The block between Hearst and Virginia has always kept its own weather. Even on cool July mornings when the rest of the flatlands are under marine layer, Fourth Street tends to catch sun by ten, and by noon the sidewalks smell like laurel from the planters and yeast from the bakeries. If you live near enough to walk in, you already know the rhythm. What has shifted this summer is what the rhythm carries you toward.
For a stretch that a lot of Berkeley residents had written off as a fixed-in-amber shopping district, Fourth Street in 2026 is behaving more like a program than a promenade. A signature dining room has changed hands, an after-dark market has taken root, and a car meet is turning up on a July Sunday morning. Taken together, the season's additions point to a block that has quietly decided to be a venue, not just an address.
The Pollara Room, Reopened as Divan
The most visible change is at 1788 Fourth. After Pollara closed, the corner sat papered over for months, which is the sort of thing longtime residents notice on the walk to Bette's. It reopened on June 22 as Divan, a modern Turkish restaurant and bar from the team behind San Francisco's Taksim. Owner Serkan Sozen has said the name refers to the central seating area in a Turkish home, which is a useful hint about how the room reads once you step inside.
The redesign kept the bones and softened everything else. Berkeley Eats, which followed the buildout through the spring, described the interior as airy and clean-lined with abundant natural light, wood, tile, and a full bar, plus a covered side patio still to come. For the first stretch of service, Divan is running lunch only, from 11 a.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. weekends, with dinner service arriving in the following weeks. The menu leans on pide, mezze, kebabs, roasted vegetable dishes like kopoglu, and freshly baked flatbreads.
Two things are worth reading into the opening. First, the previous tenant was itself a serious room, so the property did not degrade during the vacancy the way a tired retail bay sometimes does. Second, Divan is a bar-forward concept in a district that historically has skimmed lighter on cocktail programs than Shattuck or Temescal. That is a small structural shift in what Fourth Street's evenings can offer, and it matters more than any single menu.
The Block Itself Is the Venue
If Divan is the anchor tenant news, the more interesting story is what Makers Row, at the southern end of the district, has been doing with the sidewalks and courtyards between shops. The stretch has spent the last year building out a calendar of public gatherings that treat the block as a shared space rather than a set of individual storefronts.
A short list of what has happened or is on the books this summer:
- Berkeley Nights at Fourth Street Makers Row, Saturday June 20, 4–7 p.m. A golden-hour outdoor market with local makers, live music, and rotating food trucks, presented by Prikli Agency in partnership with Makers Row.
- TOYUS Kyusha Fest, Sunday July 13, 9 a.m.–noon, at 1914 Fourth Street. A first-of-its-kind Cars & Coffee dedicated to vintage Toyotas, right on the block.
- Itty Bitty Market, an 11 a.m.–4 p.m. curated vintage-and-handmade pop-up returning for a second installment.
- Endless Summer Market, an open-air, family- and pet-friendly market hosted by Creative Communal at Makers Row to close out the season.
The through-line is that none of these are destination events in the touristic sense. They are the kind of thing a resident stops in on for forty-five minutes on the way somewhere else. That is the point. A block programmed at that cadence rewards people who already live within walking or short-driving distance and can drop in casually.
For context on the ambient scale of Berkeley street programming this fall: the Solano Avenue Stroll, the East Bay's largest street festival, has drawn in the range of 100,000 to 250,000 people since 1974, according to the Solano Avenue Association, and this year's 50th edition on September 13 nearly did not include Berkeley at all. The Berkeley Scanner reported in May that organizers faced roughly $200,000 in Berkeley-assessed fees plus $50,000 for barricades, and warned they might have to keep the Stroll to Albany without significant city support. Whatever happens on Solano, Fourth Street's smaller-scale, business-district-funded programming is a different economic model, and one less exposed to the municipal budget fight.
How To Actually Spend A Saturday Here
The practical shape of the block, once you plot the new pieces onto it, is easier to describe as a route than as a list.
Start at the north end with pastry and a walk. Come south past the design shops, and if a market is on that weekend, cut into the Makers Row courtyards to see what is set up. Lunch at Divan, in the old Pollara room, and pay attention to whether the patio has opened yet. Or if a slower, familiar seat is the point, On Fourth at 1830 Fourth Street continues to run as a relaxed neighborhood restaurant on the historic stretch. Anchor tenants like the Sephora at 1745 and the ALO store keep the retail spine intact between food stops.
The move that makes Fourth Street feel different from other Berkeley shopping streets this summer is the possibility of coming back after dinner. That option barely existed here two years ago. With Berkeley Nights lasting past sunset, Divan's bar program spinning up, and the covered patio arriving, the block now has both a daytime and an evening register. A resident who used to think of Fourth Street as a Saturday-morning errand can plausibly treat it as a Friday-night one.
What This Says About The Neighborhood
The corridor updates matter beyond restaurants. When a district actively programs its shared space and lands a signature bar-forward opening in a previously vacant flagship room, the underlying commercial fabric is behaving in a way that supports property values in the surrounding blocks. West Berkeley residents watching for signals about how their walk-shed is aging can read this summer as a positive one. A block that is inventing new reasons to be visited on evenings and weekends is a block whose adjacent housing tends to be a little easier to describe, market, and remember.
None of this is meant as a promise about any specific home or transaction. It is, though, the sort of local texture that a well-run listing conversation depends on. Buyers ask what a neighborhood does on a Saturday. Sellers ask what has changed since they last shopped their own street. This summer, Fourth Street has more of an answer than usual.
If you would like to talk through what any of it means for a home you own or are considering in West Berkeley or elsewhere in the East Bay, Anian & Adrienne would be glad to help. Contact us when the time is right.