Clara Valdez exercises with a group of women near the Chula Vista Bayfront most mornings. When KPBS caught up with her in March, construction crews were breaking ground a few hundred feet from her usual route. "I've been liking it because it's been improving. At first, I was worried we might lose the green space. But I think they're doing it with the community in mind," she said.
She was talking about Harbor Park, and her instinct about the order of things was right. The bayfront has spent the better part of two years building toward a single Saturday in August. Three miles inland, Third Avenue never had to build toward anything. It just kept opening its doors.
What actually broke ground in March
On March 3, 2026, the Port of San Diego and the City of Chula Vista held a groundbreaking ceremony for Harbor Park, the renamed and expanded version of the old Bayside Park. The project is a $15 million south-phase build, funded in part by a $6.6 million California Coastal Conservancy grant, with up to $2.26 million of that earmarked specifically for this phase. The remaining conservancy money is set aside for a future beach and boat launch on the park's north end.
Here's the shape of what's actually landing on the ground, and when:
| Milestone | Status as of late September 2026 |
|---|---|
| Groundbreaking ceremony | Held March 3, 2026 |
| Park size | Expanding from about 12 to about 25 acres |
| Nautical-themed playground (25,000 sq ft) | Construction underway, targeted for completion by the end of 2026 |
| Splash pad | Final design pending Port board approval, targeted for spring 2027 |
| North phase (future beach and boat launch) | Funding not yet identified |
None of this exists in isolation. Harbor Park sits directly beside Sweetwater Park, the 39-acre park that opened April 2, 2025 and is now the Port's largest. Sweetwater Park's bike path and promenade already connect Bayside Park to the marinas, the Living Coast Discovery Center, and the Sun Outdoors San Diego Bay RV resort. Harbor Park isn't introducing a new stretch of waterfront. It's filling in the last unfinished piece of one that's already mostly built and already getting used.
The one day all of this was built for
HarborFest returned to the Chula Vista waterfront on August 22, 2026. The city's own announcement calls it a six-year gap since the event last ran; several regional outlets, including edhat and KPBS, count it as seven. Nobody seems entirely sure of the exact number, which says something on its own about how long the bayfront sat without a reason to gather people on it.
Whatever the count, the 2026 version came back with more moving parts than the old HarborFest ever had. The festival spread across named zones instead of one general fairground: the Flagship Stage and Waterfront Tap Garden for live music, the Dockside Beats Latin Stage for cultural performances, The Coastal Collective as an artisan marketplace, Mermaid & Mariner Cove for kids, and Harbor Showdown & Street Eats, which paired food vendors with Lucha Libre matches. A Classic Car Expo lined the shoreline under the name Ships of the Land, and The Water Way offered free kayaking and paddleboarding along with seal tours available for a small fee. Flagship Cruises & Events ran a new water taxi route into the festival, departing every two hours for a $15 one-way fare.
That is a lot of infrastructure and programming pointed at a single calendar date. It makes sense once you see it as the ribbon-cutting for two years of construction rather than a one-off nostalgia event. The two parks that stretch of bayfront is being built around will still be there in October, long after the festival tents come down. HarborFest was the day the bayfront introduced itself to people who hadn't been paying attention to the groundbreaking coverage.
Third Avenue never needed a groundbreaking
While the bayfront was pouring concrete for a future festival, Third Avenue kept running the schedule it's run for years. The Third Avenue Village Market sets up every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Park Way between Third and Fourth avenues, next to Memorial Park. It's a California Certified farmers market with more than 60 vendor tents, operated by the Third Avenue Village Association in partnership with San Diego Markets and market director Catt Fields White. No ceremony opened it. No grant funded it into existence. It just happens, every week, and has for long enough that regulars know specific vendors by name.
What keeps changing on Third Avenue is the storefronts around that weekly rhythm, one lease at a time. Restaurateur Jerome Gombert, who ran the South Park restaurant Vagabond until it closed in 2013, brought Suzette to 310 Third Avenue after more than a decade away from the local dining scene, serving French breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday. A few blocks over, the former Farmer's Table space became Acqua E Farina Trattoria Romana, an Italian restaurant serving fresh pasta and table-side cannoli. Coffee shop Tender Hooligan opened along the same stretch. None of these openings needed a Coastal Conservancy grant or a Port board vote. They needed a landlord, a lease, and a chef willing to bet on the block.
Not every change on the food map has gone over cleanly. A new drive-thru Chula Tacos is taking over a building on H Street that has cycled through Taqueria by El Prieto and, before that, Tacos El Gordo. When Tacos El Gordo operated there, its drive-thru lines were long enough to back up traffic onto H Street and Oak Lawn Avenue, and some residents are watching to see if the same bottleneck returns now that bayfront traffic has already picked up on its own.
Two clocks, one city
The bayfront's transformation runs on a construction timeline: groundbreaking dates, Guaranteed Maximum Price contracts, grant disbursements, a playground due by year's end and a splash pad due next spring. It is aimed at a destination, and for one Saturday in August, it hit that mark. Third Avenue's transformation runs on a lease timeline: a restaurant closes, a new one signs, the Sunday market keeps going regardless of who's cooking on the corner. Neither clock is waiting on the other, and neither needs to.
That's really the useful thing to understand about Chula Vista right now. The bayfront is becoming a destination on a schedule you can track in Port of San Diego press releases. Third Avenue has been a neighborhood you can just show up to on any given Sunday, and it hasn't needed anyone's permission to keep being one.
If you're watching how public investment on the water tends to show up later in what a specific block or street is worth, that's the kind of question John Rubino tracks block by block across Chula Vista and the rest of San Diego County. Reach out for a conversation about what any of this looks like for your specific property.
