The Empty Storefronts On Lakeshore Are A Countdown, Not A Retreat

Walk Lakeshore Avenue on a Saturday morning this August and you will pass a line for Arizmendi's morning bake, a new coffee counter pouring Yemeni brews where a neighborhood cafe used to be, and at least one storefront with butcher paper taped over the glass. Every one of those things is true at the same time, and that is the part most people walking past miss. The paper-covered windows are not a sign this stretch of Oakland is losing ground. They are the visible half of a plan the merchants running the avenue have been working on out loud, on a timeline they have already put a date on.

What's actually happening on Grand Lake and Lakeshore this fall is three things moving at once: a business district publicly counting down its own vacancies, new operators filling storefronts blocks away faster than the empty ones get noticed, and a film festival returning in September to the exact building where it started twenty-four years ago. None of it is coincidence and none of it is decline. It is a corridor mid-reset, and reading it correctly changes how you experience the next few months here.

The Vacancy Countdown Nobody Is Hiding

The Lakeshore Avenue Business Improvement District, known locally as LABID, has been unusually candid about the empty storefronts on its own street. In a recent community newsletter, the district pointed to specific addresses rather than speaking in generalities: a space of more than 10,000 square feet, one of the largest available footprints on the avenue, sits between Arizmendi Bakery and The Peach Brunch in what used to be a frozen yogurt shop. Down the block, the former Starbucks at 3347 Lakeshore closed unexpectedly, a departure that surprised regular customers who had treated that corner as a default meeting spot for years.

LABID's own framing was direct: these are not vacant buildings, they are unclaimed opportunities, and the district has set a goal of filling every empty storefront on the avenue by 2027. That kind of specificity, a named year attached to a stated goal, is not how a business district talks when it is worried about the avenue's future. It is how one talks when it thinks it has momentum and wants the timeline on record.

Part of that confidence traces back to institutional memory the avenue just lost and is trying to replace. Carol Dru, who served as LABID's co-director since 2019 and had been involved with the district's earliest merchant association efforts decades before that, retired this year to spend more time with her five grandchildren. Her decades on Lakeshore predate the Business Improvement District structure itself, which makes the avenue's current push to fill every empty storefront by 2027 read less like a slogan and more like an unfinished project she is handing off mid-stride.

What's Actually Moving In While The Signs Are Still Up

The storefronts that are empty tend to get noticed more than the ones that just filled, which skews how the avenue feels if you are only half paying attention. Two openings in July alone tell a different story about the corridor's actual pace.

Bar Skula opened July 7 at 542 Grand Avenue, in the space that used to be Sidebar, from the same owners behind the long-running Luka's Taproom and Lounge. It is a cevicheria and grill, and it kept some Luka's-era favorites on the menu alongside a new lineup of oysters, scallops, and California seafood ceviches. The interior carries a mural by artist Pancho Pescador built around Lake Merritt's wildlife, with framed photos of the lake's actual creatures and paper mache pieces made by a local craftsman rounding out the room. It is the kind of detail that only shows up when a new operator is building for the neighborhood specifically, not just filling a lease.

A few blocks over, Mazar Cafe soft-opened July 25 at 2834 Lakeshore Avenue, in the former home of Cafe Lakeview. Mazar serves Yemeni coffee and handcrafted drinks alongside pastries, giving the avenue a second specialty coffee option within walking distance of the farmers market plaza.

Two openings in the same month, both replacing known neighborhood spots rather than sitting in raw new construction, is a turnover rate that outpaces the handful of storefronts still empty. The avenue is filling in faster than the empty windows suggest, just not always in the same block you happen to be looking at.

The Avenue Threw Itself Its Own Party For The First Time

For years, if you wanted a big outdoor event near here, you went to the lake. Lakefest Oakland has taken over Lake Merritt in late June since 2018, and Festival at the Lake ran a similar role back in the 1980s and 90s. Lakeshore Avenue itself never had a signature festival of its own, at least not since a smaller Lakefest: Art & Wine Festival ran here briefly in 2008 and 2009.

That changed this year. The Lakeshore Spring Festival launched in 2026, organized by the Lakeshore Avenue Business Improvement District with two veteran event producers and the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center. The festival occupies Lakeshore Avenue itself, from the plaza outside the LGBTQ Center to Mandana Boulevard, with a main stage on that plaza and a smaller one further down. That plaza has a new name too. In May, the Oakland City Council renamed it Moore Hope Plaza, honoring Oakland activists and married couple Peggy Moore and Hope Wood, who died in a car accident in 2024.

An avenue that spent decades borrowing the lake's crowd now has a standalone event with its own footprint, its own newly named public space, and organizers who were explicit that the goal is to help Lakeshore's actual storefronts get discovered by new customers during the festival, not just draw a crowd that leaves once the music stops.

The Theater That Didn't Need A Reset, Because It Started This One

Not everything on this stretch is new. The Grand Lake Theater has anchored the corner of Grand and Lake Park Avenue since 1926, and its marquee still lights up the block the way it always has. What is worth marking on your calendar is what returns to that building this September.

The Oakland International Film Festival holds its 24th edition September 9 through 19, and its first home back in 2002 was the Grand Lake Theater itself. Over more than two decades the festival has moved through venues across the city, including what is now Northeastern University Oakland, known to longtime residents as the former Mills College campus. This year both venues are back in rotation, with the Grand Lake Theater hosting opening night on September 9 with screenings at 4:00, 6:45, and 9:30 pm.

A festival that started at this theater, wandered the city for twenty-four years, and keeps circling back to the same marquee is its own kind of proof that the neighborhood's cultural gravity hasn't shifted, even while its storefronts have.

Reading The Corridor Right This Fall

None of these four threads look like much on their own. A retiring co-director, two new restaurants, a renamed plaza, a film festival's opening night. Put together, they describe an avenue that is being rebuilt in public, on a schedule its own merchants set, rather than one drifting toward empty windows nobody is tracking.

If you live near Lakeshore or Grand, the next few months give you a reason to walk the avenue with a different eye. Order the ceviche at Bar Skula and take in the mural. Grab a coffee at Mazar before the Saturday farmers market crowd shows up. Watch what LABID's survey turns that 10,000-square-foot space into before 2027 arrives. And buy a ticket for opening night at the Grand Lake Theater, in the same auditorium where this whole festival began.

The empty storefronts will fill. The question worth paying attention to is what fills them, and this fall gives you a front-row seat to that answer.

If you're the kind of neighbor who already notices which storefronts are turning over and wonders what that means for your own street, Mark Choi has been reading Oakland block by block for years. Start Your East Bay Home Search whenever you're ready to see what that kind of momentum is worth.