The yellow Circle Bar sign came back on over Main Street back in May, ending nearly three years of a dark storefront at 2926 Main Street. Three blocks away, on the Third Street Promenade, the storefronts have not come back on. Roughly three in ten of them sit empty right now, and that number has done a lot of work in recent coverage of Santa Monica, standing in for the whole city's commercial health in headline after headline.
The problem is that Main Street and the Promenade are not the same street, and they are not having the same summer.
The Vacancy Number Everyone's Repeating
The Promenade's vacancy rate has become shorthand for "Santa Monica retail is struggling," and there's a reason for that. It's a clean, quotable figure, and it sits alongside a run of closures that read like a trend: Misfit Bar and Restaurant shut down in April after fifteen years, and Britannia Pub, a fixture on Santa Monica Boulevard for three decades, closed its doors on July 31, with a Taco Bell Cantina slated to take the address.
Those are real losses, and a longtime regular of either place has every reason to feel the neighborhood shifting under them. But the vacancy figure describes a corridor built for national retailers and built around foot traffic patterns that changed after 2020. It says very little about Main Street, a half mile south and a different kind of block entirely, where the turnover looks less like abandonment and more like a lease changing hands between people who already know the neighborhood.
What Actually Filled the Gaps
Main Street's churn this year has a pattern to it, and the pattern is local operators moving into addresses with history rather than national chains moving into empty ones.
| Address | What closed | What's there now |
|---|---|---|
| 1355 Ocean Ave | Blue Plate Oysterette, after 16 years | Westside Oyster Club |
| 930 Montana Ave | Go Get Em Tiger coffee shop | The Win-Dow smashburger counter |
| 3117 Ocean Park Blvd | OP Cafe, a longstanding neighborhood address | PonTu, a new Peruvian spot from Richie Lopez |
| 1510 Montana Ave | Vacant, next to Sogno Toscano | Second Santa Monica location of Bacio di Latte gelato |
| 2926 Main St | Circle Bar, dark since August 2023 | Circle Bar, reopened under new ownership |
Westside Oyster Club is the clearest example of what a Main Street handoff actually looks like. It comes from the team behind The Albright on the Pier, and it took over the old Blue Plate Oysterette space on Ocean Avenue with a menu built around raw bar classics and a dining room done up in a Cape Cod white-tile look. That's not a national brand testing the Westside. That's an operator who already runs a restaurant three blocks away, betting on an address they know.
The Win-Dow's arrival at 930 Montana followed the same logic in a different key. It's the chain's seventh LA-area location, which sounds like the kind of expansion that hollows out neighborhood character, except the shop opened in the old Go Get Em Tiger space with a fifty-seat build designed by the Klein Agency and murals from LA artist KC Haxton, and it built its entire identity around a smashburger that launched at $3.95 and has crept up to around $4.50. That's a pricing decision aimed at a local lunch crowd, not a tourist strip.
The Same Family, Now on Its Third Address
The Circle Bar reopening is where the pattern gets its clearest signature, because it's not really a new story. It's the same two people showing up for the third time.
Mark and Addie Van Gessel already run Hinano Cafe in Venice and Tavern on Main in Santa Monica. When Circle Bar's previous ownership shakeup left the space dark in August 2023, ending a run that started in 1949 and included regulars ranging from Jim Morrison to Robert Downey Jr., the Van Gessels stepped in. They kept the oval bar and the original floor plan, added a new elevated DJ booth they call "The Halo," and rebuilt the sound and lighting around it. What they didn't do is turn it into something else. Mark Van Gessel told the Santa Monica Daily Press that everyone has a Circle Bar story and that the goal was letting a new generation make their own.
That's the throughline worth noticing. Between the two of them, the Van Gessels now hold three addresses in a tight stretch of the Westside, two dive-tradition bars and a restaurant, and every one of them was already there before they took over. When a Main Street space goes dark, the people most likely to relight it aren't chasing the neighborhood's reputation from outside. They're already living in it.
Contrast that with Britannia Pub. Its closure isn't part of the Main Street pattern at all. It's happening on Santa Monica Boulevard, a different corridor entirely, and its replacement is a Taco Bell Cantina, which is exactly the kind of swap that gives the vacancy narrative its teeth. The mistake is treating that swap as representative of the whole city rather than as the exception that Main Street's churn is actually running against.
The Ritual That Didn't Wait for Any of This
None of the corridor's turnover has touched the thing that actually organizes a Sunday in this neighborhood. The Main Street Farmers Market has run continuously since 1995, a collaboration between the Main Street Business Improvement Association, the Ocean Park resident group, the Victorian, and the California Heritage Museum. It sets up at Heritage Square every Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., rain or shine, with about 40 certified California farms and the kind of live entertainment and prepared food stalls that make it a stop rather than an errand.
This past Sunday's edition doubled as a Sunday Fun Day, with Main Street closed to traffic from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., more than a dozen food vendors, and an Entertainment Zone that let people carry a drink down the block. The market didn't get bigger because a restaurant closed or reopened nearby. It got bigger because the city and the merchants association decided to make a Sunday out of it, the same way they've been doing for three decades.
The neighborhood also added to its list of rituals this week rather than subtracting from it. The Ocean Park Farmers Market held its first-ever market this past Sunday, a new weekly fixture for a part of town that already had its own restaurant turnover story with PonTu. And on Saturday, the Westside Boxing Club brought its Butterfly Brawl back to the Santa Monica Pier deck, an amateur card with food vendors and ocean views that has nothing to do with retail vacancy and everything to do with what a summer Saturday here actually looks like.
What the Contrast Actually Tells You
The Promenade's empty storefronts are a real story about a corridor that hasn't found its post-pandemic footing. But treating that number as a stand-in for the whole city flattens a distinction that anyone walking Main Street on a Sunday morning would notice immediately. One corridor is losing tenants faster than it can replace them. The other is trading addresses between people who already have a stake in the block, while a decades-old farmers market and a brand new one both draw a crowd on the same weekend.
If you're trying to read what a changing block might mean for property values a few streets over, that distinction is the kind of detail worth having before you draw a conclusion from a single headline number. Kathy Marshall works this stretch of the Westside closely enough to tell you which corridors are actually shifting and which ones just make for a cleaner statistic. If you'd like a private valuation and consultation grounded in what's really happening on your block, reach out any time.
