, and spend the evening walking between shows and shops. The street closure runs 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday from June 20 through September 12, with music from 6 to 8:30, and the crowd shows up whether or not the plaza is part of the route.
This Week, the Town Decides What's Next
That workaround is exactly why this week matters more than most. Three meetings, back to back, are shaping what happens to the plaza going forward, according to the Town's own update page:
- Tuesday, August 4 – The Reimagine Creek Park Community Advisory Committee met to preview design options, in Town Council Chambers and on Zoom.
- Friday, August 7 – A Live on the Avenue Design Display goes up on San Anselmo Avenue from 6 to 7:30 p.m., the same evening Soul Ska and The Mad Maggies are playing the two-stage show described above. Anyone walking the avenue that night will pass both the concert and the renderings for the space the concert no longer depends on.
- Tuesday, August 11 – A Town Council Special Meeting will take public feedback before decisions move forward.
The Friday overlap isn't a scheduling accident worth reading too much into, but it is a useful coincidence. The same crowd that proves Live on the Avenue works fine without Creek Park Plaza will be the one asked, that same night, whether the town should still spend the money to reopen it. If you have an opinion on what a rebuilt plaza should look like, or whether it's worth the cost given how the avenue has adapted, August 11 is the meeting where that conversation gets formal.
What Else Changed on the Avenue This Year
The plaza story is the headline, but it's not the only thing different about downtown this summer. A few storefronts have turned over. Tu Tập, a Vietnamese restaurant with rooftop seating, opened in July on San Anselmo Avenue. The San Anselmo Rose, a flower and gift shop, and Shorthand, a stationery store, have both settled into the same stretch, adding to the walkable retail mix that already includes longtime anchors like Comforts and Insalata's.
If you'd rather learn the avenue's older history than its newest tenants, the Town's free docent-led walking tour is worth the 9 a.m. start. It departs from Creek Park on the second Saturday of most months, covering the historic Hub intersection and the railroad line that shaped where the avenue sits today. The remaining 2026 dates are August 8, September 12, and October 10, and the tour ends at the Historical Museum for refreshments.
None of this required the plaza to reopen. That's the pattern worth noticing: San Anselmo's summer kept moving, kept drawing crowds, kept opening new storefronts, while the one piece of infrastructure everyone talks about missing sat fenced off the entire time.
The Real Question Isn't If, It's Why
Four summers of closure would normally hollow out a downtown's evening life. San Anselmo's didn't hollow out. It rerouted. Whether that's an argument for finally funding the plaza's repairs, so the avenue gets a third gathering space instead of just two, or an argument that the two-stage system already does the job well enough to deprioritize the fix, is exactly what gets decided in the meetings happening this week.
Either way, the avenue itself isn't waiting on the outcome. Live on the Avenue runs through September 12, Star Wars Night with the 501st Golden Gate Garrison lands August 29, and the last historical walking tour of the year wraps up October 10. Plaza or no plaza, San Anselmo knows how to fill a summer.
If you're the kind of person who reads town council meeting schedules for fun, or you just want to know what a place is really like before you commit to it, that's the conversation I have with clients every day. Marc Machado has spent more than 20 years in Marin watching towns like San Anselmo figure out what they're becoming. Reach Out Today if you want a straight answer about what living here actually feels like, plaza politics included.
