"I feel like we owe it to the community," Councilmember Adam Rak said back in June 2025, arguing for a vote that would let San Carlos start building something downtown instead of waiting for a bigger plan to come together on its own timeline. The council agreed with him, three votes to one, with one abstention. That single meeting is the reason the pocket park in the middle of Laurel Street has been wrapped in construction fencing since April, and it's also the reason the story residents are telling themselves about "downtown revitalization" is only half true.
If you've walked past Harrington Park recently, on the 700 block between the busiest stretch of restaurants and shops, you've seen the fencing, the equipment, and the sign explaining that something is coming. What most people walking by don't know is that the project behind that fence and the bigger vision they've seen in city renderings are no longer the same project. One has a contractor, a budget, and a completion date. The other doesn't have a start date at all.
What's Actually Behind the Fence
Harrington Park itself is small. It sits on about a third of an acre, roughly 7,250 square feet, tucked between storefronts rather than framed by a lawn or a trail, about the same footprint as the San Carlos Avenue Neighborhood Park across town. What's being built inside that small footprint is not modest. The city's Phase 1A scope, officially City Project No. C2215, includes a new multi-purpose plaza, a multi-purpose building housing two restrooms (one fully accessible with a universal changing station), a storage and mechanical room, new public seating, a rain garden, a grove of shade trees, and a ten-foot shade structure over the restroom building. A drinking fountain with a bottle-filling station and a handwashing station will sit just outside.
The existing donor bricks are being kept and folded into the new design. The "Balancing Act" sculpture, the blue juggling figure that's marked this block for years, isn't going anywhere permanently. It's being relocated to the northern end of the 700 block, near Cherry Street, so it stays part of the scenery while the rest of the block changes around it.
Construction fencing went up April 6, 2026, after a short pre-closure window from April 1 to April 3 when crews pulled out the benches, planters, and signage. The whole project carries a price tag of roughly $3.6 million, and the city's own timeline puts completion in early 2027. Work runs Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., which means the noise and the fencing are a weekday condition, not a weekend one.
The Vote That Cut Downtown's Makeover in Half
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the construction sign. Back in June 2025, the council had a choice: combine Harrington Park with the larger 700 block redesign into one project, or split them and let the smaller piece move first. Combining them would have pushed the earliest possible groundbreaking to 2027 for everything. Splitting them let Harrington Park start in spring 2026 while the rest of the block waited.
The council chose to split it, three votes in favor, one no from Councilmember Neil Layton, and an abstention from Councilmember John Dugan, who said at the time that he could never vote against the downtown effort even while declining to back the combined version. What got peeled off and delayed is the more ambitious half of the plan: a permanent pedestrian plaza called Centennial Plaza, a performance pavilion, and a water feature that staff had budgeted at roughly $750,000.
That fountain number is where the real disagreement showed up. Mayor Sara McDowell pushed back on it directly, pointing to drought conditions and the cost of water use in a drought-prone region, and told the council she wasn't sure that price tag was something the community would accept. The fountain, the pavilion, and the full pedestrianization of the 700 block don't have a construction schedule as of this writing. City planning documents say only that the plaza phase will unfold on its own timeline after Harrington Park reopens. There's no funded date attached to it.
So the plain version of what happened: the council took the parts of the downtown vision everyone could agree on, the bathrooms, the shade, the seating, and fast-tracked those. The parts that were expensive or contested, the fountain most of all, got set aside without a clock running on them. When the fencing comes down in early 2027, downtown will look like the first half of the renderings people have seen. Not the whole picture.
What Moved While the Fence Went Up
The construction didn't just close a park. It rearranged how this stretch of Laurel Street works day to day. The Sunday Farmers Market didn't stop, but its stalls moved into the street itself so the weekly produce and flower vendors could keep operating without the park space they used to spill into. The four short-term parking spaces directly behind the park are gone for the duration, replaced by a designated drop-off and loading zone. Construction vehicles come and go through the alley behind Laurel Street, entering and exiting at Cherry and Olive, which keeps the trucks off the main sidewalk but does mean more alley traffic than usual.
Two businesses sit close enough to feel this the most: Mama Coco Cocina and Faith & Spirits, both directly adjacent to the park. City staff reached out to both ahead of the closure and has kept in touch as work progresses. Bow Wow Meow got a direct call as well. A city-run Downtown Prosperity Team, formed specifically to manage this kind of disruption, has held coffee chats in the park itself before it closed, drawing in owners from Town, Spasso, and Stamp Bar & Grill to talk through parking, alley congestion, and how businesses get folded into downtown programming while construction is underway.
If you're routing around the block this fall, a few things are worth knowing:
- The Farmers Market is still happening every Sunday, just in the street rather than through the park.
- Storefront access along Laurel hasn't been cut off. The construction traffic uses the alley, not the sidewalk.
- If you used to park behind the park, that space is now a drop-off zone, not parking.
- The trench work in front of the park for utility connections gets backfilled once it's done, so any temporary sidewalk disruption there isn't permanent.
What You Get Back in Early 2027, and What You Don't
When the fencing comes down, expect a small park that does more with its footprint than the old one did: real restrooms downtown for the first time, shade, a place to sit with takeout, a rain garden that's doing double duty as landscaping and stormwater management. That's a genuine upgrade for a block that's been running restaurant density without public restrooms for years.
What you won't see yet is the water feature, the pavilion stage, or the 700 block's full conversion into a car-free plaza. That's still sitting on the other side of the council's split vote, waiting on a budget conversation about the fountain that hasn't been resolved and a construction schedule that hasn't been set. The renderings you may have seen online show the finished version of both phases together. The version arriving in early 2027 is just the first one.
None of this requires a decision from anyone reading it. It's useful mostly because it changes what you should expect to see when the fence finally comes down, and because it explains why the block might still feel unfinished even after the ribbon cutting.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for property near downtown, whether you're weighing a move within San Carlos or watching how a project like this tends to affect walkability and value over time, that's a conversation worth having with someone who's tracking it closely. Vision Real Estate keeps an eye on projects like this one because they shape how a neighborhood lives day to day, long before they show up in a sale price. Reach out anytime for a free property valuation and a straight read on what's actually happening in your part of the Peninsula.
