Fifth Avenue reopened to traffic just after 11 p.m. on Sunday, August 9, once the crews struck the last of the CityFest stages and swept nine blocks of confetti and beer cups off the pavement. The Hillcrest Business Association had run the same trade for four decades: close the street, borrow it back from the city for a day, hand it over to bands, DJs, and a new ticketed wine garden on University Avenue, then give it back. This year's edition was the 40th annual CityFest, and the association's own materials put the crowd above 50,000.
A few blocks north, something is happening that has never happened in Hillcrest before. The neighborhood is building something it gets to keep.
Forty Years of Borrowed Streets
Hillcrest has always run its civic life on loans. The neon sign arching over University and Fifth has hung there since 1941, and when it needed a full electrical overhaul in 2023, the Hillcrest Business Association didn't ask the city for the money. Community members and local businesses raised more than $80,000 in six months to fund the retrofit themselves, giving the sign color-changing LEDs so it could glow rainbow for Pride and red and green at Christmas, all without a dollar of public funding, according to Fox 5 San Diego's coverage of the relighting.
CityFest itself works the same way. It is not a permanent installation. It is a street that the association applies to close, year after year, and the crowd, the stages, and the wine garden all get taken down again by Monday morning. That is the pattern that has defined Hillcrest's public life for most of its history: the neighborhood pays for its own traditions and rents the ground they stand on.
A Parking Lot Held the Market Since 1997
The Hillcrest Farmers Market tells the same story with produce instead of neon. It launched in 1997 with 27 vendors after the Business Association negotiated a deal with the California Department of Motor Vehicles to use its parking lot on Sundays, a workaround made possible with help from then-Congresswoman Susan Davis, according to the market's own history. Nearly thirty years later, that market has grown into the largest in San Diego County, with 175 to 180 vendors and more than 10,000 shoppers on a typical Sunday. It has spent its entire existence on land someone else owns.
That arrangement finally broke in January 2025, when construction began on the Normal Street Promenade and the market had to vacate the DMV lot altogether. It relocated to University Avenue between Herbert Street and Park Boulevard as a stopgap, a move CBS 8 covered at the time, noting vendors were nervous about the change but found the wider street gave them more room to work.
What's Different About the Normal Street Promenade
The project underway now is not another borrowed space. It is a nearly $30 million capital build funded by the City of San Diego, the San Diego Association of Governments, and parking meter revenue, converting the west-side lanes of Normal Street into a permanent pedestrian walkway and rainbow-colored bike path while keeping the eastbound lanes open to cars, according to details compiled on Hillcrest's Wikipedia page. When finished, it will include:
- A children's play area
- Historic-style lamp posts and new seating
- 13 new parking spots
- 115 new trees
- A wider Pride Plaza built for year-round use, not just festival days
The full build is expected to wrap by late 2026. But several current business listings, including the market's own directory entries updated this spring and summer, already show its address as 3960 Normal Street rather than the University Avenue stopgap. That suggests the market itself may have moved into its finished home ahead of the surrounding streetscape work, though residents heading there on a Sunday should expect some construction context to remain visible until the full project closes out.
Once it does, Hillcrest will have something it has never had in three decades of markets and four decades of street fairs: a piece of public infrastructure it doesn't have to ask permission to use, funded with government dollars instead of a GoFundMe.
The Restaurant Investment Followed the Market, Not the Other Way Around
Operators are placing real bets on the same handful of blocks. Rocko's Modern Taphouse, a family-friendly arcade and beer bar, opened this year at 3940 Fourth Avenue, directly across from Scripps Mercy Hospital, with owner intentions to expand into lunch service by summer given the hospital and office foot traffic nearby, as reported by San Diego Magazine.
A few blocks south, Saigon Alley Kitchen & Bar opened toward the end of July at 3687 5th Avenue, taking over a space that had cycled through Two Seven Eight and, before that, The Tractor Room. It's the newest concept from the family behind Pho Ca Dao Vietnamese Kitchen, adding a full bar program to a menu built around pho, banh mi, and vermicelli bowls, according to reporting from What Now San Diego.
Down on Park Boulevard, Trust has kept its footing as one of the neighborhood's steadier bets, having already picked up recognition from Eater San Diego as a Best Neighborhood Trailblazer for its wood-fired approach to New American cooking. None of these are pop-ups or short leases. They are build-outs, full liquor licenses, and multi-year commitments in a business district that spent decades watching its biggest civic assets sit on land it didn't control. Operators tend to sign longer leases where they expect the surrounding public realm to hold its value, and a permanent promenade with new trees, lighting, and parking is exactly the kind of signal that changes a five-year lease into a ten-year one.
What This Means If You Live Here
The Sunday rhythm hasn't changed on paper. The market still runs 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., every week, rain or shine, and street parking around the DMV lot at Normal and Lincoln remains free on Sundays even as the surrounding block continues its transition. If you're headed there this month, map to 3960 Normal Street rather than the old University Avenue stopgap, since that's the address most current listings now show.
CityFest won't come around again until next August, but the wine garden the Business Association added this year on University Avenue, a ticketed tasting space distinct from the free festival grounds, suggests the organization is testing new formats even as it keeps the core street fair intact. Watch for that to return, possibly expanded, in 2027.
The bigger shift is quieter and slower. For the first time since the market started borrowing a government parking lot in 1997, and since the sign started passing the hat for its own maintenance in the 1980s, Hillcrest is getting a piece of its identity built with public capital instead of community fundraising. That's a different kind of neighborhood than the one that has existed for the last three decades, even if the Sunday market smells the same and CityFest still closes the same nine blocks.
If you're a homeowner in Hillcrest and you're curious how infrastructure like this tends to show up in property values over time, The Lotzof Group works across San Diego's uptown and coastal neighborhoods and can walk you through what a confidential home valuation looks like when a neighborhood is mid-transition like this one.
