Napa Valley Register
Puzzle pieces downtown: Napa’s city center has key properties in play
The puzzle depicts a lively downtown with luxury hotels, boutique stores and restaurants, lots of restaurants. Tourists, some wearing suits or gowns, mix with more causally dressed locals and, on weekdays, county and city workers.
A pedestrian walks past the historic Napa post ofce in downtown Napa in June 2022. The Art Deco building has been closed due to damage from the 2014 earthquake.
But some pieces are missing. Those include the vacant lot at First and Main streets and the long-closed post office that was damaged in the 2014 earthquake.
Other pieces could be swapped for new ones. The Kohl’s building, the former Carithers department store and the county jail are among the properties targeted for redevelopment.
What does all of this bode for the downtown of the future?
“My hope — and I think others share the same vision — is that it’s a strong mix of residential, lodging and retail,” said Napa Mayor Scott Sedgley.
Missing pieces
Coombs Street LLC holds a big puzzle piece – it plans to reshape the properties that house the soon-to-be-shuttered Kohl’s department store and the adjacent Dwight Murray Plaza.
The group proposes to demolish the early-1970s Kohl’s building, originally a branch of the defunct Mervyns chain, and clear Dwight Murray Plaza. A 161- room hotel, 78 residential units and retail space could be built, with a new public plaza running through the middle toward the city 9/11 Memorial Garden.
The Napa City Council enthusiastically accepted a rough outline of that planned transformation last July. The city has agreed to sell a parking lot to the developer and swap Dwight Murray Plaza for the new plaza to help with the project.
“There’s just a hunger for there to be something better down there visually,” then-City Councilmember Liz Alessio said.
City Councilmember Bernie Narvaez called the project “a large element of what we’re trying to accomplish (downtown), this being such an important location.”
The developers couldn’t be reached for comment.
A major missing downtown puzzle piece is the vacant lot at Main and First streets. Talk about “location, location, location” — this site is a gateway to the heart of downtown.
The property was once home to businesses such as the Tuscany restaurant. It had one-story, flat-topped buildings that were demolished in 2015.
In 2017, the city approved a four-story, stone-clad building to house a wine shop, a relocated Bounty Hunter restaurant and offices. That development never happened, ownership changed, and the lot remains vacant behind a fence. (Bounty Hunter continues to operate at 975 First St.)
Napa developer Jim Keller, an owner of the property, said more land is needed for a substantial development project.
As it happens — see the next chapter of this story — the county wants to eventually move out of the adjacent Carithers building and sell that site.
“We’re waiting to see what happens there,” Keller said. “I think we would fit in very nicely with whatever development happens there. It’s really the front door of downtown, our parcel is.”
For several years, he has proposed to build a hotel that incorporates the 1930s era post office. He recently said that a plan could be ready and made public this spring or summer.
County plans
Napa County plans to scramble some key downtown puzzle pieces over the next six or seven years.
It is rethinking its downtown presence. Some departments are to move to the South Campus a few miles south. The jail is to move to a new complex off Highway 221, the Napa-Vallejo Highway.
When the dust settles, the county could sell two properties at key downtown locations to the private sector for redevelopment.
The Hall of Justice, which contains the jail, is located at 1125 Third St. and has Main Street frontage across the street from Napa’s Riverfront. It should become vacant this spring.
Carithers is located at 1127 First St. across from Dwight Murray Plaza. The former department store was bought by Napa County in 1989 and houses various county departments. It should be vacant in three to five years.
County Public Works Director Steven Lederer has called Carithers and the Hall of Justice “valuable assets.” Beyond revenue sources to the county when sold, the sites are valuable to the community, he said.
It’s a matter of highest and best use. Some see a better use for a prime downtown location on Main Street near the Napa River than a jail.
Anne Cottrell, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, said the county’s facility shuffle should be good for the downtown area. Perhaps housing and businesses could be built on the sites the county sells.
“I think it opens opportunities for the downtown, for other types of business,” she said.
However, a 2024 report by the Gensler consulting firm said Carithers has limited short-term redevelopment and sale potential because of high construction, material and labor costs.
Demolishing Carithers and constructing a hotel or apartments would require subsidies. Keeping the building for a return to retail is also infeasible under current market conditions, the report said.
Keller, who owns the vacant lot adjacent to Carithers, said high interest rates and high construction costs make building hard. Nonetheless, he expressed optimism for downtown’s future.
“We’re in a pretty good market here in Napa,” he said. “We’re a desirable place. I think people are always ready to lessen their return in order to be here.”
Napa County holds another potential piece to the downtown puzzle. It owns the Sullivan parking lot bounded by Third, Coombs, Randolph and Fourth streets.
Over the years, county officials have suggested that the Sullivan lot could be sold and redeveloped with affordable housing. but they’ve never pursued this notion.
Whether the Sullivan lot is another puzzle piece in play remains to be seen. Cottrell noted its future is not sketched out under the county’s present
downtown reconfiguration plan.
A town square?
Sedgley dreams of shifting a few downtown puzzle pieces to create something radically different.
The mayor envisions creating a large town square with a park where the public could gather and recreate. The space could be provided on First Street by clearing the county’s Carithers building and the city’s Second Street parking garage.
Some nearby cities have large town squares or plazas dating to their pioneer days. In Sonoma County, Healdsburg is one, the city of Sonoma another.
In the early 1900s, Napa created Fuller Park a few blocks from downtown. A few decades ago, the city created the much smaller Veterans Memorial Park downtown at Main Street, facing the Napa River. But it has nothing in the heart of downtown comparable to Healdsburg or Sonoma.
Realistic dream or daydream? Sedgley isn’t certain.
“Whether the city can take that project on is something that would have to be decided in the future,” he said. … “It would have to be community-serving. It would have to be an amenity like Veterans Park.”
One big challenge would be the expense. For example, county officials have said they intend to sell the Carithers property, not give it away.
Some old-timers remain
As puzzle pieces shift, a few remain that have long been in place. They are the increasingly rare holdovers from the local-serving downtown of old.
People can buy expensive wines and clothing downtown. They can also buy nails and barbecue grills at Zeller’s Ace Hardware.
A few years ago, the Zeller’s property was intended to be part a hotel development, along with the adjacent post office property. But that’s no longer the case and the hardware store is set to remain at 819 Randolph St.
On a recent morning, the store owner, Dick Clark, moved small boxes of thermostat equipment in the rear of the store. He reflected on downtown’s transformation to a more upscale, tourist-oriented area, which he called “terrible.”
“There needs to be more businesses down here for the local people,” Clark said. “And (more) people living down here would be good.”
“We’d love to attract a little more variety in essentials downtown,” Sedgley said. “That’s struggled when Safeway (on Jefferson Street) closed (after the 2014 earthquake). That’s a challenge, where we weave that in.”
Zeller’s has been located downtown for decades and has occupied present-day location since the early 1960s. Clark bought the business in 1993.
Always in ux
Napa’s downtown has seen many changes over the decades, perhaps none bigger than a massive redevelopment effort half a century ago.
The city’s Redevelopment Agency took the wrecking ball in the early 1970s to blocks of old buildings, some landmarks, some not. It removed structures such as the stone Migliavacca building and the Masonic Lodge, creating vacant ground for modern buildings.
This was more than shifting a few puzzle pieces. It was akin to creating an entirely new puzzle.
One goal was to make room for bigger versions of Carithers and Mervyns and keep those department stores from fleeing to outlying shopping centers.
“If Napa loses its major department stores, it would take more than a generation to recover from the blow, environmentally as well as economically,” Richard Oliver of the Redevelopment Agency said at the time.
Still debated is whether Napa saved downtown or bulldozed prized, irreplaceable pieces of history and Main Street, USA.
“It was well intended,” Sedgley said. “Those boxes went up like Carithers and Kohl’s (the successor to the Napa Mervyns, which closed shortly before the retail chain’s collapse in 2008) — that was kind of the model. In hindsight, the architecture was missing.”
Also, the mayor said, the city lost many buildings that were part of its character.
During the 1990s, downtown was again in the doldrums. It came alive mostly during events such as the chefs’ market, which featured bands and food booths on Fridays.
Puzzle pieces have since shifted quickly. Some of the major changes:
- The historic brick Hatt/Napa Mill building was reborn as the Napa River Inn in 2000.
- The ood control project created a Napa River promenade in 2008. It also ended the threat of flooding during big storms.
- Napa’s Riverfront was completed in 2009, creating two blocks of stores, restaurants and condominiums.
- The five-story Avia hotel, now the Andaz, opened in 2009.
- The five-story Archer hotel opened on First Street in late 2017.
With several key pieces in play, downtown is poised for further change. What picture the jigsaw puzzle portrays in the coming years remains to be seen.
“I’m very optimistic,” Sedgley said.