The ribbon cutting at 204 Second Street happened at 3:30 in the afternoon, in a building that has stood on that corner since 1904. By 5, a guitarist named Tim Cecchini was playing through the open doors while people walked in holding glasses of wine that started as grapes on Oakley soil. It was Favalora Vineyards Winery's first dedicated tasting room, and it gave the winemaker's family a permanent address in the town where their vines actually grow, after years of pouring those same wines out of a shared space on Vasco Road in Livermore.
If you have lived in Oakley for a while, you probably know Frank Favalora's name even if you have never met him. His estate vineyard traces back to 1999, planted with Zinfandel cuttings from his father in law's vines, which themselves went into the ground in 1902. The wines have picked up Double Gold medals at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. What Oakley has not had, until this month, is a place downtown to taste them.
That gap just closed. And it closed the same way another gap closed two blocks over in June, when Rocki's Chicken opened at 3350 Main Street. Both storefronts exist because of the same city program, and understanding that program tells you more about what is actually happening on these two streets than either opening does on its own.
The Program Doing the Work
In February 2023, the Oakley City Council created the Citywide Retail & Industrial Revitalization Grant Program, funding it with $700,000 in American Rescue Plan Act dollars. The structure is simple: the city will match a business's investment in its storefront, dollar for dollar up to 80 percent of project cost, capped at $50,000 per business. A business owner who wants to open on Main or Second Street still has to bring most of the money and all of the risk. The grant lowers the number they need to raise, which is often the difference between a storefront sitting empty for another year and a storefront opening this year.
Rocki's Chicken took that $50,000 match and turned it into a working restaurant on Main Street by June. Favalora took the same size grant and turned a century old building on Second Street into a tasting room with weekend hours. Neither business would tell you the grant paid for the whole project. What it did was make the math work on a block where empty storefronts have outnumbered occupied ones for longer than most residents want to admit.
This is not a one-off story about two restaurants. It is a pattern with a funding source behind it, and it explains why the pace of new openings downtown has picked up this year specifically, rather than gradually over the past five.
Why These Two Blocks, and Why Now
Main Street was not always the kind of place a wine tasting room would want to sit next to. For most of the 2000s it functioned as a wide, vehicle dominated stretch, built at a scale for cars passing through rather than people stopping to walk in. The city's Downtown Specific Plan, developed under a Downtown Task Force in the early 2000s, set out to change that, and the construction that followed narrowed the road, widened the sidewalks, added rain gardens and bike paths, and built custom rammed earth walls for public seating along the retail strip.
That infrastructure work is what makes the current wave of storefront openings different from past attempts at a downtown resurgence. A wine tasting room with Friday evening pours and Saturday live music only works if people are comfortable parking once and walking between two or three destinations. Second Street and Main Street are now built for that kind of visit in a way they were not a decade ago. The grant program supplied the businesses. The earlier streetscape work supplied the sidewalks those businesses now depend on.
What a Weekend Downtown Actually Looks Like Now
Favalora's tasting room runs Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. for tastings, pours wine by the glass or bottle on Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m., and pairs live music with wine service on Saturday evenings from 5:30 to 8:30. That is a new fixed point on the weekly downtown calendar, and it sits inside a calendar that already had more going on than most residents track in one place.
Here is what the City of Oakley has scheduled downtown between now and the end of October:
| Event | Schedule | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday Night Bites food trucks | First Friday of each month | Civic Center Park/Plaza |
| Concerts in the Park | First Friday, May through October, 5 to 9 p.m. | Civic Center Plaza |
| Mercantile Market | Fourth Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. | Downtown Oakley |
| Movies on Main Street | Fridays at sunset | Civic Center Plaza |
| Heart of Oakley Festival | Saturday, September 19, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. | Civic Center Plaza and Main Street |
The movie lineup for the rest of the season includes The Wild Robot on August 21, Sonic 3 on September 25, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie on October 16, each starting at sunset with crafts and trivia beforehand and a snack shack running behind the stage.
The Heart of Oakley Festival on September 19 is the 12th year the city has run it, and it is the one weekend where the whole downtown corridor gets treated as a single event space, with vendor booths running along Main Street between Vintage Parkway and Norcross in addition to Civic Center Plaza. If you have been to it before, this year's version lands two weeks after Favalora's grand opening and roughly three months after Rocki's Chicken opened in June, which means the festival will be the first time both new storefronts are open during the exact same weekend that draws the biggest downtown crowd of the year.
Put the calendar and the two new storefronts together and a Friday or Saturday night downtown now has a shape it did not have a year ago. Dinner at an existing Main Street anchor like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which has served the neighborhood since 2022 with hours that run to 9 most weeknights and later on Friday and Saturday, still works as a starting point. Now there is a reason to walk the two blocks to Second Street afterward instead of driving home.
What's Still in the Pipeline
The city is not stopping at storefronts. A design review is currently working through the Planning Division for a new Oakley Library and Community Center, a roughly 13,370 square foot civic building proposed at 3235 Main Street, inside the Downtown Specific Plan boundary. It is meant to replace the current library, which shares space with Freedom High School, and to sit close enough to City Hall and Civic Center Park that the three would function as one connected civic block. The project is still in design review, so there is no construction timeline yet worth repeating as fact. But it tells you the city's intent for this stretch of Main Street goes beyond filling empty leases. It is building toward a downtown where the library, the plaza, the festivals, and now a wine tasting room and a chicken restaurant all sit inside a walk of each other.
None of this changes what downtown Oakley has always been to the people who live here: a place to grab dinner, catch a free movie, or let the kids run around the plaza on a Friday night. What has changed is how much of that is now happening on purpose, funded by a specific program with a specific dollar cap, on two blocks the city spent years making walkable before anyone tried to open a tasting room on them.
If you are already living in Oakley and keeping half an eye on what your neighborhood is worth, that kind of deliberate, funded infill downtown is worth knowing about even outside of any plans to buy or sell. It is the sort of change that shows up in how a block feels to walk down long before it shows up in a comparable sale. If you ever want to talk through what that means for your own street or your own home, The Lucas Group knows this part of the East Bay block by block, and we're always glad to talk it through. Get in Touch.
