Walk down the 1900 block of Fourth Street this August and you'll pass a dark storefront at Suite 104. That's the old Cotopaxi. A few doors away, the former Vans is dark too. Cross Hearst and turn onto the Delaware pedestrian strip, though, and by six o'clock on a Saturday the sidewalk in front of Peet's has a live band, a maker market, and a line for a Turkish restaurant that didn't exist here two months ago.
The story of Fourth Street in the summer of 2026 isn't a list of openings. It's a reweighting. The block's national-brand retail spine is thinning, and the food, events, and small-batch tenants that used to be the supporting cast are becoming the reason to come. For anyone who already lives within a mile of San Pablo, that shift changes when Fourth Street is worth your evening.
The Spenger's block, quietly reshuffled
The most visible change is what's missing. Cotopaxi closed at 1915 Fourth Street, Suite 104 after a ram-raid robbery, and its neighbor inside the former Spenger's space, Vans Shoes, also closed without fanfare. Two national outdoor and lifestyle brands, gone from the same building in the same stretch of months, is not a coincidence a resident should file under "retail happens." It's a signal about which tenant model still works on this street.
Compare that to what's moving in a few blocks away. Plank + Power, an El Cerrito-based Pilates studio, is expanding into Berkeley with its second location inside the space formerly occupied by Keetsa on San Pablo Avenue, and the studio is known for its "high intensity" Pilates, according to owner Megan Gressel. The pattern reads clearly once you line the moves up: fewer chains cycling in and out of the flagship blocks, more East Bay operators taking on their second or third location in the smaller storefronts one street over.
What actually opened this summer
The single most useful thing to know is that Fourth Street has a new dinner reservation. Fourth Street in Berkeley has officially welcomed the new modern Turkish restaurant Divan, which soft opened on June 22, focusing on lunch service only at first but expecting to open for dinner service in the coming weeks. That timeline held. The modern Turkish restaurant in Berkeley's Fourth Street is now open for dinner, having soft opened June 22 with lunch service, and the dinner menu includes starters, flatbreads, and main entrees such as fish, vegetarian, and beef or lamb dishes. Divan sits at 1788 Fourth Street, a short walk from the maker market blocks and close enough to Cesar Chavez Park that you can build a real evening out of it.
The other opening worth planning around is south of the shopping district, tucked into the Berkeley Kitchens complex. Milk Cloud Bakery officially soft opens Friday, July 24, located in the Berkeley Kitchens in the former La Noisette space, where baker Elizabeth Khuu will have a seasonal, rotating menu with some permanent items including shokupan Japanese milk bread toast, "ramen egg" sandwiches, a strawberry black sesame sando, and creme brulee basque cheesecake slices; a new item debuting is Khuu's take on choux au craquelin, and during the soft opening the bakery will be open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The address is 2701 Eighth Street, Suite 116. Three-days-a-week hours are the tell that this is still soft-opening territory, so if you want the strawberry black sesame sando, go early in the day.
A few more that changed the daily-life map:
- Berkeley's Pop Bar location is now open at 2125 University Avenue, and the global chain serves embellished gelato- and sorbetto-based popsicles and gelato sandwiches.
- Berkeley's Palmetto Superfoods soft opened Friday, July 24, with the customizable frozen bowl spot inside Anchor House in downtown.
- A new cafe on the Cal campus, Gateway Cafe, opens July 20 featuring Mediterranean food and drinks including build-your-own bowls, located at the Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway Building on the north side of campus at the corner of Hearst and Arch.
Gateway Cafe is the one to flag if you live in the Northside or Live Oak pocket. A UC Berkeley Dining outpost that opens before the fall semester means a lunch option in a stretch of Hearst that had almost none.
The calendar residents should actually mark
The event programming on Fourth Street has quietly become its own reason to visit. This isn't the old holiday-lights-and-Lunar-New-Year rhythm. The summer 2026 lineup at Fourth Street Makers Row is running an after-hours market series that treats the block like a stage.
Berkeley Nights is an after-hours summer market on Fourth Street Makers Row, a golden-hour gathering of local makers, live music, and food trucks taking over the block as the sun goes down; visitors can shop a curated lineup of Bay Area artisans, grab dinner from rotating food trucks, catch live music in the open air, and stay a while. The format tells you what the district is trying to become: less strip-mall daylight shopping, more evening third-place.
The single event most worth putting on the calendar for early August is on Delaware. Dance on Delaware with Edgardo Cambon y su Orquesta is happening on Saturday, August 8, 2026, from 1:00 PM onwards on Fourth Street, Berkeley. Free, outdoors, live salsa. Bring a friend who complains that Berkeley shuts down at nine.
If your household includes anyone who reads car forums, the recurring meets have found a home here too. Car enthusiasts can browse iconic Toyota and Lexus builds at the Fourth Street car meet and craft market, which also features a maker mart, live music, and local food, on Saturday, July 18, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1919 Fourth Street. That's the same 1919 Fourth Street address the Makers Row event calendar keeps using, which means the block between Hearst and Virginia is doing double duty as a weekend event venue roughly every other Saturday.
Reading the shift
Zoom out and the individual moves become a pattern. Cotopaxi and Vans, two national brands that leased into the flagship Spenger's redevelopment, are out. In their place across the neighborhood: a Turkish independent from the Bay Area doing its own build-out at 1788 Fourth, a soft-opening bakery running Thursday through Saturday out of a shared commercial kitchen, an East Bay Pilates operator taking a second location, and a UC Berkeley-run cafe filling in a gap the market didn't. The event calendar is picking up the slack the fashion and outdoor retail used to carry.
For a resident, the practical translation is this. Fourth Street used to reward a specific kind of visit, weekend brunch and browsing, and it treated weekday evenings as dead hours. That's inverting. If you live in Berkeley now, the more interesting question isn't what's on sale at the anchor stores. It's which Saturday in August you want to be standing on Delaware with a plate from a food truck while Edgardo Cambon's band plays.
A quick shortlist to plan around before Labor Day:
| Date | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Ongoing (Thu–Sat) | Milk Cloud Bakery soft opening | 2701 Eighth St, Ste 116 |
| Ongoing (dinner) | Divan | 1788 Fourth St |
| Sat, Aug 8 | Dance on Delaware with Edgardo Cambon | Delaware at Fourth |
| Rotating summer Saturdays | Berkeley Nights + Endless Summer Market | Fourth Street Makers Row |
Everything on that list is free to walk up to, which is worth stating plainly. The reweighting of Fourth Street isn't happening at the register. It's happening at the curb.
If you're the kind of Berkeley resident who pays attention to which corners are getting more interesting and which are quietly emptying out, that same instinct is what matters when it's time to think about your home. The Souza Niroomand Team reads these blocks the same way you do, and we're always happy to talk about what the shifts mean for your street. Let's Sit Down and Talk.
