Friday night, September 12, San Anselmo Avenue closed to cars for the last time this year. Two stages, one at Creek Park and one at Town Hall Plaza, split the crowd between 6 and 8:30 p.m. the way they've split it every summer weekend since June 20. Restaurants pushed tables into the street. Somebody's kid rode a bike in slow circles near the beer garden. By the time the bands packed up, Live on the Avenue had closed out its 2026 season, and downtown went back to five nights a week of regular traffic.
Here's what almost nobody mentioned on the way out: the thing this whole two-stage format was built around isn't there. Creek Park Plaza, the fenced-off platform locals call BB2, has been closed since fall 2022. For four full summers, San Anselmo has thrown its signature block party around a hole in the middle of downtown, not through it. And the workaround has worked well enough that the town is now facing a strange question: now that a real design has finally been approved for the plaza, does downtown actually want its center back, or has it already rebuilt itself around not having one?
The Platform Nobody Could Use
Creek Park itself is a one-acre parcel at the heart of downtown, and the town had been trying to reimagine it since 2019, when a Community Advisory Committee gathered more than 500 survey responses and ran a design competition that eventually selected Mill Valley firm RHAA. Then the pandemic hit, and in a strange twist, the delay became an opportunity: the county tore down the buildings that used to bridge San Anselmo Avenue to the creek, creating what became known as Building Bridge 2, a temporary plaza. It didn't last. The county closed BB2 in fall 2022, citing structural safety concerns, and it has stayed fenced off ever since.
This June, the town got the timing wrong twice. In February 2026, the Marin County Board of Supervisors and the Town Council approved a lease letting San Anselmo use the BB2 platform again as a limited gathering space, which read like the closure was finally ending. Then, on June 17, just three days before Live on the Avenue's 2026 season opened, the town had to announce that the plaza would not reopen after all. A structural engineering evaluation found the substructure needed repair and reinforcement first. Mayor Steve Burdo put it plainly at the time: the town had "a responsibility to put public safety first," even knowing the news would disappoint people who'd been waiting years.
Three Things That Grew Up Around the Fence
What's easy to miss, watching that timeline, is that downtown didn't sit still while it waited. Three separate projects filled the space where a reopened plaza was supposed to be, and none of them were planned as a substitute for it.
- Live on the Avenue itself solved for the missing plaza by splitting into two stages, Creek Park and Town Hall Plaza, and closing the street between them. The plaza's absence is baked into the current format.
- Tụ Tập, the Vietnamese restaurant that opened July 29 at 625 San Anselmo Ave., used the closed-off street as a marketing platform rather than an obstacle. During renovation, hundreds of people toured the space on weekends when San Anselmo Avenue was already closed for the concert series.
- Hilldale Pocket Park, tucked behind United Market on Jordan Avenue in the Sequoia Park neighborhood, opened in 2023, the same year BB2 shut down, and is getting a second life this month with new seating and a nature-based play feature.
None of these were coordinated. They just happened to land in the same four-year window, and together they did something the plaza closure alone couldn't: they gave downtown more than one reason to gather.
The Restaurant That Didn't Wait for Permission
Tụ Tập's backstory is worth sitting with, because it says something about who's willing to bet on this town right now. Executive chef Justine Kelly grew up in San Anselmo and spent 17 years working for the late Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before taking on the restaurant as her first ownership stake. Co-owner Adam Block, who also lives in San Anselmo, called the opening "kind of a homecoming." Bill Upson, whose Real Restaurants group runs Bix in San Francisco along with Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco in Marin, is a partner too.
The restaurant sits in a two-story space with a rooftop patio looking toward Mount Tamalpais, and the menu leans on Kelly's read of Vietnamese classics built through wok work, claypot cooking, and a raw bar. It didn't open quietly. Locals had been touring the build-out for months before the doors opened, catching glimpses during the same Friday and Saturday closures that shut down the street for Live on the Avenue. The restaurant and the concert series ended up promoting each other by accident, which is a detail that matters more than it looks like: downtown's biggest new anchor built its audience using the exact infrastructure that exists because the plaza wasn't available.
A Small Park Finishes Ahead of a Big One
Hilldale Pocket Park is easy to overlook next to a restaurant with a rooftop bar, but its timing tells its own version of the same story. The park opened in 2023 on a former dead-end court behind United Market, built with heavy input from Sequoia Park neighbors on everything from play features to seating. This month, the town is celebrating a round of improvements funded by what the town described as additional funding and contractor donations that came in ahead of schedule, meaning the upgrade didn't need a public fundraising push. The ribbon-cutting is set for Saturday, September 19, at 10:30 a.m., with light refreshments and a craft table for kids.
It's a small project by any measure. But it finished, fully and without drama, while the town's flagship public space sat behind a chain-link fence for four straight years. That contrast is the whole point: San Anselmo's civic energy over this period went to the projects that could actually get built, not necessarily the ones with the most attention.
What the August Vote Actually Changed
The plaza project did move, eventually. At a special meeting on August 11, 2026, the Town Council backed the Curvilinear Concept, listed as Option A, as the 60 percent design for the Creek Park Plaza portion of the larger Reimagine Creek Park project. Marin County Public Works Director Christopher Blunk framed the county's role as making sure the structure is sound enough to support whatever the town decides to do with it. Town Manager David Donery described the plaza as an important public space central to what he called the town's broader vision for Creek Park and downtown vitality.
That vote is real progress after four years of delay, but it's a design decision, not a reopening date. The structural repair scope, schedule, and funding are still being worked out between the town and the Marin County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, the agency that owns BB2. Nobody has said when the fence actually comes down.
The Question Nobody's Asking Yet
Here's the part worth sitting with if you live here. When BB2 finally reopens, downtown will have four gathering spaces instead of one: the reopened plaza, the two Live on the Avenue stages that grew up without it, and a freshly upgraded Hilldale Park a few blocks away. Nothing forces the town to consolidate its street closures and events back onto a single plaza just because the plaza exists again. The two-stage concert format worked. The restaurant's rooftop has its own gravity now. The pocket park has its own regulars.
San Anselmo spent four years proving it doesn't need one center to function as a downtown. The interesting test, once BB2 reopens, isn't whether the plaza looks good. It's whether the town uses it at all the way it used to, or whether it just becomes a fifth option in a downtown that already learned to spread itself out.
If you're weighing what a stretch of Marin like this actually offers day to day, beyond the headline events, that's the kind of texture worth knowing before you make any decision about it. If you'd like to talk through what's happening in San Anselmo or any of the towns we work in, The Morgan Team is always glad to have that conversation.
