Walk Lakeshore Avenue on a Saturday and you will pass a storefront that used to sell frozen yogurt, sitting empty between Arizmendi Bakery and The Peach Brunch. A few doors down, the corner space where a Starbucks closed without much warning is still waiting for its next tenant. These are not new problems. What changed this year is what the street's business association decided to do about them, and it involves live music, more than a hundred vendors, and a stage named after two people who used to walk these same blocks.
The Corridor Already Has Foot Traffic
Start with what is not broken. The Grand Lake Farmers Market has run every Saturday since it opened in a parking lot under Highway 580 around 1998, then moved into the newly built Splash Pad Park in 2003. It now draws close to 100 vendors a week, rain or shine, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. That is a two-decade-plus habit for thousands of households, not a seasonal draw. So when Lakeshore Avenue talks about needing more energy, the honest read is not that people have stopped coming to the neighborhood. It is that the crowd already here tends to stop at the market and the theater, then turn around, without ever making it the length of Lakeshore itself.
Four Vacancies and a 2027 Deadline
The Lakeshore Avenue Business Improvement District has been direct about this in its own newsletter. Right now several storefronts sit empty, and the district is naming them specifically rather than talking around it:
- A space of more than 10,000 square feet, described as one of the largest opportunities on the avenue
- The former frozen yogurt shop between Arizmendi Bakery and The Peach Brunch
- The corner building where a Starbucks closed unexpectedly
- A configured restaurant space with two entrances, a full bar, and room for outdoor seating
The district has set a public goal of filling every vacant storefront by 2027 and is running a resident survey asking what people actually want in these spaces, from a café or specialty market to a bookstore, wellness concept, or live entertainment venue. It is also a season of transition inside the organization itself. Carol, who has served as co-director since 2019 and whose involvement traces back to the district's founding in the 1990s under John Russo and Barry Gilbert, is retiring. The institutional memory that helped build the district is handing off at the same moment the district is trying to solve its most visible current problem.
A Festival Built to Solve a Leasing Problem
This is the context for the new event that launched on Lakeshore this year. BID president Kelsey Heath and treasurer Terri Ellis brought in longtime event producers Daniel Swafford and Candi Martinez, and Joe Hawkins of the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center joined the effort soon after. The result was the Lakeshore Spring Festival, occupying the street from the plaza outside the LGBTQ Center to Mandana Boulevard, with a main stage at the plaza and a second stage further up near Mandana. More than 100 vendors were expected to set up along the route, deliberately positioned in front of the empty storefronts the district is trying to fill rather than clustered near the market or the theater where the crowd already gathers on its own.
The plaza itself now carries new meaning. On May 19, 2026, the Oakland City Council renamed it Moore Hope Plaza, honoring Peggy Moore and Hope Wood, a married couple and longtime Oakland activists who died in a car crash in 2024. Hawkins described the goal in plain terms.
"A neighborhood that has historically been very diverse, very inclusive."
That is the frame the festival is working from, and it explains why the route runs the full stretch of storefronts instead of stopping at the plaza.
Not the First Attempt, and That Matters
Lakeshore has tried this before, and the differences are worth laying out plainly, because they show this year's version is not a repeat.
| Event | Years active | Location and focus |
|---|---|---|
| Festival at the Lake | 1982 to 1997 | Around Lake Merritt, citywide draw |
| Lakefest: Art & Wine Festival | 2008 to 2009 | On Lakeshore Avenue, business-district led |
| Lakefest Oakland | 2018 to present | Lake Merritt, late June, music-focused |
| Lakeshore Spring Festival | 2026 to present | Full length of Lakeshore Avenue, storefront-facing |
Lakefest Oakland, the event still running every June, faces the lake. It is a good party, but it does not route people past Lakeshore's empty storefronts any more than the farmers market does. The Lakeshore Spring Festival is the first event in nearly two decades built to run down the commercial strip itself, which is the specific gap the earlier Lakefest: Art & Wine Festival tried to fill back in 2008 and 2009 before it stopped. The district is not throwing a generic street party. It is repeating an old idea with a sharper aim.
The Theater Turned 100 the Same Year
None of this is happening in isolation. The Grand Lake Theatre, the 1926 movie palace that anchors the top of the avenue, is marking its own hundredth year in 2026. The theater ran free classic screenings on March 4 and gave building tours March 6 through 8. It hosted the 23rd edition of NOIR CITY, the film noir festival, in January. Coming up, a Wurlitzer organ concert precedes a silent film screening on August 26, and the theater's Annual 9/11 Truth Film Festival runs September 8 from 3 to 10 p.m. A single-screen movie house that has outlasted a century of Oakland business turnover is still adding new programming rather than coasting on nostalgia, and that steadiness is part of why residents keep treating Lakeshore as a destination at all.
What to Actually Watch For
If you live here, the useful thing to track is not whether the festival was fun. It is whether foot traffic starts showing up in lease signs. The frozen yogurt space between Arizmendi and The Peach Brunch, the former Starbucks corner, and the 10,000-square-foot space are the three to watch first, since the district has named them outright and is actively soliciting resident input on what should go there. If the district hits its 2027 target, this year's festival will be the reason people point to. If the vacancies linger past next spring, it will be a sign that foot traffic and leasing are two different problems that a single Saturday event cannot solve on its own.
In the meantime, the neighborhood's evening life is already proving people will stay after the market closes. Since opening in February 2024, the vintage shop 3319 Marché has turned into an after-dark gathering spot on Lakeshore, hosting in-store performances that have included a listening event for Oakland rapper Seiji Oda, a music video shoot for producer Ovrkast, and a nine-year anniversary concert for the local band MeloDious. That is a business built by two Oakland natives who grew up walking these blocks, and it is already doing on a Friday night what the festival is trying to do on a bigger scale: give people a reason to walk the full length of the avenue instead of turning back at the market.
Grand Lake has never lacked people. What it has lacked, on and off since the 1990s, is a way to get them past the storefronts that need them most. This year's festival is the district's clearest attempt yet at closing that gap on purpose.
If you are watching this corner of Oakland for reasons beyond a Saturday walk, whether that means a future move, a sale, or just understanding what a changing block does to property values nearby, the Souza Niroomand Team has spent decades reading these shifts across the East Bay. Let's sit down and talk about what it means for you.
