Foster City has canceled its Fourth of July fireworks two years running because of construction at Leo Ryan Park. This year's Summer Days, August 14 through 16, is the first one arriving after that construction reached a real milestone, not just another progress update.
The new Community Center at 650 Shell Blvd has moved from active job site to a building with permanent power and a topped-off frame. That shift, more than any new vendor or band on the lineup, is the actual story of this year's festival. If you've watched Leo Ryan Park operate around a construction fence for the better part of two years, you'll notice the difference before you notice the car show.
What the Fence Was Actually Hiding
The old William E. Walker Recreation Center, built in 1974, came down to make way for a rebuild that has shaped nearly every summer event at Leo Ryan Park since construction began in late 2024. The city postponed its Fourth of July fireworks show in 2025 because of the construction footprint, then postponed it again in 2026, confirming the second straight cancellation back in April. Daytime programming, the Rotary Club pancake breakfast, live music, and the Family & Dog Parade, went on both years. The nighttime crowd around the lagoon didn't get its show.
Leo Ryan Park has operated around that construction site since the old building came down, which means a compressed footprint, fencing to route around, and a building in the background that looked like scaffolding rather than a place you'd actually walk into.
That changed this spring. According to a May 2026 report from the San Mateo Daily Journal, structural work on the new center was mostly complete, with interior finishing and exterior improvements as the remaining items. Permanent power from PG&E had just been secured. Senior Engineer Justin Lai told the city council what that milestone actually unlocks:
"Now that we have permanent power, the team is able to start conditioning and doing a lot of the testing required to really occupy the building."
That's the difference between a shell and a building people can walk into. On July 29, the city held a Topping Off ceremony, the placement of a final signed steel beam atop the framework, marking the completion of vertical construction. Interior finishing was still underway as of that milestone, but by the time Summer Days opens, roughly two weeks will have passed since the frame topped out, enough for the exterior to read as a finished building rather than a work site, even if the café and ceramics studio inside aren't open for business yet.
The Weekend Itself
Foster City Summer Days is a three-day run, free to attend, dog friendly, open to all ages. The shape of the weekend hasn't changed much from prior years, but the setting has.
| Day | What's Happening |
|---|---|
| Friday, Aug. 14 | Classic car show on Shell Boulevard, 4 to 7 p.m., with categories spanning classic cars, muscle cars, classic trucks, hot rods, lowriders, and motorcycles. Concert in the amphitheater follows in the early evening, alongside carnival rides and food and beverage vendors. |
| Saturday, Aug. 15 | Full festival day: outdoor vendor marketplace curated by SJMADE, food trucks curated by Moveable Feast, carnival rides, and the Rubber Ducky Scavenger Hunt running 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| Sunday, Aug. 16 | Marketplace and food trucks continue, carnival rides wind down, and the Rubber Ducky Scavenger Hunt runs a shorter window, 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. |
The vendor marketplace deserves a note of its own. SJMADE has curated the maker and artist booths since stepping in for SF Etsy, the event's original vendor curator, which has been on an extended sabbatical from event organizing since before 2024. SJMADE's sister company, Moveable Feast, handles the food truck lineup, the same team that's been running the Wednesday night Off the Grid market at Leo Ryan since it returned to the park in April. If you've caught that Wednesday market on the lawn this spring, Summer Days is the larger, weekend-long version of the same operators working the same park.
Getting There Without the Old Frustrations
The parking situation this year is worth planning around, mostly because the closures start well before the festival itself does.
Shell Boulevard closes in stages starting Tuesday, August 11, with the segment between East Hillsdale Boulevard and Foster Square Lane going first, followed by the stretch to Bounty Drive on Thursday, August 13. Balclutha Drive and the PJCC's South Service Road exit close on the same Thursday timeline. Full reopening runs through the Monday following the event. If your daily commute or errands route through that stretch of Shell, plan for a full week of detours, not just the weekend.
For parking on-site:
- Paid event parking, $10, is available at Parkside Towers (1031 E. Hillsdale Blvd), City Hall (610 Foster City Blvd), and the Century lot (1065 E. Hillsdale Blvd), running 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
- Accessible parking is located at the Community Center and Library lot, 1000 E. Hillsdale Blvd.
- Event parking is not permitted in private retail centers or on nearby residential streets.
- Sports Basement is providing complimentary bike parking both Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the main lot on Shell Boulevard.
None of this is dramatically different from prior years on paper. What's different is that the lot you're parking in now fronts a finished building instead of a construction trailer.
What the New Building Actually Adds
The new Community Center isn't just a bigger version of the old recreation building. Foster City has been soliciting vendors to run a café, a ceramics studio, and an early education classroom inside the facility, spaces the 1974 building never had room for. Combined with updated playgrounds and resurfaced bocce courts, both detailed in our earlier look at the project, the building is being built to generate foot traffic on ordinary Tuesdays, not just during festival weekends.
That matters for how Summer Days will actually feel this year. For as long as the site has been fenced, the festival has been the one weekend when the park felt fully occupied, because the rest of the year it was a job site. This August, Summer Days becomes the loud, temporary version of something the park is now built to sustain quietly the rest of the time. If the café and ceramics studio open on anything close to schedule, the corner of Leo Ryan Park that's been fenced since late 2024 becomes a place people walk past on a regular Tuesday afternoon, not just during the third weekend of August.
The Read for Anyone Planning Around This Weekend
If you're new to Foster City, this year's Summer Days is simply the festival as it exists on paper: a car show, a maker market, a rubber duck hunt, carnival rides. If you've lived through the last two years of canceled fireworks and a fenced park, you're getting something else too, proof that the trade the city asked residents to make since the groundbreaking is close to paying off. The building that replaced the crane is standing where the crane used to be.
Whether you're catching the classic car show on Shell Boulevard Friday evening or walking the SJMADE marketplace with the dog on Saturday, you're seeing Leo Ryan Park closer to how it's supposed to look than it's been in years. That's worth noticing, even if you're only there for the food trucks.
If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood where the community calendar actually shapes daily life, from the Wednesday food truck lawn to a rebuilt civic hub at its center, Julie Flouty can walk you through what living near Leo Ryan Park is really like, month to month, not just on festival weekends. Let's Connect.
