State Street Promenade

You've come out onto State Street — and depending on the day, you may be standing in the middle of the road with no cars in sight. That's not an accident. This stretch of State has been closed to traffic since 2020, when the city emptied the roadway and, almost overnight, people filled it — tables, strollers, buskers, whole dinners served where lanes used to be. They call it the State Street Promenade.

And it belongs at the end of this walk, because it's the same fight the whole tour has been about, just wearing modern clothes. A century ago the question was "what should downtown look like?" — and the answer was a mandated Spanish town. Today the question is "what is a main street for?" — cars, or people — and the city has been arguing about it ever since the barriers went up. However you find it as you stand here today, know that its future is genuinely undecided; this is history still being written under your feet.

Look around at the shops along here, fronting the open-air Paseo Nuevo center — this is the specialty retail of now, the current chapter of a downtown that has always sold browsing as an experience, all the way back to La Arcada and El Paseo. Same instinct, new century.

That's the tour. Ten stops, and one stubborn idea: this city decided what it wanted to look like — twice, a hundred years apart.

From here, take your time and walk the promenade back up State Street toward the Arlington and your start. Go at your own pace — you'll pass everything again from the other side, and now you know which "old" is which.