If you have lived in Arcata for any length of time, you already know the summer rhythm. Saturday morning at the Plaza. A weekday walk up into the redwoods behind Cal Poly Humboldt. Dinner somewhere on 8th or 9th when the fog burns off around six. What has changed this year is not the rhythm but the pieces inside it. A new bike park opened on an old logging landing at the end of July. A restaurant that closed for a year and a half quietly turned the lights back on in April. The Plaza itself now sits car-free every Saturday, year-round.
Taken together, these updates point in a single direction. The people running Arcata's civic and small-business infrastructure are betting on the town's shared spaces getting cheaper, more usable, and more locally programmed for the residents already here. Here is what that looks like on the ground.
A new bike park opened on an old logging landing
The Landing Chaser Skills Park sits on a one-acre site inside the Arcata Community Forest, adjacent to the top of the Peanut Butter and Jump trails. Volunteers put a few finishing touches on the park last Thursday, opening it up for mountain bikers of all skill levels. Named for its location at an old forest landing, a site for stacking cut logs before they're hauled to a mill, the park features a rocky climbing trail, a trail with several large wooden platforms that riders can drop off of, and, by the end of the summer, a "skinny features" area with balancing beam-like logs.
The design is more interesting than a standard pump track. The original proposal came from a group of mountain bike riders from the Humboldt Composite, a county-wide racing team for sixth through twelfth graders, and the Redwood Coast Mountain Bike Association, who were looking for a place to practice riding some types of terrain that are hard to find here in Humboldt. Much of the park's final design is theirs. Humboldt's trails are usually rock-free, a boon for many riders, but they often compete in other areas of California where the trails are choked with them. The park was built specifically to close that gap.
For everyone else in the forest, the park also does a second job. Arcata's Director of Environmental Services Emily Sinkhorn hopes the park will siphon away fast riders from other areas of the forest more heavily used by pedestrians, keeping them centralized in an area where the risk of smacking an unaware hiker is lower. If you have been avoiding certain trails because of bike traffic, that calculus may shift over the next few months. Access is easy, just up one of the old logging roads from Redwood Park or the Fickle Hill parking lot.
The skills park is one of three connected trail changes this year. Earlier this season, construction began on a mountain bike park in the McKay tract in Eureka, and the Annie and Mary Trail in Arcata was extended to West End.
Plaza Grill came back, and it came back cheaper
If you moved to Arcata in the last two years, you may know the Jacoby Storehouse only as the brick building on the southwest corner of the Plaza. If you have been here longer, you know Plaza Grill lived on its third floor for decades, and then went dark for a year and a half. It reopened in April.
Bill Chino has been feeding Arcata for four decades, arriving in 1979 sight unseen, fresh off a 2,100-mile walk of the Appalachian Trail, and enrolled at Humboldt State with nowhere to live. He never left. His restaurant career started with a take-and-bake pizza franchise, then the Far Side Cafe in Northtown Arcata, then Abruzzi, and eventually Plaza Grill on the third floor of the Jacoby Storehouse, which he also owns.
What is different this time is the model. Plaza Grill reopened under a new format. Chino owns the bar; a separate team of former employees runs the kitchen as its own entity. The model is counter service, a smaller menu, and lower prices. He says the goal is simple: it costs too much to go out to dinner, and he wants to offer people a break.
There is a second layer to the building worth knowing about. The basement of the Jacoby Storehouse is also running as a music venue, drawing crowds for jazz, bluegrass, rock, DJs, and burlesque, with a capacity of around 200. That gives one address on the Plaza three different rooms for three different evenings, at three different price points.
Saturday belongs to the Plaza now
The Arcata Plaza Farmers' Market has run on Saturdays for decades. What changed recently is the street around it. The Arcata Plaza Farmers' Market has continued to grow over the last several years. Street closures support public safety and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ADA access and parking are maintained or expanded, and Plaza Closures during Saturday Farmers' Market has been a long-awaited goal of the City. It was a recommendation of the Plaza Improvement Task Force in 2020 and has been included as a Council Priority Project for 2023/2024.
The street is closed every Saturday during the Arcata Plaza Farmers' Market, year round, 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The market's summer hours run 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. from April 4 through November 21, with winter hours resuming after that, so if you have been showing up at 10 out of habit, you have already missed the first hour of the busy season.
A few things that make the market worth planning a Saturday around, especially for residents who already have a favorite vendor:
- Alongside the weekly produce, humanely raised meats and eggs, honey, jams, flowers, and plant starts, local goat cheese and fresh caught fish show up depending on the time of year.
- The market features the very best bands of Humboldt County, with performances each week from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
- CalFresh EBT customers get a $15 Market Match.
- Pets are not allowed, but trained, ADA certified service animals are welcome.
If you have out-of-town family visiting, the market is now doing double duty as an event and a public space. The full block between 8th and 9th and G and H is walkable in a way it was not a few years ago.
What August looks like on the Plaza and around it
The rest of the summer calendar keeps building. Arcata Main Street's Sunday programming on the Plaza runs alongside a mid-month reggae date, with the West Coast Riddims Tour on the Arcata Plaza on August 15. If you want to bracket a Plaza day with a set at another venue that afternoon or evening, Buddy Reed and the Rip It Ups play Dell'Arte International the same afternoon and Mad River Brewing that night, and Flat River Band plays the Humboldt County Fairgrounds later that evening.
For a slightly different scale, the Humboldt Bay Marathon and Half-Marathon on August 9 runs along the Eureka Waterfront and Hikshari' Trail, and the first-ever Rumble Over the Redwoods lands at the California Redwood Coast-Humboldt County Airport August 8 and 9. Neither is in Arcata proper, but both pull a crowd through town on the way in and out.
The thread running through all of this is not a marketing plan. It is a set of independent decisions by city staff, longtime restaurateurs, farmers, and community bike groups that happen to be pushing the same direction at the same time.
A short list for the next warm Saturday
If you want a way to string these updates together in a single day without driving more than a few miles, here is a route that uses what is actually new:
- Start at the Fickle Hill parking lot and walk or ride up to the Landing Chaser Skills Park. Even if you are not on a bike, the platforms and the log stacking landing are worth seeing.
- Come down through Redwood Park and cut over to the Plaza before the market wraps at 2 p.m. The block is closed to cars until 3:30, so there is no reason to rush back to a meter.
- Stay on the Plaza for the afternoon music, then head up to the third floor of the Jacoby Storehouse for an early counter-service dinner at Plaza Grill.
- If there is a show that night in the basement of the same building, you are already there.
None of these pieces existed in this configuration a year ago. The forest trail, the reopened restaurant, and the car-free block are all new inside the last twelve months.
For anyone who has watched Arcata cycle through openings, closings, and reopenings across the decades, the story worth telling this summer is not that any one place came back. It is that the shared civic pieces around the Plaza and up into the Community Forest are being rebuilt with residents in mind, not tourists. Everything on this list is free or low-cost, walkable, and programmed by people who live here.
If you are thinking about what a summer weekend in Arcata looks like a few years from now, or what it would take to trade a longer commute for a walk to the Plaza, the team at Coldwell Banker Cutten Realty knows this town street by street and would be glad to talk. Contact Us Today.
