For more than fifty years, getting from the Pruneyard to Downtown Campbell has meant getting into a car, even though the two are close enough that you could see one from the other on a clear day. The Los Gatos Creek Trail has run behind both this whole time, but the connection between them was never actually finished. A completed stretch of trail now links the Pruneyard's parking garage directly to East Campbell Avenue, closing a gap that residents have been driving around since the Nixon administration.
That gap tells you something about how this town actually grew. Downtown Campbell and the Pruneyard were never built to be the same kind of place, and the trail extension is the first infrastructure that treats them like they might be.
Two Districts, Built Fifty Years Apart in Philosophy
Downtown Campbell's core is old and small-scaled, the kind of walkable grid that predates cars as the assumed way to get anywhere. The Pruneyard is a different animal entirely. Developer Fred Sahadi bought the land in 1968, a 27-acre pear and prune orchard called Brynteson Ranch, and built an upscale, Mission Revival-style mixed-use complex that opened its movie theater in 1969 and finished the rest of the project in 1970. It came with three office towers, one of them still among the tallest buildings outside downtown San Jose, and eventually a DoubleTree by Hilton. This was a shopping center designed as its own self-contained destination, not an extension of the town next door.
The Pruneyard's separateness even made it into constitutional law. In the late 1970s, high school students tried to collect petition signatures on the property and the mall told them they couldn't. The dispute went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June 1980 that California's constitution can protect free speech activity on the private grounds of shopping centers open to the public. Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins is still cited in California law today. Whatever else you want to say about the Pruneyard, it has never been just another block of Campbell Avenue. It has its own legal history.
The Half-Mile Nobody Walked
The Los Gatos Creek Trail already ran past both ends. The Campbell stretch covers roughly three miles, including a two-mile par course loop, and the trail has an access point at the northwest corner of the Pruneyard complex, tucked behind the parking structure. Downtown Campbell sits close enough that some route descriptions put it at a three-block walk from the trail via Campbell Avenue. Close, but not connected. If you wanted to walk from a lunch spot at the Pruneyard to a dinner spot on Campbell Avenue, the practical route ran through parking lots and past the Highway 17 on-ramps, not along the creek.
The newly completed trail extension changes that by creating a continuous path from the existing spur near the Pruneyard's parking garage straight through to East Campbell Avenue. It is a short piece of infrastructure, but it does something the fifty-year gap never allowed: it lets you leave your car at one end and actually arrive at the other on foot, following the creek instead of dodging traffic.
Campbell has also placed a couple of markers along this corridor that give it a sense of place rather than just function, including a fountain feature called Discover Water near the Campbell Park bridge and a Gateway arch marking entrances to the historic downtown. Neither changes what the trail does, but they make the walk read as connective tissue between two parts of town rather than a drainage easement with a bike lane on it.
What's Actually Worth Walking To
The timing matters because both ends of that new connection have real reasons to visit them right now, and they are not the same reasons.
At the Pruneyard, the current dining anchors have some history behind them. Orchard City Kitchen moved into a former Hobee's space in 2014, brought in by chef Jeffrey Stout, who had made his name at the Michelin-starred Alexander's Steakhouse in Cupertino. Stout describes his restaurant as the first wave of independent operators to move into a shopping center that had gone a little quiet by that point. A few years later, Jo Lerma-Lopez and John Lopez, who had run a taqueria called Las Palmas on the Alameda in San Jose for more than sixty years, converted a former El Burro space into Luna in 2017. Luna earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand two years later. Both restaurants describe the Pruneyard's older bones, exposed beams and all, as part of what drew them there instead of a newer, glossier center.
Downtown Campbell's changes are more concentrated, even if not every one of them is brand new. Doppio Zero, a Southern Italian chain with locations in Mountain View, San Francisco, San Carlos and Concord, opened its fifth location in May 2024 at 220 E. Campbell Ave., a storefront that had sat vacant for roughly three years after the candy shop Rocket Fizz Soda closed in 2021. It has had time to become one of the avenue's steadier draws. More recently, Elia, a Greek restaurant chain with locations in Pleasanton, Walnut Creek and San Carlos, targeted the former Opa! space at 276 E. Campbell Ave. for an early 2026 opening, after Opa! closed in a 2025 bankruptcy. Il Sogno, from the owners of Vin Santo, opened in the space shared with Campbell Brewing Company, in what used to be Liquid Bread Gastropub. And FLIGHTS, serving comfort food tapas-style, is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday.
None of this is a coincidence of timing so much as a pattern. Downtown Campbell has been filling long-vacant storefronts with restaurants pulled from small regional chains, while the Pruneyard's strongest recent openings have leaned toward independent, chef-driven spots with deeper local roots. A short walk between them now covers two genuinely different dining identities instead of one blurred strip.
A Fall Calendar Built Around the Walk
Downtown Campbell runs a dense fall calendar that gives the new trail connection somewhere to lead. The weekly anchor is the Campbell Farmers' Market, held every Sunday year-round in Downtown Campbell.
| Event | When |
|---|---|
| Campbell Farmers' Market | Every Sunday, year-round |
| 31st Annual Campbell Oktoberfest | Saturday, October 17 |
| Thrill the World Zombie Crawl | Saturday, October 24 |
The Zombie Crawl is a South Bay tradition at this point. Every Halloween, a crowd performs the "Thriller" dance routine while working its way from one end of Downtown Campbell to the other, with free practice workshops held in the weeks beforehand. Later in the year, the Carol of Lights opens Campbell's holiday season with Santa visits, a petting zoo and a community stage for local dance groups.
None of these events happen at the Pruneyard. They happen on Campbell Avenue, in the walkable core that the trail extension now reaches on foot instead of by car. A resident heading to the farmers market on a Sunday morning can just as easily walk the creek path back toward the Pruneyard afterward for lunch, something that would have meant re-parking a car a few months ago.
What the Trail Actually Buys You
The distance between Doppio Zero on Campbell Avenue and Orchard City Kitchen at the Pruneyard is a few tenths of a mile, the kind of stretch that used to require getting behind the wheel because the direct route didn't exist. Now it's a six or seven minute walk along the creek, past the Discover Water feature and under the Gateway arch, with a fifty-six-year-old shopping center on one end and a nineteenth-century downtown grid on the other. That's not a small thing for a town where these two centers of gravity have operated like separate business districts since before most current residents were born.
If the idea of a Campbell address that puts both ends of that walk within reach has you thinking about what's actually available nearby, Karin Freiman can walk you through the options along this corridor and what they typically involve.
