"For people looking at where to celebrate birthdays, baptisms or whatever, they don't have to spend on a Mariachi," Alfredo Cruz Navarro told CapRadio, referring to the live band that plays every Sunday morning at his restaurant, Taqueria Maya, on Broadway. He's been running that kitchen at 2700 Broadway for fifteen years, long enough to watch two different versions of this street exist at the same address.
That's the part of Broadway familiar to many Land Park residents: a corridor that's been under construction seemingly forever, dotted with longtime businesses like Taqueria Maya. The work has already changed one part of the street, and it may already be changing again on the rest of it, on two completely different timelines.
What "Finished" Actually Means Here
The Broadway Complete Streets project covers two miles, from 3rd Street to 29th Street, and it was never designed as one job. It's three.
The first two phases, covering 3rd Street to 24th Street, wrapped their major work in August 2024. The city's senior engineer on the project, Megan Johnson, said at the time that paving and final striping were complete, medians and islands were in, and pedestrian crossings were installed, with the lane reduction already cutting down on speeding along that stretch. That part of Broadway, the section that runs past Taqueria Maya and the Tower Theatre, has been operating in its new, calmer configuration for about two years now.
The third phase covers 24th Street to Highway 99, and it may already be underway. City capital project documentation describes that segment going from four lanes down to two with a center turn lane and new bike infrastructure. Reporting last October cited the city's own timeline for that stretch: final design wrapping in fall 2025, with construction slated to begin in spring 2026. If that held, the last piece of Broadway's road diet started months ago and is either mid-build or just wrapping its early stages right now. So if you've been avoiding a chunk of Broadway because you remember cones and lane shifts, you're either driving through a section that's been done for two years, or one that's in the middle of the same process today. Very little of the corridor sits in the in-between anymore, even though "Broadway construction" still functions as a single, ongoing idea in most people's heads.
The retail side hasn't caught up evenly either. A local news roundup in October 2025 described the corridor as changing, but unevenly, with new housing and streetscape work outpacing consistent foot traffic and a still-missing major grocery or national retail anchor to tie the stretch together. Construction can finish on a schedule. A commercial corridor filling back in doesn't work that way.
The Businesses Betting On The Half That's Done
Two concrete signs of that fill-in are landing in Land Park within roughly the same year, on two different streets.
Hidden Dumpling House, a family-owned Chinese restaurant with two existing Sacramento locations, is opening its third a few blocks off Broadway, on Freeport Boulevard, taking over the former Yummy Cafe space at 3305 Freeport Blvd. The ownership team was targeting a May 2026 grand opening. It's a small, specific bet: a business already four years old choosing to grow into Land Park rather than open somewhere untested.
The bigger bet is on Broadway itself. Chef Chris Barnum-Dann, the name behind Michelin-starred Localis and the more casual Betty Wine Bar + Bistro, confirmed in March 2026 that he's opening three businesses at once on the ground floor of the Tower Broadway apartment building, a 68-unit development sitting directly across the street from Tower Cafe. The lineup includes Sacasta, a tapas and pintxos concept he first tested with pop-ups back in 2020, along with a spot called 4B and another called Giadanno's. His partner in the project is developer Jon Gianulias, who built Tower Broadway itself. At the time of the announcement, the businesses were expected to open roughly a year out, which puts a realistic opening somewhere in early 2027. Betty, his existing wine bar, posted its second-highest grossing month ever in January 2026, typically the slowest month of the year for restaurants.
Here's a snapshot of what that fill-in actually looks like right now, business by business:
| Business | Street | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Taqueria Maya | Broadway (2700) | Open 15 years, Sunday mariachi |
| Hidden Dumpling House | Freeport Boulevard (3305) | Targeted a May 2026 opening, third Sacramento location |
| Sacasta, 4B, Giadanno's | Broadway, Tower Broadway building across from Tower Cafe | Announced March 2026, expected roughly a year out |
| Soul House Vintage | 21st Street, just off Broadway | Open since around 2024 |
That last one, Soul House Vintage, belongs on this list because it's the kind of small addition that doesn't make headlines but fills the same gap the restaurants are filling. A CapRadio report offers a closer look at the shop. Nathaniel Woo opened the vintage clothing shop with his mom on 21st Street, just off Broadway, aiming to keep prices reasonable rather than treat vintage as a premium category. "It's nice to have something where anyone can come in and grab a piece," Woo told CapRadio. His shop sits on a stretch where cars can't park because it's now a bike lane, part of the same wave of city bikeway work that's been reshaping the streets feeding into Broadway.
The Shakespeare Festival Has Moved Indoors
The festival's history helps explain why that change can be easy to miss.
The Sacramento Shakespeare Festival has been around since 1966, and for decades it performed outdoors at the William A. Carroll Amphitheater, a WPA-era venue tucked inside William Land Park. For many longtime residents, the festival may still call to mind blankets on the grass, a picnic, Shakespeare under the summer sky.
That hasn't been true since 2019. The festival moved indoors to Sacramento City College's Art Court Theatre because July heat in the Sacramento Valley regularly hits triple digits, which became a genuine safety concern for performers and crew doing full productions outdoors. The festival's own event listings for its current season still place the shows at the City College campus, not the park amphitheater. 2026 marks the festival's 60th anniversary, and over that run it has produced 26 of the 37 plays in Shakespeare's full canon, a detail the company itself highlights as it plans new work built around the plays it hasn't yet staged.
It's a small correction, but it echoes Broadway: familiar places and projects can change on different timelines, and the old picture can linger.
What's Actually Happening This Weekend
If you're trying to figure out what's going on in the park itself rather than what used to be going on, here's what's on the calendar close to home right now:
- September 19, 2026: Ballet in the Park, presented by the School of Sacramento Ballet, starts at 5 p.m. at William Land Park.
- September 19-20, 2026: The American Heart Walk takes place at William Land Park over the weekend.
Both are the kind of low-key, in-the-park events that Land Park handles well, offering a different way to enjoy the park this weekend.
Broadway Is A Moving Target, Which Is The Point
None of this is a story about a neighborhood transforming overnight. It's the opposite. Two miles of road are getting rebuilt in three separate phases on three separate timelines. A handful of specific, named businesses, from a family-run dumpling shop to a Michelin-starred chef's three-concept bet, are filling in a corridor that outside observers still describe as uneven. A sixty-year-old arts institution quietly relocated indoors and never moved back. None of it happened all at once, which is why the changes are easiest to see block by block.
If you live in Land Park, the honest read on Broadway right now isn't "still under construction" or "finally done." It's both, on different blocks, at the same time, with the businesses moving in ahead of the finish line rather than after it.
If you're ever curious how any of this, the road work, the new leases, the shifting foot traffic, might actually affect what a home on or near Broadway is worth, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this corridor as closely as the people running businesses on it. Rich Gibbens keeps an eye on exactly this kind of detail across Land Park. Let's Connect.
