Midtown, California Avenue and Edgewood Plaza

Most visitors never see this side of Palo Alto, but it is where residents shop week to week. The south and middle of the city are served by small neighborhood centers along Middlefield Road and by California Avenue, the main street of the old town of Mayfield. In the north, Edgewood Plaza is a modest center with an outsized place in architecture history.

None of these is a destination mall. What they offer is parking right outside the door, groceries, pharmacies, a good sandwich and a few independent businesses that have outlasted many downtown storefronts. This guide covers each area in turn. For the bigger centers, see our Palo Alto shopping guide.

California Avenue

California Avenue runs east from El Camino Real to the California Avenue Caltrain station. The blocks from El Camino Real to Birch Street are car-free. The city made that permanent in 2025 and has since added planters, bollards and colored paving. Bikes are allowed at a slow speed limit. The street is mostly restaurants and cafes now, but it still covers everyday needs.

Groceries on Cal Ave

• Mollie Stone's Market at 164 S. California Avenue is a full-service grocery that also handles catering. It is part of a family-run Bay Area chain that marked its 40th anniversary recently. Fans of HBO's Silicon Valley may recognize it, since the store appeared in an episode of the show's fourth season.
• Country Sun Natural Foods at 440 California Avenue is an independent store for natural and organic groceries and wellness products. Its roots go back to 1970, when New Age, which it describes as the first natural foods supermarket, opened in a former Purity Market on the same street. It posts hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

The Sunday market

Every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round, the California Avenue Farmers Market fills the car-free street with produce stands, bakers and prepared food. EBT shoppers get a matching bonus on fruits and vegetables. Parking fills early, so many locals bike or take the train. Our farmers markets guide has more.

Some shop owners say the car-free street hides them from drive-by customers. The debate continues at City Hall. For the history of the street and its neighborhood see the California Avenue guide.

Midtown on Middlefield Road

Midtown is the first neighborhood south of Oregon Expressway on the bay side of Alma Street. Its shops line Middlefield Road, with the main cluster around Colorado Avenue and a second where Middlefield meets Loma Verde Avenue. They were built after World War II to serve the fast-growing south side of the city, on what had been farmland. Over the decades the mix included gas stations, bakeries, markets and a small department store.

Today Safeway at 2811 Middlefield Road is the main grocery. Around it you will find chain drugstores, small restaurants, cafes, banks and services such as dry cleaners and salons. Parking is in surface lots behind and beside the storefronts, which is a big part of the appeal. One block of shops at 2615 to 2699 Middlefield Road, about 18,555 square feet of retail, sold in 2016 for $15.3 million, a sign of what even small neighborhood retail is worth here.

Empty storefronts and the 3191 Middlefield site

Midtown's main problem in recent years has been vacancies. A three-alarm fire in February 2023 destroyed a row of storefronts at 3191 Middlefield Road, including a cafe and a dry cleaner. By June 2026 the burned building had been cleared and the fenced lot was back on the market as a redevelopment site. City Council members have said they want ground-floor shops in any new project, even if housing goes above. Our Midtown guide follows the story.

Midtown's one true attraction sits on the same road. Winter Lodge at 3009 Middlefield Road is an outdoor ice rink that opened in 1956. See the Winter Lodge guide.

Charleston Shopping Center

Farther south, the Charleston Shopping Center sits on Middlefield Road near Charleston Road, a short walk from Cubberley Community Center. It is a classic neighborhood strip with a big lot in front.

Its anchor is Piazza's Fine Foods at 3922 Middlefield Road. Piazza's is a locally owned grocery whose family roots go back four generations to a grocery business in Italy. The store has produce, cheese, a butcher and seafood counter, bakery, deli, prepared foods, wine and flowers. Its butchers make Italian sausages in house. Piazza's posts daily hours of 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and opens early for shoppers aged 60 and over from 7 to 8 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Its only other store is in San Mateo.

A few doors away at 3946 Middlefield Road, Rick's Ice Cream is a longtime local scoop shop. Nearby, Cubberley hosts the monthly Friends of the Palo Alto Library book sales, described in our bookstores guide. Mitchell Park and its library are a short walk north. See Mitchell Park and Magical Bridge Playground.

Edgewood Plaza: Eichler's only shopping center

Edgewood Plaza sits at Embarcadero Road and St. Francis Drive in the northeast of the city, near US 101. It looks like a quiet neighborhood center. Its story is one of the longest running land use sagas in Palo Alto.

The Eichler design

Joseph Eichler built thousands of modern tract homes across the Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s. Palo Alto has some of the largest concentrations of them. Edgewood Plaza was the only shopping center he developed. He hired the Los Angeles firm Jones and Emmons and A. Quincy Jones led the design. The result echoed the houses around it: low post-and-beam buildings, big panes of glass and open courts. It opened in the late 1950s to serve the surrounding Eichler tracts.

Decline and a long fight

By the 2000s the center was run down and largely empty. A plan to raze it and build homes and new retail ran into opposition from neighbors and preservationists who saw the buildings as a cultural resource. The dispute ran for about a decade. In 2012 the city approved a redevelopment by Sand Hill Property Company that kept and renovated original buildings, added neighborhood retail, built 10 single-family homes and created a small park. One original building that was supposed to be taken apart and moved was largely destroyed in 2012.

The Edgewood grocery saga

The redevelopment required a grocery store. The Fresh Market opened in June 2013, with an interior that displayed photographs by Eichler's photographer Ernie Braun. It closed in March 2015. The landlord said dozens of grocers turned the space down before The Market at Edgewood opened in December 2017. In the meantime the city fined the owner for the empty store. A judge ordered the city to refund the fines in 2017, the city appealed and the case reached the appeals court in 2019. Today the grocery space is The Market at Edgewood, which posts current hours and takes online orders on its website.

Visiting Edgewood Plaza

Come for the architecture more than the shopping. Park in the plaza's lot, look at the original buildings and walk a few blocks into the Eichler streets of the surrounding neighborhood. Our Duveneck/St. Francis neighborhood guide covers the area. For the bigger picture on Eichler and Palo Alto's other architects, see Palo Alto architecture.

Which one for which errand

For a store-by-store comparison of the city's markets, see our groceries and specialty food guide.

Frequently asked questions