COVID: This Bay Area city pulls the dining tables off its main street; others to follow?

Shop owners and city officials say not all businesses benefit equally from street closures to allow for more outdoor dining and other entertainment.

With colder nights around the corner and indoor dining in full swing since the early summer despite the pandemic’s persistent grip, Bay Area cities are trying to figure our whether it’s time to make restaurants pull some of their tables off closed streets so motorists could start driving on them again.

Although the extended parklets that sprung up in the downtown cores of cities have been a lifesaver for many restaurants during on-again, off-again lockdowns, retailers like wine stores, gift shops and service businesses say they’ve impeded customers from finding and easily getting to their shops.

In an effort to accommodate both, Pleasanton ended its Weekend on the Main program after Labor Day.  As a result, a two-third-mile stretch of Main Street that had been closed on weekends so patrons could dine on its lanes is open again.

But the restaurants, cafes and other businesses with tables on sidewalks and parklets in street parking spaces can keep their less obtrusive setups there seven days a week at least until the end of the year.

Maurice Dissels, the owner of Guyanese- and South American-inspired Oyo restaurant on Main Street, said he wishes Weekend on the Main could have been left alone at least for a little while longer.

“Obviously I would like to see it extended, maybe through October, given the nice weather we have in store for us,” he said.

Though he has spent more than $9,000 to create a colorful semi-permanent wooden parklet with tables and umbrellas in parking spaces along the curb, the full street closures helped him nearly double the number of customers he served by adding more tables in the traffic lanes.

“It allows us to gain back some of the losses we experienced. But that’s going to be taken away,” Dissels said. He also said residents loved the vibes created by the street closures, including live entertainment.

“People enjoyed themselves and danced in the street till 11 o’clock. Because people wanted to forget about COVID, they wanted to have fun, they wanted to not feel cooped up,” he said.

But Jaime Zile, who runs J’aime Bridal just across the street from Oyo, said the weekend street closure made it difficult for her customers, some of them out of towners, to find her shop.

Even after she gave clients warnings and directions, she said she often had to spend time helping them navigate around the closures.

“So instead of helping another bride, I’m on the phone,” she said.

“People aren’t just coming downtown to go to restaurants and go, ‘Oh hey, there’s a bridal shop, let’s go in and buy something.’ Our business is a 100 percent destination.”

“About 20 percent of our businesses find it painful,” Zac Grant, executive director of the Pleasanton Downtown Association, said of the Weekend on Main program.

“If closing Main Street and allowing outdoor dining is a proper pandemic countermeasure for a restaurant, opening Main Street and encouraging curbside pickup at the front door of a retailer is the solution for retail,” he said.

“Those two solutions are mutually exclusive,” Grant said.

Nextdoor to Oyo, Alexis Gass runs Clover Creek, a gift and home goods shop.

“I’m OK with it being once a month, but not every single weekend,” Gass said.

“The tents and umbrellas, they extend over into the front of the retail stores. Retail stores who are paying rent just like restaurants are, they don’t get any visibility from the street because the restaurants have taken over everything,” she said.

Gass said the street closures also made it hard for customers to find parking, and if someone buys a large or heavy item from her shop, it’s not easy to lug it back to their car.

“It just seems like there needs to be equity among all the shops and the restaurants,” Gass said.

​​Pamela Ott, Pleasanton’s deputy city manager, said city leaders plan to keep Weekend on Main and the parklet programs going in the future, but they may have to change somewhat.

“Weekend on Main did exactly what it was designed to do, which was to support our merchants, and those were largely restaurants,” she said.

But it was important to end the program after Labor Day to help balance the scales for retail shops, with the fall and holiday shopping seasons on the horizon. “That is the time that retailers generally return a significant portion of their annual revenues to their businesses,” she said.

It was also necessary to end the program before the downtown association’s Concerts in the Park event series, she said.

Other cities are facing similar challenges in determining whether to continue, alter or end their various outdoor business programs.

San Jose’s Al Fresco outdoor dining program will remain in effect until Dec. 31, but it’s unclear what will happen after that deadline, even as some city leaders and business owners have been advocating to make parklets and street closures permanent, including the banishment of cars from a portion of San Pedro Street.

Oakland will keep its Flex Street program in place through at least March 2022, which allows some businesses to use sidewalk and parking space areas, and includes some street closures.

And at least through the end of the year, it appears Walnut Creek will allow restaurants to retain their outdoor dining patios on Main Street and keep some side streets closed off to allow easier access to the main road.

Zile, Gass and Dissels all agree the city and downtown association need to settle on a more even-handed approach going forward.

“It’s not fair to any of us — the restaurants, the retailers, the merchants — to be sort of pitted against each other. I think the leadership can come up with something that would make everyone, to the extent they can, benefit from it,” Dissels said.

“Because the last thing we want to have happen is to have any kind of animosity amongst our merchants.”

Deputy city manager Ott said she and city leaders have heard the concerns loud and clear.

The city plans to put together a working group that includes “retailers, restaurants, other business owners in downtown, residents, city staff” and the downtown association to help “understand how we can create a Weekend on Main that supports all of those stakeholders.”

City staff aims to have renewed versions of the programs ready for council review by early next year.

Staff writiers Maggie Angst, Aldo Toledo, and Shomik Mukherjee contributed to this article.