The Empty Lot on Rodeo's Waterfront Just Became a County Priority

Walk down Pacific Avenue on any Friday afternoon and you will pass the same three things in the same order. First the Rodeo Library at 220 Pacific, quiet and brick faced. Then a stretch of sidewalk that runs past a chain link fence and a pier that has not held a boat in decades. Then, without much warning, San Pablo Bay opens up on your right and you are standing at the Rodeo Marina, where a small winery and a coffee counter have quietly become the town's unofficial living room.

Most people who live here have made peace with that fenced lot in the middle. It has been there long enough to stop registering as a place and start registering as scenery. That changed this spring, when Contra Costa County's own advisory board put the property on the record as a live priority, not a rumor. If you have been treating that gap as permanent, it is worth understanding why the county suddenly does not.

A Two-Stop Routine That Already Works

The two active anchors on this stretch are easy to describe because regulars already know them by name. Four Fools Winery sits at 13 Pacific Avenue, right on the marina, and has been pouring wine since 2013, when four friends named Marc, Dana, John and Marcia decided their hobby of comparing and judging wine should turn into an actual tasting room. The winery is open Friday through Sunday except on private event days, and its best selling bottle is Peach Perfect, a fizzy, fruit forward white that has become something of a house signature. The deck looks straight out over San Pablo Bay toward Mare Island, and on the right evening the winery runs a First Friday by the Bay gathering that draws people who are not otherwise wine drinkers.

Next door, in the lower level of the same waterfront building, The Waterfront Rodeo runs a small café called Loony Bean, open Wednesday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and weekends from 9 to 1. It is the kind of spot where people come to answer email with a marina view instead of an office wall. The same building's event space holds up to 180 people indoors and another 75 outside, which is why it has hosted things like a Juneteenth gathering built around food, music and community rather than a formal program.

None of that is news to anyone who already lives in Rodeo. It is simply what the waterfront has become over the past several years: two small, independently run businesses that turned an out of the way marina into a reason to linger.

The Lot Between Them

What sits between the winery and the marina café is a different story entirely. The address is 1 Pacific Avenue, and the property is still known locally by its old name, Joseph's Resort. Frank Joseph opened it back in the 1930s as a fishing resort with a rental skiff fleet, a launch ramp, a pier and a tavern parked right at the shore end of the wharf. For decades it hosted the town's aquatic festivals, complete with a King and Queen Neptune and a beard growing contest, and generations of Rodeo kids grew up fishing off its pier or swimming from its beach for a quarter admission that one longtime regular remembers going straight to toilet paper for the bathroom.

By the 1980s, silting had made it hard for boats to reach the old marina, and the resort slowly stopped functioning as one. What is left today is roughly 3.78 acres, about 1.7 of it on dry land and the rest extending into the bay, along with a pier and platform that have deteriorated but technically remain part of the property. It is currently listed, and the listing itself notes that the site sits directly between Four Fools Winery and D&R Marine, which tells you how small this stretch of shoreline really is. Multiple uses are allowed on paper, from restaurant and marina services to parking and recreation, though any buyer would need to confirm specifics with the county.

What the County Said in May

Here is the part that changes the picture. At the Rodeo Municipal Advisory Council's May 2026 meeting, Colin Coffey, an East Bay Regional Park District board director whose service area covers Rodeo, gave the council an update on efforts to acquire and remediate the old Joseph's Resort property specifically for future public use and shoreline improvements. He framed it as part of a longer term push to improve shoreline access, protect open space and strengthen regional trail connections through Rodeo.

That is a meaningfully different conversation than the one this lot has had for the past forty years, which was mostly rumor about a park and pier that might someday get built. This time it is an actual park district official telling a public council, on the record, that acquisition and remediation are in motion. The Rodeo Municipal Advisory Council meets the fourth Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. at the Rodeo Senior Center on Parker Avenue, and its next session lands on August 27, which is the closest thing residents have to a scheduled checkpoint on where this goes next.

The Missing Link in a Ten Mile Trail

The reason a park district cares about a deteriorated pier becomes clearer once you look at the bigger map. The San Pablo Bay Trail is meant to eventually run a full ten miles along the shoreline, connecting Point Pinole in Richmond through San Pablo, Pinole and Hercules before ending at Lone Tree Point here in Rodeo. Big chunks of it are already built and walkable. But the East Bay Regional Park District's own trail page is candid that the Rodeo segment is still undeveloped in parts, with access currently limited to the Lone Tree Staging area at San Pablo Avenue and Pacific Avenue, just up the street from the winery.

That staging area sits on the same short run of Pacific Avenue as Joseph's Resort. Fill in that one property with public shoreline access and you are not adding a nice-to-have park. You are closing the last real gap in a trail that already reaches Richmond in one direction, which is exactly the kind of connectivity a regional park official would show up to a town meeting to talk about.

What to Watch, and What to Do This Weekend

None of this means shovels are in the ground. Acquisition and remediation of a waterfront property with a collapsing pier is a slow process, and the county's own language in May was about efforts underway, not a signed deal. The honest version of this story is that Rodeo's waterfront has a live, credible path toward closing its own missing link, and residents now have a specific date to track it rather than a vague sense that someone should really do something about that fence.

In the meantime, the two working stops on the block are not waiting around. Four Fools Winery has a guitar festival on the calendar for August 22, and its fall lineup already includes a Tim Burton themed gathering called Burton Fest set for September 26. A simple Saturday on this stretch still holds up on its own:

• Coffee at Loony Bean before the marina gets warm
• A short walk past the fenced lot to the Lone Tree Staging area to see how much of the trail is actually open right now
• An afternoon tasting at Four Fools, weather and crowd depending

The fence will probably still be there this weekend. But for the first time in a long while, the people deciding its future are saying so out loud, and that is worth knowing if you live on this stretch of Pacific Avenue and plan to keep walking it.

For neighborhood context like this across Solano County and the surrounding Bay Area, Frontline Network keeps an eye on the local details that shape everyday life here, not just the transactions.