A Kensington Sunday, Mapped From Colusa Circle

Most neighborhoods have a busy day. Kensington has a busy corner. If you already live here, you know the difference. Sunday morning around Colusa Circle is not just another retail cycle. It is the one moment in the week when the mile of hillside between Arlington Avenue and the El Cerrito line behaves like a town square, and the Circle itself becomes the thing it was drawn to be in 1911.

The thesis of this post is simple, and it may be one you have felt without ever stating: the shops around Colusa Circle are not what makes Kensington a neighborhood on Sunday. The Sunday is what makes those shops possible the other six days. Once you see it that way, your weekly route through the Circle stops being habit and starts making a kind of civic sense.

The Sunday That Fixed The Circle

The Circle's current shape is younger than most residents realize. In 1911, the Berkeley Park subdivision near what is now Colusa Circle was started by Eugene L. Brock of the Berkeley Investment Company. A retail cluster grew up around it, then thinned. The 1970s brought a renaissance to Colusa Circle with the opening of Kensington's first restaurant, culinary mecca Narsai's Restaurant. Owner David Narsai was known on the Bay Area food scene from catering large-scale outdoor events for rock legend Bill Graham, including for major bands like the Rolling Stones. Narsai's dining room was fashioned from a giant redwood tank, and the wine list was described as "one of the ten finest in the world" by the New York Times.

Then the tank emptied. Narsai's Restaurant closed in 1986 and increased vacancies within the circle led landowner Ed Hammonds to sell four of his parcels. That same year, the Kensington Improvement Club convinced PG&E to underground utilities around Colusa Circle and installed a temporary circular island. In 1988, the permanent traffic island at Colusa Circle was constructed and, in 1989, the island was landscaped by the Kensington Improvement Club under the pro bono direction of landscape architect Ted Osmundson. Infrastructure improved. Retail did not. By the late 2000s, a longtime merchant had a nickname for the block:

"the circle was called the 'Colusa Triangle', a place where, like the Bermuda Triangle, businesses appeared and then disappeared. Sure, there were always the hard-core, cherished businesses over the years that persevered and even thrived. They kept the lights on for the circle." All that changed for the better when the Kensington Farmers' Market moved down from upper Kensington to Oak View Ave in 2008.

That is the moment worth marking. A single Sunday market did not save the Circle by itself, but it gave the storefronts a reliable weekly reason for foot traffic that a small unincorporated hillside could not otherwise generate. The Circle you walk today is what happened after that decision.

A Walk You Can Actually Do In Two Hours

The market runs every Sunday from 10am to 2pm, rain or shine, on Oakview Avenue between Colusa Circle and Santa Fe Avenue in Kensington, and it is a California Certified Farmers' Market, which means that the vendors are certified by the state to ensure that they grow or make what they sell. If you are already a regular, the value of the next few paragraphs is a nudge: the merchants on the ring around the market are worth working into the same trip, because their economics depend on you doing exactly that.

A workable Sunday loop, in order:

1. Kensington Farmers Market, Oak View Avenue at the Circle. When the Kensington Farmers' Market set up tents 12 years ago, it quickly established itself as a resource for fresh, locally grown produce, and has since expanded to host up to 40 vendors, selling everything from seafood, poultry and meats, to bagels, French pastries, cheeses and foods to go. Live music makes the market a party every Sunday.
2. Semifreddi's, 372 Colusa Avenue. The neighborhood outpost of a bakery whose Alameda factory is naturally lit, and bread leftovers are made into chicken feed. Ciabatta and pastries, dispatched fast on Sunday mornings.
3. Colusa Market, 406 Colusa Avenue. Shopping at Colusa Market is like stepping back in time, but with a Bay Area twist. The market looks like an old-fashioned grocery store, but it stocks organic, locally sourced produce and poultry products and has a fantastic selection of wines. It also has a butcher counter and all the staples you need in a neighborhood setting. Useful for anything the market stalls did not cover.
4. Freshly Cut, 378 Colusa Avenue. Janet Johnson's shop, where she creates custom floral designs with seasonal flowers rather than premade bouquets.
5. Hiersoux Gallery, 437 Colusa Avenue. Hiersoux Gallery is a gallery and studio that has been ground zero for East Bay fine ceramic arts for 30 years. The gallery is only open Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. One of the only weekend-only stops on the Circle, so if you are ever going to walk in, Sunday is the day.
6. Kensington Circus Pub, 389 Colusa Avenue, for a late lunch. Kensington Circus Pub, located at 389 Colusa Avenue, is a great place for live music. This local favorite offers British pub food options and the finest British Ales. They serve dinner seven nights a week and provide live music from a wide range of genres.
7. Benchmark Pizzeria, 1568 Oak View Avenue, if you missed lunch or want to bring a pie home. Benchmark is a Certified Green Business, using 100% renewable energy.

If you are on the Arlington side of the neighborhood, Young's Market at 285 Arlington Avenue is the parallel stop. When you're looking for a sandwich on to go or to skip a drive into Berkeley for an item forgotten, Young's Market is the best place to stop.

What The Circle Does That A Strip Mall Cannot

Look at that list. Bakery, market, florist, gallery, pub, pizzeria, spa, all inside a walk of maybe five minutes end to end. That is not a lifestyle amenity. That is a functioning small commercial district in an unincorporated hillside of roughly nine thousand people, according to the count published on Nextdoor. Districts of that size usually cannot support this many independents. Colusa Circle can, because the Sunday market compresses a week's worth of casual visits into four hours.

The merchants understand this. The Colusa Circle Merchants Association describes itself as a small but mighty business and residential district in Kensington, California. The work of the Colusa Circle Merchants Association is rooted in our steadfast commitment to building community, encouraging sustainability and showing our local love. The annual calendar reinforces the same rhythm. Presently most of the storefronts are filled with dynamic shopkeepers and annual community events including the Halloween Celebration, the Holiday Tree Lighting, and the Colusa Circle 5K keep the block on residents' calendars in the months when the tourist-facing part of the Bay slows down.

The point for a resident is practical. The businesses you like at Colusa Circle survive because enough neighbors treat Sunday as a walk rather than a drive-through. That is worth remembering the next time you consider ordering the same pastry through a delivery app.

The Weekday Footnote Worth Planning Around

One correction to the standard "Sunday in Kensington" article you may have read elsewhere. Blake Garden, the ten-acre hillside garden most guides list as a Sunday walk, is not open on Sundays. Per the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, which manages it, Blake Garden is the landscape laboratory for the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning. It occupies 10+ acres of rolling terrain in Kensington, featuring large rock outcroppings, several reaches of Cerrito Creek, and sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. You'll encounter a range of landscapes here, including a formal garden with a reflecting pool, a shady canyon with towering redwoods, and a California native wetland zone populated by Pacific Chorus frogs. Public hours are weekdays only. The garden is free and open to the public Tuesdays–Fridays from 9 am to 4 pm. Closed on Mondays, weekends, and University holidays.

The scheduling quirk is worth internalizing because it changes how you plan. If you have a weekday morning free, that is the day for Blake Garden and its Bay view. A free public tour runs the second Thursday of every month, 2–3 p.m. Sunday belongs to the Circle. Tuesday through Friday belongs to the garden. Treat them as complementary rather than as competing options for the same afternoon.

Why Sunday Is The Real Test Of A Neighborhood

If someone asks what Kensington is like, the honest answer is that it depends on the day of the week. Wednesday afternoons here are mostly quiet residential streets and hillside canopy. Sunday between ten and two, the same streets funnel toward Oak View and the Circle, and the neighborhood declares itself. Live music, a knife-sharpening stall, a florist assembling something for a dinner party three houses over, a pub filling up before the market has finished breaking down.

The 2008 decision by the Kensington Improvement Club to move the market down the hill did more than fill a Sunday. It gave the Circle its second act after Narsai's, and it did so in the most durable way possible, by making residents show up in person. Every latte at Benchmark, every bouquet from Freshly Cut, every ceramic bowl from Hiersoux is downstream of that decision.

The next time your Sunday plans start to slip toward the freeway, consider that walking to the Circle is not just a nice thing to do. It is the quiet civic obligation of living here, and it happens to end with pizza.

If you would like to talk about what a home on this side of the hill is worth, or what it takes to sell one well, Ruth Frassetto has been walking these blocks for four decades. Schedule a personalized market consultation whenever a Sunday walk turns into a longer conversation about staying, moving up, or moving on.