Santa Rosa’s Fourth Street closure, boon for restaurants, irks some retailers

The orange barricades sitting astride Fourth Street in the heart of Santa Rosa have cordoned off part of downtown to vehicles for a week now, and in their place have sprung dining tables, many within shaded “parklets” framed by wooden fencing, where diners are tucking into meals and sipping from frosty glasses.

The barriers closed three blocks of Fourth Street between B and E streets, carving out a new pandemic-era pedestrian space that is set to remain through Oct. 15.

It has received mixed reviews from downtown business owners, with restaurateurs largely embracing the extra leg room after indoor dining was shut down again this week. Retailers, however, are less enthusiastic, pointing to dips in sales that they worry are tied to the drop in vehicle traffic.

The freedom to seat patrons in the street means much-needed extra capacity for the roughly 20 restaurants or other establishments that serve food on or near the three closed blocks, including Bollywood Bar & Clay Oven and Beer Baron, both owned by the Chandi Hospitality Group and both of which now feature large makeshift outdoor seating areas.

The founder and president, Sonu Chandi, noted that while it’s too early to gauge the closure’s effect, the initial indications are good.

“I personally think this could be a really positive thing and drive positive traffic to downtown Santa Rosa, which we’ve missed over the years,” Chandi said.

Christian Sullberg, co-owner of Noble Folk Ice Cream & Pie Bar, supports the closure and hopes it makes Santa Rosa’s downtown more inviting, citing Healdsburg — where Noble Folk also has a downtown location — as an atmosphere worth emulating. Santa Rosa’s experiment also could prompt Fourth Street businesses to find novel ways to work together, he said.

“I think it’s been needed for a while,” Sullberg said.

The closure has allowed proprietors to stake out numerous parklets for outdoor dining along Fourth Street. Fifteen of the wooden dining structures have been assembled or will be built by Bayside Church Santa Rosa, according to Mason Williams, the pastor of student ministries for the Sebastopol Road church.

“We know how much the restaurants have been hurting,” Williams said. “We just wanted to find a way to help and serve.”

The city also has set up green umbrellas over blue and orange chairs, which are sprinkled throughout Fourth Street and also on the downtown square, where four crape myrtle trees are now blooming bright pink. After the fog burns off, downtown Santa Rosa this week has looked a little brighter and a little busier than it did in March and April, when the pandemic was throttling the local economy.

Still, the city is trying to achieve a difficult balance, between drawing enough people to downtown that local businesses can be prosperous without attracting crowds of such magnitude that Fourth Street becomes a COVID-19 hotspot. Some retailers say the closure appears to have actually hurt, not helped, their business.

Mark Auerbach says his Mark Allen Jewelers business, located just outside orange barricades blocking traffic between the square and D Street, remains a destination for customers around the Bay Area. But Auerbach said his foot traffic is “definitively down” and that while extra outdoor seating for restaurants is a good move, closing Fourth Street is not.

“Closing the street is not going to make it busier,” Auerbach said. “People that weren’t coming here before aren’t suddenly going to come downtown now.”

Skeeter’s Gallery, which sells women’s clothing and gifts, is fully within a closed block of Fourth Street, meaning nobody can park in front. By noon on Thursday, Tyler Jansen, who co-owns Skeeter’s with his wife, Carolyn, said the day’s customers can be counted on one hand, and though he puts most of the blame on the pandemic, he said blocking off Fourth Street hasn’t helped.

“The street closure is beneficial for restaurants, but not for retailers,” he said.

“Awful, awful," Sharzad Mo, owner of Mirage Florist, responded after being asked how the closure had affected her business. No vehicles on the road means no curbside deliveries to her shop’s front door, so she’s been driving to Rohnert Park and Petaluma to restock before parking around the corner on D Street and taking trip after trip to haul bouquet material to her shop herself.

“They closed the road just for a few restaurants, that’s it,” Mo said.

Cadance Hinkle Allinson, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce-associated Downtown Action Organization, said she’d try to work with more than a dozen merchants within or near the closure zone as the Fourth Street program continued.

“It definitely is a little more challenging for retail because we can’t really adopt the one-size-fits-all approach that we did for outdoor dining with our restaurants,” Hinkle Allinson said. “We’re working on connecting individually with the retailers who want to work with the program to come up with creative solutions to engage their business with the community.”

The city will continue to monitor the closure’s impact. Feedback from an upcoming survey of downtown businesses over the next couple of weeks could give the city reasons to continue, change or reverse the closure altogether. Until then, the mid-October end date remains in place.

Raissa de la Rosa, the city’s economic development director, acknowledged that some retailers are unhappy.

“But if we don’t do something, all business will suffer,” de la Rosa said. “We’re hoping that those retailers who are not in favor of this concept will realize that we’ve created a safer place for people to come and experience the downtown.”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.