The Rink Was Supposed to Open This Fall. Monterey Street Didn't Wait.

On Saturday, September 26, cars lined Monterey Street for Gilroy's Annual Tamale Festival & Car Show, hoods up, folding chairs out, the smell of masa and corn husk carrying over the block. Three streets over, the storefront window at 815 1st Street is still taped over. That's the old Round Table Pizza space, and back in June a company called Endura LLC filed for a beer-and-wine license there, the kind of paperwork that usually means a full-service restaurant is coming. No name yet. No opening date. Just a filing and a quiet window.

Those two scenes, one loud and finished, one still waiting on a permit, describe how downtown Gilroy has actually been operating this year. The city's biggest promised addition, an ice rink that was supposed to open this fall, is stalled indefinitely over money. Everything smaller kept moving anyway.

What's Actually on the Calendar

Here's what a Gilroy resident can put on the calendar right now, confirmed dates and all:

La Ofrenda is worth planning around even if Día de Muertos isn't your tradition. This is the fourth year the Gilroy Downtown Business Association has run it, and the footprint has grown into a full afternoon: the Camino de Ofrendas altar walk, a community-built La Gran Ofrenda installation, a Lucha Libre match in the middle of Monterey Road, and a Calavera Bike Cruise that turns the same street into a rolling parade of decorated bikes. It's free, and it's the kind of event that's been picked up by NBC Bay Area in past coverage, which tells you it's grown past a neighborhood gathering.

The Holiday Festival in December has its own local hook this year. The Gilroy Downtown Business Association named Kurt Michielssen as Grand Marshal, a banker who started his career in Watsonville in 1971, moved to Gilroy in 1981, and spent his last working years as a senior vice president at Pinnacle Bank before retiring. He's spent decades on the Rotary Club of Gilroy alongside that day job. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you who this town actually runs on.

The Rink That Was Supposed to Open This Fall

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're not reading the city council agenda every month. Sharks Ice Gilroy, the 100,000-square-foot, two-rink complex the San Jose Sharks and the city have been negotiating since 2019, was supposed to be this fall's headline addition to Gilroy Sports Park on Monterey Road. When the design was unveiled in May 2024, the timeline called for a 12 to 18 month build that could wrap by fall 2026. Two NHL-sized rinks, a restaurant and snack bar on the upper level overlooking the ice, a gym, the whole thing city administrator Jimmy Forbis walked the council through in detail.

That's not what happened. Construction costs kept climbing past the original estimates, and by February 2026 Mayor Greg Bozzo was telling the city council that the two sides needed to figure out how to close the gap, because "construction costs are much higher than anticipated." The council formed an ad hoc committee, Zach Hilton, Tom Cline, and Terence Fugazzi, to work the problem with Sharks Sports & Entertainment. By April, coverage of the project said nobody had pulled the plug, but the fall opening was almost certainly delayed. By July, the language changed again. The city's own statement described a "significant funding gap" between what the project could generate in revenue and what it would cost to build, and the project was described as on hold indefinitely. Hilton said the council could make a real decision when the ad hoc committee's mandate expired that August.

So the anchor project that Gilroy has been told to expect for years, the one meant to make the Sports Park a regional recreation destination, is sitting in the same place it was sitting in July. No groundbreaking. No new timeline. Just a committee still working the numbers.

What Filled the Gap Instead

Downtown didn't need the rink to keep moving. A few things worth knowing if you're spending a Saturday there this fall:

• Gourmet Alley, a pedestrian-only stretch planned for downtown, is currently under construction, one of the same set of economic development bets the city has been making alongside Sharks Ice.
• The Historic Paseo, the walkway connecting Monterey Street's shops and restaurants to the free parking lots behind them, runs between Fifth and Sixth Streets and is lined with murals tracing the city's history from its agricultural roots through its garlic years.
• The Gilroy Center for the Arts on 7th Street keeps a rotating schedule of exhibits and workshops, the kind of small cultural anchor that doesn't need a funding committee to open its doors.
• Longtime Monterey Street restaurants like OD's Kitchen and The Milias Restaurant have kept serving through all of this, the same early 20th century storefronts doing the same job they've done for years.
• The Sunday farmers market on Monterey Street is still running, produce and vendors setting up on the same stretch of street that closes for La Ofrenda in October.

Each of these runs on a fixed date and a familiar street, which makes the season easy to plan around while the city and the Sharks keep working through the financing on the larger projects.

The Actual Read

The lesson here isn't that big projects fail and small ones succeed. Gourmet Alley is still under construction and still counts as a bet on downtown's future. But the rhythm of a place like Gilroy right now runs on the things that don't have to wait on a financing plan: a taped-up window on 1st Street with a beer-and-wine license already filed, a Día de Muertos festival entering its fourth year, a farmers market that shows up every Sunday whether or not the ice rink ever breaks ground. The block adjusts. It always has.

If you're watching downtown Gilroy for signs of where the neighborhood is headed, and wondering what all this activity means for property values or timing a move, Harpreet Dhaliwal can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, block by block.