Saturday, September 12 was the last night of Live on the Avenue for 2026. The string lights came down, the folding chairs went back into storage, and San Anselmo Avenue reopened to cars for the first time on a summer weekend since June. If you've lived here more than a season, you already know the rhythm: the town closes its main street on Friday and Saturday nights, a band plays at Creek Park or Town Hall Plaza, and then Labor Day passes and the whole thing quietly wraps.
What's easy to miss, because the series is the loudest part of the summer, is that almost nothing about the town's actual footprint depended on it. Two restaurants opened their doors for good while the avenue was closing every weekend. A park finished construction. A sixty-year-old diner did not come back, despite what half the food blogs in Marin told you to expect. The concert series was the soundtrack. The town underneath it moved on its own schedule.
Four Months, Two Stages, One Closing Weekend
For the record, this year's run went Friday and Saturday evenings from June 20 through September 12, with no show on the Fourth of July, free live music from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. and the avenue itself closed to traffic from 4:30 to 9:30. The series ran on two stages: Creek Park Amphitheater, tucked into a redwood grove with lawn seating, and Town Hall Plaza, which put music directly onto the closed street in front of downtown's restaurants and shops. The closing weekend lineup put El Cajon and Le Minivans at Creek Park and F.A.T. Betty at Town Hall Plaza. Sponsors this year included Redwood Credit Union, Golden State Cider, and Creekside Pizza & Taproom, which has anchored the series' civic side for years.
That's the part of the summer everyone saw. It's also the part that was always going to end on schedule, because it always does.
Two New Front Doors Opened While the Series Ran
The more durable news happened at street level. On July 29, Tụ Táºp opened at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, in the space that used to be Kientz Hall. It's a modern Vietnamese restaurant with a rooftop bar looking straight at Mount Tamalpais, and the kitchen is led by chef Justine Kelly, who grew up in San Anselmo and spent 17 years working under the late Charles Phan at the Slanted Door before taking this job. Her business partner, Adam Block, also lives in town, and told the San Francisco Chronicle that opening here felt like "a homecoming." During construction, the team offered tours of the space on weekends when the avenue was already closed for Live on the Avenue, and hundreds of people showed up before the restaurant had even opened.
A few blocks away, near Red Hill Shopping Center, four longtime friends who bonded over their shared Thai heritage opened Pretti Platters on May 19, in the freestanding building that used to house Auryn Thai Cuisine. Co-owner Fah Intapura and her partners built a menu that runs from brunch staples to dinner-caliber plates: branzino with Meyer lemon beurre blanc, a bone-in heritage pork chop with celery root puree, even caviar with housemade roti. It's the kind of place designed to work for a Tuesday lunch and a Saturday night out.
| Restaurant | Former occupant | Opened | What it fills |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tụ Táºp | Kientz Hall | July 29, 2026 | Rooftop dining, evening anchor at the top of the avenue |
| Pretti Platters | Auryn Thai Cuisine | May 19, 2026 | All-day brunch-to-dinner spot near Red Hill |
Both openings landed squarely inside the Live on the Avenue calendar, and neither one depended on it. They're staying open long after the last Saturday show.
The Diner That's Still Not Back
Here's where the town's actual timeline runs ahead of what a lot of people still believe. Hilda's Coffee Shop, a San Anselmo institution for more than 60 years, closed in September 2025 when longtime owner Sue Kirton retired the business rather than keep patching a building with failing plumbing, electrical, and flooring. Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza & Taproom, bought the space and set out to rebuild it, and for a while the plan was for the reborn diner to open before this year's Live on the Avenue season even started.
That timeline slipped. By spring, the target had moved to mid-May, with an opening planned about a week before the June 20 concert kickoff. Several restaurant roundups published this spring and early summer still had Hilda's landing sometime in "summer 2026." None of that happened. As of this month, Creekside's own update on the project says demolition is finished but the new design work is still underway, with a build-out now targeted for January, not this fall.
"There are very few breakfast places for this small town community, and I think that's what I want to preserve," Townsley has said of the project.
If you've been holding off on brunch plans waiting for Hilda's to reopen, don't. The honest version of the timeline points to January at the earliest, months after the concert series that was originally supposed to welcome it back.
The Park That Opens This Weekend
While one project ran behind schedule, another wrapped ahead of the summer's end entirely. The Town of San Anselmo is holding a grand opening celebration for Hilldale Pocket Park this Saturday, September 19, from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m., with light refreshments, a craft for kids, and Mayor Steve Burdo along with other council members expected to attend. The park sits on Hilldale Drive at Jordan Avenue, behind the United Markets parking lot in the Sequoia Parks neighborhood.
The pocket park first opened in 2023 on the site of a former dead-end court, built with heavy input from neighbors who wanted picnic tables, natural benches, and drought-resistant landscaping in a corner of town that had none. This latest round of work added a nature-based play feature and more seating, and according to the town, additional funding and contractor donations let the project move forward without the community fundraising drive originally expected.
The Walk That Doesn't Take a Summer Off
There's a third piece of San Anselmo's calendar that never paused for Live on the Avenue and won't pause now that it's over. The Historical Commission runs a free, docent-led walking tour on the second Saturday of most months, departing from Creek Park at 9:00 a.m. and covering the historic Hub, the railroad's role in shaping the town, and how the businesses and architecture along San Anselmo Avenue have changed over the decades. It's the kind of thing that happens quietly, without a stage or a sponsor banner, and it keeps running on its usual monthly schedule straight through fall.
Why This Matters If You Live Here
Line these up and the pattern is different from what the closing weekend suggests. The visible, scheduled part of San Anselmo's summer, the one with a start date and an end date and a sponsor list, wrapped exactly on time. The parts of town that actually changed, two new kitchens, a finished park, a diner still working through permits, didn't wait for the series and won't reset when it's gone. If your mental map of downtown still has Auryn Thai in that space near Red Hill, or Kientz Hall standing empty at 625 San Anselmo Avenue, or Hilda's back in business, it's a few months out of date.
If you're mapping out the next few weeks around what's actually open and happening, here's the practical version:
- This Saturday morning, September 19, stop by the Hilldale Pocket Park opening on Hilldale Drive at Jordan Avenue.
- For dinner with a view, Tụ Táºp's rooftop at 625 San Anselmo Avenue is running full service.
- For a weekend brunch, Pretti Platters near Red Hill Shopping Center covers everything from a Dutch pancake to charbroiled branzino.
- Hold off on Hilda's until an actual opening date surfaces. January is the number to watch, not this fall.
- If you want the deeper story behind any of it, the Historical Commission's next docent-led walking tour departs Creek Park at 9:00 a.m. on the second Saturday.
San Anselmo doesn't really go quiet when the avenue reopens to cars. It just stops being loud about what's already changed.
If you're weighing a move into San Anselmo, or wondering what a shifting downtown means for a home you already own here, this is the kind of granular, on-the-ground tracking Kris Klein does year-round for buyers and sellers across central Marin. Request a home valuation to talk through what it means for your specific address.
