A rarely discussed casualty of San Diego voters rejecting a sales tax hike in 2024 is the Gaslamp Promenade, a much-hailed pedestrian area that was abruptly eliminated a year ago and now faces a murky future.
There’s general consensus among downtown merchants and city officials that a plaza in the seven-block stretch of Fifth Avenue has the potential to transform the sagging Gaslamp into a vibrant regional destination tourists rave about — especially if long-planned upgrades like performance spaces get added.
But the preliminary phase was considered only a modest success, the planned upgrades would cost an estimated $65 million, and the cash-strapped city has no money to revive even the bare-bones version anytime soon.
“This is a project with tremendous merit, but the financial deck is stacked against it for now,” Mayor Todd Gloria said last week. “Our city is facing a significant financial challenge and we have to prioritize our needs.”
Downtown hotels and merchants say it should be a priority to revive the pedestrian area and eventually transform it into a promenade with street furniture, trees, shaded areas and other features. They contend the upgrades would pay for themselves by attracting more conventions and increasing hotel tax revenue.
They say the bare-bones version, which spanned from Broadway to K Street, was already making a big difference.
“It created a sense of place that boosted walkability and vibrancy,” said Fred Tayco, executive director of the San Diego County Lodging Association. “It elevated the guest experience and drove hotel room rates.”
Tayco said it could end up looking shortsighted for the city to have abandoned the promenade.
“It’s important for the city to remain focused on attracting visitors,” said Tayco, calling the Gaslamp a standout attraction along with Petco Park and the Rady Shell. “These are the things that make San Diego special. It’s always important for us to have more of them, not less.”
The pedestrian area had also begun to encourage private-sector investment in the Gaslamp, with brighter prospects for the future prompting some building owners to renovate and expand, said Michael Trimble, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association.
“People were excited about the future,” Trimble said.
One of those building owners was Ruth-Ann Thorn, who bought the Yuma building on Fifth Avenue in 2024 primarily because of excitement generated by the promenade.
“It gave the area a feeling of being a place you could walk around and have a good time,” Thorn said last week. “It became very festive — like New Orleans.”
Thorn estimated that at least 80% of merchants and building owners are frustrated the early version of the promenade went away in February 2025 and wish it would return.
“It feels like we are going backwards,” she said. “Our traffic is way down.”
Trimble said the promenade helped create a short-lived reduction in vacancies in the Gaslamp.
“A lot of businesses came and went because the promenade failed them,” he said.
The mayor said he agrees that the promenade was popular and generally well-received when it was operating. But he said there should have been more activities on the wide-open promenade, mentioning cornhole and other games as potential options.
While most merchants praised the promenade, businesses that don’t benefit as much from foot traffic — like jewelers and high-end restaurants — were not as enthusiastic.
San Diego police also gave the promenade mixed reviews, Trimble said.
He said it’s easier to control things when people are on narrow sidewalks than in a wide-open plaza. And the promenade made fights more common after bars close at 2 a.m. by mixing people together in a large area, he added.
Some critics had also complained that the promenade’s early version had forced changes to some bus routes and said it had worsened traffic congestion on nearby side streets.
Despite some problems, Gloria said the early phase of the promenade was a success. He also called it unusual for an infrastructure project because of its potential to generate revenue.
“I think there’s a case to be made it could grow the pie,” said Gloria — noting that hotel tax revenue is particularly appealing, because the city doesn’t have to share it with the state and county as it does sales tax and property tax.
He said the promenade could be particularly impactful if the city were able to spend the roughly $65 million needed to take it to the next level.
Gloria and promenade supporters say there’s a big difference between simply closing a street to cars and transforming it into a promenade.
But the mayor said even if a sales tax hike eventually gets approved by voters — the full-cent hike on the ballot in 2024 was expected to boost annual city revenue by roughly $400 million — an upgraded Gaslamp Promenade would still have to wait in line.
“It’s difficult to say this should be the highest priority when we have a multitude of urgent needs to address,” Gloria said.
While money spent on the promenade would ultimately boost city revenue, Gloria stressed that other infrastructure projects, like fixing pipes, cost much more the longer you wait to tackle them.
Gloria said an upgraded promenade would be much more feasible if the private sector or philanthropists became financial partners with the city.
Betsy Brennan, chief executive of the Downtown San Diego Partnership, suggested last week that shrinking the scope of the promenade could help.
“We believe there would be significant benefit to reintroducing a promenade in a more concentrated, focused footprint, particularly on the southern end of the Gaslamp, where it can be evaluated and get more real-world feedback from visitors, residents and businesses,” she said.
Dominic Li Mandri, district manager of downtown’s East Village Association, said last week that city officials need to address problems with homelessness and street vending downtown in conjunction with creating more pedestrian plazas.
He said plazas are a great idea, but they can’t reach their potential when downtown is plagued by other challenges.
The bare-bones version of the promenade was rolled out in phases.
It began during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic with an expansion of outdoor restaurant seating into what had been downtown parking spaces, including on Fifth Avenue.
City officials then began temporarily closing mid-block lanes to vehicular traffic to allow more outdoor gathering spaces and better pedestrian mobility.
From July 2020 through June 2023, different parts of Fifth Avenue were closed to car and pedicab traffic during various hours five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday.
Then in July 2023, the city expanded the promenade to seven days a week, expanded the hours to noon to 2 a.m. and replaced makeshift bike-rack barricades with more functional bollards, poles that block traffic.
That version was in place until February 2025, when a reduction in city funding for the Gaslamp Quarter Association prompted the association to stop installing each day the bollards that blocked traffic.
Trimble said the city’s move to cut its funding amounted to abandoning the promenade.
Brennan said new technology called hydraulic bollards could make it easier and cheaper to revive the bare-bones version of the promenade.
The mayor said the promenade, whether the bare-bones version or the souped-up version, remains part of the city’s long-term vision.
“I think this concept is very promising,” he said.
And he said the preliminary phase paved the way for the future by establishing that it was possible to eliminate traffic and parking spaces from Fifth Avenue without creating total chaos.
“We made a very good effort to show that this can be done,” he said. “It needs to be left on the sidelines for now, but there could be a different story in future years.”
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