If you live between 40th and 51st, you've probably noticed that the storefronts are shuffling faster than usual this year, but the strip itself looks about the same length. Nothing on Telegraph has emptied out into a long vacancy. Nothing has been torn down. The action has been happening inside the buildings that were already there, with new operators taking on addresses that other people spent years making legible. That is the story of Temescal in 2026 so far, and it's the frame worth carrying into August.
The Cattaneo Block keeps finding tenants
The clearest example is 5000 Telegraph. Small Change closed, and by early spring the same address had reopened as Ace Seafood under Peter Gutowski and Tay Kennedy, with a menu built around oysters, shrimp cocktail, and an aromatic clam chowder that the new owners describe as "Oakland style". The address sits in the middle of the designated landmark Cattaneo Block, which stretches from 5006 to 5010 Telegraph, and once housed the Buon Gusto Bakery. A block away, Genova Delicatessen opened in 1926 on the site of a former train barn, which is a useful reminder that the "new" operators up and down this stretch are usually the second, third, or fourth tenants in a room that was purpose-built for feeding the neighborhood a hundred years ago.
Ace's hours settled at Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 8 p.m., and events began on the patio in March, which are the details that matter if you're deciding whether it fits into a Thursday-evening walk rather than a special occasion.
A former Walgreens becomes a grocery store, not a hole in the ground
The other big address swap this year is at 5055 Telegraph. Walgreens closed its doors at Temescal Plaza last February as part of the drug store chain's wider Bay Area store shutdown, which left one of the largest single retail floors on the strip sitting dark for a year. In February 2026, Temescal Property Management filed an application with the City of Oakland for Grocery Outlet to take the space. The site spans 14,370 square feet and is located across the street from a Whole Foods Market at 5110 Telegraph Avenue.
The interesting piece isn't the discount grocer itself. It's what the landlord told the city in the filing: "Finding tenants for medium- and large-scale retail spaces like the former Walgreens space is increasingly difficult," the application said, and without a parking modification, Grocery Outlet would not move in. That is a candid statement about what it now takes to fill a big-box footprint on this corridor, and it's the mechanism behind the pattern you see everywhere else on Telegraph. Small operators recycle small rooms quickly. Larger rooms sit longer and require concessions to reopen. If you've wondered why the smaller storefronts around Alley 49 always seem to have someone new setting up while the bigger boxes take years, that's the reason in one sentence.
For scale, the second Grocery Outlet would sit about a mile and a half north of the chain's first Oakland outpost at 2900 Broadway, which means the Broadway–Telegraph spine is about to have two of them within walking distance of each other.
Piedmont Avenue, five minutes east, is running the same playbook
The pattern isn't confined to Telegraph. On Piedmont Ave, The Lodge, closed since the end of January, reopened after new owners Chris Cashin and Kris Gordon took over the bar, taxidermy and all. The interior is essentially unchanged, and the new menu keeps bar classics like a burger, a Chicago-style hot dog, an all-day egg sandwich, and an elevated grilled cheese with white cheddar and brie, ranging from $6 to $12. Hours run Sunday to Thursday, noon to midnight; Fridays and Saturdays noon to 2 a.m.
Further up the avenue, a bigger arrival is in motion. Restaurateur Min Park, of SF's Itria and Menlo Park's Yeobo, Darling, and chef Brian Shin are aiming for a late 2026 opening of a Korean comfort-food restaurant called Ajae at an undisclosed address on Piedmont Avenue. Shin is an alum of Benu and the former In Situ at SFMOMA. The context matters: this is the same avenue where chef James Syhabout's Commis was for years the only Michelin-starred restaurant in all of Oakland, and where recent vacancies include the former Pomella space at 3770 Piedmont and The Crepe Pan at 4184 Piedmont. Two empty storefronts, one high-pedigree arrival on deck. If you live on the Piedmont side of 51st, that's a pretty good preview of the fall.
What to actually put on the calendar
August and September on this side of Oakland are shaped less by big fairs and more by smaller, recurring things. A few worth marking:
- Temescal Open Edible Gardens Day, Saturday, August 1, 10 AM to 4 PM. Neighbors open their edible gardens for a self-guided tour, with about half open from 10 AM–1 PM and the rest from 1–4 PM. Registered attendees get a digital map ahead of time. This is the kind of event that only makes sense if you already live here, which is probably why it doesn't show up on most "things to do in Oakland" lists.
- Fútbol on the Block watch parties at 5200 Telegraph. Free, all-ages, outdoor viewing with a beer garden and food. The BID has been running these throughout the summer soccer calendar.
- The Temescal Roots Project. A public art installation is in development to honor the rich history of the Black Panther Party's beginnings in and around Temescal, as the first 3D public art piece to honor the entire party rather than a single member. Worth watching for site announcements.
- Mosswood Recreation Center. After a long closure, the center celebrated its grand reopening in the spring, and the programming calendar has been rebuilding through summer. If you have kids and had written it off, it's worth another look.
- The Temescal Branch library at 5205 Telegraph runs Family Storytime on Thursday mornings, 10:30–11:30 AM, and Baby Bounce for pre-walkers on Wednesdays at 11:45 AM. Both are quiet, and both fit into a normal weekday.
If you want the bigger anchors, the district's spring calendar had the annual Taste of Temescal, a culinary tour with over 40 stops and four entertainment zones, and the summer's Temescal Street Fair on Saturday, July 11, from 11 AM to 7 PM, described as the longest-running street fair in the area. Both come back around, and both are easier to enjoy when you already know which block is which.
The Alley still does what the Alley does
While Telegraph churns, the pair of pedestrian lanes off 49th remain the constant. Bakesale Betty is still around the corner. Curbside Creamery, Crimson Horticultural Rarities, and Esqueleto are still where you left them. The alley once housed stables for horse-drawn trolleys in the early 1900s, which is the same recycling story as the Cattaneo Block, just at smaller scale. Contact Records at 484 Alley 49 keeps Tuesday-through-Sunday hours, and Womb House Books at 470 49th Street hosted the first Temescal Alley Book Festival in July, which is the sort of first-of-its-kind event that tends to come back.
The through-line, if you spend any time walking it, is that the alley has always been a place where small operators take small rooms, and the rooms are the right size for small operators to stay solvent. That's the same math that keeps Telegraph turning over quickly at the storefront scale while the former Walgreens sat empty for a year.
The one thing to take from this
Temescal in 2026 is not expanding or contracting. It is being handed off, address by address, from one operator to the next, usually within months rather than years. When Small Change closed, Ace Seafood took the room. When The Lodge went dark, new owners kept the deer heads and reopened. When Walgreens left, the landlord went to the city to make the space workable for a different kind of tenant rather than let it sit. That's a healthier sign for a commercial corridor than a flurry of ground-up construction would be, because it means the buildings themselves still work, and the neighborhood still has enough foot traffic to make a lease pencil out for someone new.
The practical upshot for a resident: don't write off a storefront because it looked closed last month. Walk the block. The name on the door is probably different from what your phone thinks it is.
If you'd like to talk about how the shape of Temescal, Rockridge, or the Piedmont Ave corridor is influencing what's coming on the market this fall, Diana Ip is happy to compare notes over coffee. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
