The Los Altos July Calendar, Read Against the Plazas It's Built On

Downtown Los Altos runs on eight parking plazas, a Thursday farmers' market, and a summer calendar most residents can recite from memory. This July, all three are in play at once. The city has spent more than a year designing a park on Plazas 1 and 2, and a resident coalition turned in signatures in May to put the whole question on the November ballot. Meanwhile, the festivals, concerts, and First Friday nights are running as scheduled, using those same lots as staging, parking, and neighbors. If you live here, this is the last summer the downtown footprint is guaranteed to look the way it does now. Here is how to spend it.

The Weekend Everyone Blocks Off

The 47th Los Altos Arts & Wine Festival lands Saturday and Sunday, July 11 and 12, 2026 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day, with an opening night concert Saturday 5 to 7 p.m. The event stretches along Main and State Streets between First and Edith, through Downtown Los Altos Village. A few practical details worth knowing before you walk over:

• Spirits beyond wine. San Jose's 10th Street Distillery hosts a whiskey booth near Main and Third, the Los Altos Town Crier sponsors the Margarita booth in the Main Stage area, and Petaluma's Griffo Distillery is on the corner of State and Third with special libations.
• Where to cool off. The State Street Market Chill Zone sits inside the food hall at 170 State Street with free Wi-Fi at the corner of State and Third.
• Kids. Lori and RJ return to host the LAVA KidZone on State Street near Fourth.
• Parking, honestly. Visitors are directed to the North and South parking plazas and surrounding streets, with limited overflow at the Los Altos Community Center at 97 Hillview Avenue, a short walk across San Antonio Road at the Edith/Main light.

If you have out-of-town family visiting the same weekend, the festival is the easy answer. If you live three blocks away and have done it fifteen years running, the more interesting move is Saturday morning before 10 a.m. or the last hour Sunday, when the artist booths thin out and the food lines evaporate.

Thursdays Are Concert Nights

The city's Summer Concert Series is in its 15th year. The 2026 series kicked off with six more free shows after the opener, with musicians performing at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays on the soccer field at either Hillview Park or Grant Park. The Peninsula Symphony launched on June 13 at Grant Park, 1575 Holt Avenue, admission free, with a program leaning on John Williams, Gershwin, Joplin, and Sousa.

The remaining July and August schedule as posted by the city:

Two things residents figure out by their second summer. First, parking is limited at both locations, and concerts start promptly at 6:30 PM, which means the 6:15 arrivals get the good grass and the 6:45 arrivals stand behind the sound board. Second, Big Bang Beat drew a specific crowd this year because trumpet player Steve Stanley told the Town Crier the band is a San Francisco-based rock and soul group that has been performing in the Bay Area for over 40 years, playing hits from the 1960s to the 1990s. The concert curator's stated philosophy, from Recreation Supervisor Mary Jo Price, is that the genres reflect a range of musical tastes that resonate with Los Altos residents while providing variety, prioritizing acts that are energetic, family-friendly, and proven crowd-pleasers. Translation: pack the picnic blanket, not the folding chairs.

First Friday, Every Month

The concert series ends in early August. First Friday does not. It is a free community event featuring 10 to 15 bands playing simultaneously throughout Downtown Los Altos starting at 6:00 p.m., every month, year-round. The Los Altos Chamber of Commerce serves as fiscal sponsor of the volunteer-led event, which brings live music, art, and local culture to downtown on the first Friday of each month.

The trick with First Friday is that it is not one show, it is fifteen. Walk once from Main to State without stopping, note the two acts you want to hear, then double back. The last hour is quieter and the good tables at the sit-down restaurants free up around 8:15.

Layer in the Thursday Farmers' Market along State Street and you have four different reasons to be downtown in a given week without leaving a two-block radius.

What's New Since Last Summer

Three openings changed the downtown food map in the last twelve months, and residents who haven't looked up from their usual rotation are missing them.

Haru Japanese Restaurant. Chef-owner Gavin Liang opened Haru on First Street in early June 2026. Liang is not new to Bay Area sushi. He and Weida Chen opened Hinata, an omakase restaurant in San Francisco, in 2016, brought on Jing Huang two years later to open kaiseki restaurant Sasa, opened omakase restaurant Sushi Jin in 2022, and opened Haru in downtown Los Altos on Friday. His stated reason for the format matters: "So many omakase restaurants open down in Santa Clara County, so we figured, why should we still do omakase style? We should have something more affordable, so that's why we try to open a more casual dining restaurant in South Bay." Read that as a casual sushi room from a chef with high-end credentials, not a discount version of the same experience.

Bluestone Lane at 288 1st Street. The Australian coffee chain took over a heritage building on First. The café blends Melbourne and Sydney coastal aesthetics with the historical features of the building, a heritage-listed Los Altos landmark with an open-plan layout and Australian beach prints on the walls. Standard menu of avocado smash and grain bowls, more interesting for the room than the food.

Callao Peruvian. Slightly off the main downtown grid, worth the two-block walk. It is a little hidden and several blocks away from the main downtown Los Altos area, on 1st Street, right next to Draeger's supermarket and across from Halo blowdry bar. There is a private party room in the back for about 50 people, which is a useful thing to know when your book club or your kid's soccer team needs a room.

These three sit alongside the anchors, Roja on State Street, Los Altos Grill on Third, that residents already know.

The Plaza Question Under All of It

Here is the layer most summer roundups skip. Every one of the events above depends on the current downtown parking plazas, and the plazas are the subject of the most contested municipal fight in years.

The 2024 Downtown Parking Strategy counted 2,504 parking spaces in Downtown Los Altos, including 395 on-street spaces and 1,305 public off-street spaces. The city has been designing a "Downtown Park with Parking" on Plazas 1 and 2. On February 11, 2025, the council awarded Watry Design a contract of $2,288,500 for community engagement and design services on the project, with money drawn from the Park Impact Fee fund, which held about $18.9 million at the time. Stanford University research on the Los Altos Downtown Green, a temporary pop-up park, found that park space within the downtown environment increased foot traffic and sales tax revenue while increasing community engagement through a new gathering space.

A resident coalition disagrees with the process. FORLosAltos launched in-person signature gathering to meet an April 30 filing deadline and describes the measure as a way to rein in what they see as piecemeal decisions about public land, targeting the number of valid signatures needed to qualify for the November 2026 ballot. The petitions were submitted May 3, 2026 and are undergoing verification at the Santa Clara County Recorder's office. The initiative would prohibit the city from selling, leasing or modifying any downtown parking lots without voter approval.

The stakes, per Los Altos Stage Company board president Mike Kasperzak in the Palo Alto Daily Post: "It probably kills any project to put this to a vote."

You do not have to hold a position to notice what this means for the summer. The Farmers' Market booth near State and Third is the city's Downtown Park Outreach point, a community outreach effort for an exploration of ideas on a brand-new park in Downtown. The Arts & Wine Festival is one of the outreach venues too. If you show up to a concert, a market, or the festival this July, the clipboard question about a downtown park is part of the visit. What you say now shapes what appears on your ballot in November, and what appears on your ballot shapes the downtown your neighbors will walk through next summer.

The One Move Most Residents Skip

Read all three calendars, the city's, the Village Association's, and First Friday's, together. Downtown Los Altos has more than 150 retail, dining, service and professional businesses, and the Los Altos Village Association is celebrating its 60th year of promoting and beautifying downtown. The overlap is the interesting part. A Thursday in mid-July gets you the Farmers' Market from 4 to 8 p.m. on State Street, a concert at Grant or Hillview at 6:30, and a Haru reservation at 8:45 if you book now. A First Friday in August gets you fifteen simultaneous bands and a walkable dinner within four blocks. The 47th Arts & Wine Festival gets you two days without needing a car if you live inside the walk-shed.

The plazas you park in for all of that are the same plazas the city and a resident coalition are arguing about. Whichever way the November vote goes, this specific configuration of Los Altos summer, current lots, current tree canopy, current pedestrian flow from Third to Main, is a snapshot with a shelf life.

If you are thinking about how the downtown reshuffle might affect your block, your walk score, or your long-term plans on your own home, David Kim Group has followed every step of the plaza process from the 2024 parking strategy through the May petition filing. Schedule a Consultation and we will walk you through what the ballot outcome could mean for your specific corner of Los Altos.