The designs include bollards, planters and more to give the now-closed block of Avenida de la Playa a “cohesive,” permanent look.

A “sharp,” organized look is coming to the one block of Avenida de la Playa currently closed to vehicular traffic for outdoor dining in La Jolla Shores.

Phil Wise, who has spearheaded the closure since 2020, presented new drawings and plans for the street, parking replacement and landscaping at the Nov 12 meeting of the La Jolla Shores Association.

Now called “Promenade de la Playa,” the one-block closure from El Paseo Grande to Calle de la Plata will soon have bollards at each end to keep the street closed; the bollards can be removed for emergency vehicle passage, Wise said.

Each end will also display improved signage indicating the closure and placed so as to keep buses and other vehicles clear of the crosswalks.

Inside the closure, the restaurants’ existing outdoor seating spaces will undergo a few changes to create a more unified look. 

The fencing that now separates the dining spaces from the street will be removed, Wise said, to be replaced with planter boxes and flowers.

The whole area will have a “much softer look,” he said, creating a”really nice pedestrian walkway down the center of the street.”

The promenade will look “clean, cohesive, razor sharp, and indicative of the beauty of The Shores,” said Darren Moore, who owns Shore Rider and Dough Momma Pizzeria on Avenida de la Playa and heads up the La Jolla Shores Business Association, which oversees the closure. 

The plans further add permanency to what began as a temporary response to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which restaurants were prohibited from serving indoors.

The permits for the closure went through a few iterations before the city of San Diego issued a permanent permit in August. 

“It’s been very hard to work through a process that was being created on the fly,” Moore said.

The new plans also include changes to a sand berm along Camino del Oro at the Kellogg Park parking lot, with a sidewalk and parallel parking adjacent to the street, to make up for the permanent loss of 11 parking spaces on Avenida de la Playa.

The original number of parking spaces to be replaced was 26; the city adjusted that to 11 to account for spaces lost to the newer daylighting law and others illegally painted red.

The La Jolla Shores Business Association is currently drafting documents to hold the restaurants accountable for maintenance of their storefronts and outdoor spaces; the businesses are largely self-policing, Moore said.

“I think this is terrific,” LJSA board member Richard Dahlberg said.

Restaurants will have two years to complete construction.

The business association is currently fundraising for the project; the restaurants have funded the permitting and other costs entirely on their own up until now but “it’s very expensive to do all this,” Wise said.

“This program is not for the restaurants,” he added. “It’s for us because it improves our ambiance.”