Heather Farm Park has hosted two of Walnut Creek's biggest annual gatherings for decades. Both left the park last year, pushed out by the city's rebuild of the aging Aquatic and Community Center, and neither has returned since. What most residents haven't connected yet is that these two absences aren't following the same script. One already has a confirmed second year at its new address, with organizers talking openly about staying put. The other's homecoming, still promised for whenever construction wraps, hasn't even locked in dates for this fall.
If you use this park on a normal week, that distinction matters more than the construction fencing does.
The construction footprint is smaller than it feels
Heather Farm is a 102-acre park, the largest in the city's system. The project tearing through it, the new combined Aquatic and Community Center, sits on a 4.7-acre site, less than five percent of the park's total land. The old Community Center came down on March 6, 2026, following a groundbreaking ceremony on February 18 where Mayor Kevin Wilk called it the biggest construction project the city has ever undertaken, funded largely through the Measure O sales tax voters approved in 2022.
What's still running while that 4.7 acres gets rebuilt:
- Clarke Memorial Swim Center, kept open deliberately. The city chose this construction site specifically so the pool could keep operating through the entire build.
- The off-leash dog park at the north end
- The Walnut Creek Tennis Center
- The skate park
- The Gardens at Heather Farm
- The connection to the Iron Horse Trail
That's most of what makes Heather Farm a daily-use park for the neighborhoods around it. The disruption is real, but it's concentrated, not park-wide.
What's actually fenced off right now
The cement fishing pond and a stretch of canal trail near the nature lake are closed for the duration of the work. The pond was drained in mid-2025 and refilled during the fourth quarter of that year, but public access to it and the adjacent trail segment remains restricted while construction continues around it. If your usual loop includes that stretch, plan to detour onto the Contra Costa Canal Trail or the Ygnacio Canal Trail instead, both of which pass close by.
Picnic sites #2 through #5 are closed through 2026, according to the city's own rental page. Site #1, near the ballfields, isn't on that closed list.
About 75 trees came down at the start of the year to clear the site, a step the city says was completed by the end of January after environmental review. The replacement commitment is two trees planted for every one removed, and the city's own tracking already shows a net gain of roughly 80 trees across the park once that planting catches up. The removed redwoods aren't going to a landfill either. The city is working with Bay Area Redwood to turn them into wood pieces that will eventually go back on display in the park. Wildlife oversight has been part of the process throughout: the city says a biologist has been present for demolition and construction, and every contractor on site has completed wildlife training.
The new facility isn't expected until late 2027 or early 2028, so this is a multi-year condition, not a summer inconvenience.
Two festivals got evicted. Only one has a return date.
This is where the story stops being about fencing and starts being about geography.
| Festival | Where it landed | How the move is framed |
|---|---|---|
| Walnut Festival, an 89-year-old event hosted at Heather Farm since 1976 | Antioch Fairgrounds | Framed as temporary from day one. ABC7 News reported the event would need to be held away from Heather Farm for three years, and the festival's own site still lists this year's 90th anniversary edition as date to-be-determined. |
| Art & Wine Festival (42 years running at Heather Farm before 2025) | Civic Park, downtown | Back for a second consecutive year in 2026 (its 43rd annual), with organizers already promoting the downtown location's advantages. |
The Walnut Festival's move to Antioch was framed from the start as a relocation of necessity, not preference. It's a carnival-style event with more than 15 rides, a scale that fits a fairgrounds better than a 4.7-acre construction zone ever could. The fact that its 90th anniversary edition still shows as date to-be-determined on the festival's own site, with fall approaching, tells you the fairgrounds arrangement hasn't settled into a fixed rhythm yet.
The Art & Wine Festival's move reads differently. It relocated to Civic Park for the first time in 2025 and simply returned there in June 2026, drawing on a lineup that includes more than 200 artisan and maker booths and wine from Livermore Valley, Lodi, and the Sierra Foothills. One food and travel writer covering the 2025 move put it plainly: Civic Park sits next to a BART-accessible path, feeds foot traffic straight into downtown, and sits a few blocks from Broadway Plaza. The writer's read at the time was that the move could easily become permanent.
Two years of the same pattern is starting to look less like a workaround and more like a decision.
Why downtown might keep this audience
Heather Farm gave the Art & Wine Festival a park setting, but Civic Park gives it a captive downtown crowd. The festival has historically pulled more than 30,000 attendees over a weekend. Landing that many people a few blocks from Broadway Plaza's restaurants and shops instead of inside a residential park off North San Carlos Drive is the kind of shift that downtown business groups don't walk back once they've felt the difference in a single weekend, let alone two.
None of the public materials from the Chamber of Commerce or the city have said the festival is staying at Civic Park permanently. But nothing about how it's been built out looked like a placeholder either. The free BART shuttle from both Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill stations, the parking arrangements at North Garage and the Pleasant Hill garage, and the same street closures on Civic Drive, Locust Street, and Arroyo Way the event used for its first Civic Park run in 2025: that's the infrastructure of an event settling in, not one waiting to go home.
Compare that to the Walnut Festival's fairgrounds stint, where the framing has stayed consistent since day one. It's away because Heather Farm can't currently host it, and the expectation, at least as of the three-year figure given when the move was announced, is that it comes back once the new facility is finished.
What this means for the rest of your year
If you live near the park, the practical version of all this is straightforward. The pool, the dog park, tennis courts, skate park, and the Gardens at Heather Farm are open now and should stay open through the entire multi-year build. The pond loop and picnic sites #2 through #5 are out until further notice. Expect construction noise during standard weekday hours, with some weekend work authorized as needed.
The bigger shift is less about this year and more about what late 2027 or early 2028 looks like when the new Aquatic and Community Center opens. The Walnut Festival has a stated path back to Heather Farm once that happens. The Art & Wine Festival's path is less clear, and two consecutive years in Civic Park is exactly the kind of pattern that tends to become the new normal before anyone officially announces it.
Worth watching over the next year: whether the Chamber of Commerce says anything explicit about where the 44th Art & Wine Festival lands in 2027, and whether the Walnut Festival Association locks in dates for its 90th anniversary event rather than leaving them at the fairgrounds indefinitely.
If watching your own neighborhood shift like this, one park closure and two festival relocations at a time, has you thinking about what your own home's next chapter looks like, Lopez Listings can help you get a clear read on where things stand. Get a Free Home Valuation and talk through what's changing in your corner of Walnut Creek, no obligation attached.
