For most of the last decade, the west side of the Seaplane Lagoon was a fenced expanse of cracked runway pavement that Alameda residents drove past on the way to somewhere else. It showed up in city council packets as a "master plan," in grant applications as a line item, and in the occasional news story about muscle cars doing donuts on the empty tarmac after dark. It was always going to become something. Nobody had a date for when.
That changed this year. On Sunday, September 20, runners in the Alameda Island Running Festival will start and finish at City Hall West on West Mall Drive, tracing a course the organizers describe as circling "some of the best parts of the Alameda Point and recently opened trails." Back on July 11, the Beer City Half sent half marathoners, 10K runners and a beer-mile crowd out along the same shoreline from Radium Runway, with a one-mile Beer Stroll looping through Waterfront Park itself. These are not hypothetical events on a rendering. They are races with bib numbers and finish lines, run on ground that used to be blocked off.
If you already live in Alameda, the useful thing to understand isn't that a park exists out at the Point. You've probably walked it. The useful thing is that 2026 is the year the whole waterfront project stopped being an open-ended plan and started running on a clock, with a construction deadline, a paid parking meter, and a security guard to prove it.
The Promenade Earned Its Name the Slow Way
The three-acre stretch now known as Seaplane Lagoon Promenade opened to the public on April 9, 2022, with a free performance festival staged by Rhythmix Cultural Works and West End Arts District. For a while the city just called it Alameda Point Waterfront Park because the naming process was still working through a public survey. Seaplane Lagoon Promenade won that vote, and the city's own parks department now lists it under that name at 1801 Ferry Point, with sightlines to the USS Hornet and the San Francisco skyline across the water.
What's changed since the ribbon-cutting isn't the promenade's footprint. It's what routes through it. A running festival and a half marathon both anchor their courses there now, and the beer stroll at July's event ran a full mile loop around the park as its own attraction, not an afterthought tacked onto a race weekend. Almanac Brewing, nearby, has served as a shuttle stop for past waterfront events. The promenade has gone from a place you'd visit once for the opening festival to a fixture other events build around.
The Empty Half of the Lagoon Is on a Schedule Now
The west side of the lagoon, the part still fenced off and covered in old runway concrete, is called De-Pave Park, and its history says a lot about how slowly big public works move until suddenly they don't. Advocates, led in part by the Sierra Club, started pushing the city to commit to removing the pavement back in 2014. The city took ownership of the Seaplane Lagoon from the Navy in 2016. The council didn't approve a master plan until March 2024, and only after a separate vote in November 2023 to tear down Building 25, a 55 foot hangar that had been kept alive as a possible source of lease revenue.
That's a decade of debate for a project that, as of this year, has an actual finish line attached to it. In an October 2024 grant application to the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority, the city stated plainly that it planned to complete 60 percent design and apply for regional permits by early 2026, and to reach 90 percent design and be shovel ready by the end of 2026. The site itself is roughly 12 acres of former runway, but the finished design from CMG Landscape Architecture turns that into around 21 acres of new tidal marsh, tide pools and shoreline habitat, with a 24-foot promenade running the length of the park once it's built.
Eric Robbins, a member of the Alameda Recreation and Park Commission, put it this way when commissioners reviewed the final design in February 2024:
"This is a very bold and brave move to remove the buildings."
The building is already gone. The design deadline is this year. That's a different conversation than the one Alameda has been having about this stretch of shoreline for the better part of a decade.
The Ferry Terminal Got Busy Enough to Need a Meter
Nothing signals real foot traffic like a city deciding it's time to charge for parking. Starting February 3, 2026, the Seaplane Lagoon Ferry Terminal began charging $3 for parking on Tuesdays through Thursdays, with a dedicated security guard assigned to the lot. Parking stays free on Mondays, Fridays and weekends, which tells you exactly when the demand shows up: commuter days, not weekend strolls.
The terminal itself is also getting a hardware upgrade. A Notice of Exemption filed in late July 2026 confirms the Water Emergency Transportation Authority is electrifying the Seaplane Lagoon terminal as one of the first stops in its fleet-wide push toward zero-emission ferries, installing a new charging float equipped with more than 1,300 kilowatt-hours of battery storage to support the electric vessels currently under construction. None of this changes how the ferry ride feels day to day. It does mean the terminal you've been parking at for years is being treated as permanent, high-use infrastructure rather than a placeholder.
What This Adds Up to This Fall
Put the pieces next to each other and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only notice one item at a time. A park that opened quietly in 2022 now hosts races with national footprints. A restoration project that spent a decade in public meetings has a construction deadline before New Year's. A ferry terminal parking lot went from free to metered because enough people started using it on weekdays to justify the change.
If you're already out at the Point on weekends, here's what's worth putting on the calendar or watching for before the year is out:
- September 20: The Alameda Island Running Festival starts and finishes at City Hall West, with half marathon, 10K, 5K and family fun run distances all routed through the Point's trail network.
- Through year end: De-Pave Park's design work is targeted to hit 90 percent completion and shovel ready status, the clearest sign yet of when actual construction equipment shows up on the west shoreline.
- Tuesday through Thursday: Expect the $3 parking fee at the Seaplane Lagoon Ferry Terminal if you're driving in for a weekday commute. It's free the rest of the week.
None of this is a reason to do anything differently tomorrow. It's a reason to notice that the waterfront you've been walking past for years is being built out on a real timeline now, not a wish list, and that the small annoyances, a parking fee here, a construction fence there, are the byproduct of a project finally moving instead of sitting still.
We spend a lot of time on the ground in Alameda, watching which parts of the island are quietly becoming more than they used to be. If you're curious about what a changing waterfront means for property values nearby, or you just want someone who actually knows the difference between the promenade and the runway, the Anthony Riggins Team is always glad to talk it through.
