Royal Oak Closed a Street by Accident in 2020. This Fall, It's Making That Decision Permanent.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk down Fifth between Center and Washington on a Saturday night this month and you will not find a single car. That is not new. What is new is that the city just told you, officially, that it never will again.
For six years, this stretch of Fifth Street has existed in a kind of civic limbo. It closed to traffic in 2020 as an emergency measure, so restaurants could spill tables onto asphalt during the months when indoor dining felt risky. The emergency passed. The closed street did not reopen. And what started as an accident of a pandemic is now, in 2026, an actual construction project on the city's active project list: a permanent pedestrian plaza, funded in part by a $311,751.61 Placemaking and Revitalization Grant from Main Street Oakland County, with grass, added lighting, and seating built to stay.
That is the thesis of this piece, and it is not a metaphor. Royal Oak's downtown is mid-conversion from a place built around parking to a place built around standing still, and you can see the evidence on the same three blocks: a closed street becoming a plaza, a new restaurant betting its whole design on foot traffic instead of a parking lot, and a hundred-year-old market that has been having this exact argument with the city since before most of the current commissioners were born.
The Downtown Development Authority has been working the Fifth Street plaza concept with civil engineering firm Fleis & Vandenbrink since 2023, and when the DDA briefed city commissioners on it in 2024, the project carried a working budget of roughly $1.5 million. The city commission unanimously approved the conceptual design, covering the segment from the railroad tracks at Center down to Washington, and a second connected stretch running from Washington to Lafayette that already functions as a walkway past the Baldwin Theatre, home to Stagecrafters. The water main and plaza work on that Lafayette-to-Center segment sits on Royal Oak's own list of active infrastructure projects right now, and a Phase 2 sponsorship request went before the DDA this spring to keep extending the work, including an application for county transit funding to make the surrounding intersections easier and safer to cross on foot.
Not everyone loved every detail on the way here. At one commission meeting, Commissioner Melanie Macey pushed back on the plan to use artificial turf for the plaza's green space:
"It just seems like now we've replaced all of this space with turf, and I don't personally love that as much."
City staff held their ground on turf for a practical reason: real grass gets torn up fast under the kind of daily foot traffic a plaza next to Baker College and a busy retail corridor actually draws. That single exchange tells you something the renderings don't. This isn't a beautification project chasing a look. It's an infrastructure decision built around how many people the city expects to be standing there, not driving past.
Two doors down from where that plaza is going in, a three-story building that used to be Pastaio, and before that a HopCat, and before that a club called Woody's, opened in March 2026 as Rock & Brews. It is the first Michigan location for the chain founded by KISS members Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, and the local ownership is the part worth knowing. The operating franchisees are Tony and Danny Yezbick, who already run Fifth Avenue, the longstanding bar directly across the street, along with 526 Main Piano Bar around the corner. Detroit rock radio veteran Drew Lane, who spent twenty years co-hosting The Drew and Mike Show on WRIF and now hosts his own podcast, is a partner too, and he spent the buildout feeding the design team old WRIF stickers, Motown posters, and flyers from vanished Detroit punk clubs like Bookie's and Traxx.
The building itself is a bet on people arriving on foot. It runs 12,000 square feet across three floors built for roughly 600 guests: main dining at street level, a live music floor above it, and a rooftop lounge that opens for warmer months. There are more than 30 televisions and a 16-foot LED screen, but the layout is not built around a drive-up crowd. It's built around the plaza traffic the city is currently constructing next door. CEO Adam Goldberg put it plainly when the restaurant opened: the team wanted the space to feel unmistakably local, not like a franchise dropped in from somewhere else.
A few concrete details, if you're deciding whether to stop in:
The Yezbicks aren't new to Royal Oak's civic machinery either. They were in front of the city commission again in November 2025, this time on a liquor license matter for Club Christmas, the seasonal pop-up bar they also operate at the same Center and Fifth corner. Whatever else changes on that block, the same handful of local operators keep showing up to steer it.
If the plaza and the restaurant are the new evidence, the Royal Oak Farmers Market already proved the underlying point once, when it turned 100. The market opened on October 14, 1925, as a place for a growing town to sell produce, and it moved into the brick building it still occupies at 316 E. 11 Mile Road in 1927, a 23,000-square-foot hall with a concrete floor built specifically so farmers could drive wagons in to unload. On its first day, more than 300 consumers bought from 75 producers. Some of those original vendor families are still selling there today.
The market has its own history of nearly losing its public footing to redevelopment. In 1996, when a sale of the market was proposed, residents protested, and the city ended up buying out the county's 60 percent stake to keep it municipally owned outright. That's the same instinct playing out on Fifth Street now, three decades later: a public gathering space nearly converted to something else, saved by people who wanted to keep standing in it.
The market marked its actual centennial last year with three events spaced across the calendar and tied to whatever was in season, an idea market planner Christie Siegel described as leaning into the harvest itself. A Centennial Flower and Garden Day ran in May 2025. A hundred-vendor corn roast, one of the market's biggest days of the year, followed on August 9, 2025. The celebration closed with a Harvest Festival on October 8, 2025, six days ahead of the market's actual hundredth birthday on October 14, 2025. Market manager Shelly Mazur has talked about the moment that keeps repeating on the market floor, people walking up and telling her they came here as kids, or that their family once ran a booth there decades ago. A hundred years in, and now more than a year past that milestone, the market's pull is still that it's the same place, not a reinvented one. Royal Oak was, for a stretch in the 1930s, informally known as a rhubarb capital because of how much of it shipped through the market and out to the region, a detail that only makes sense once you know how central this one building has been to the town for a century.
None of these three things happened because of the others. The plaza is a civic infrastructure decision that predates Rock & Brews by years. The market's centennial was just math, a hundred years after 1925. But look at them together and the pattern is hard to miss: downtown Royal Oak keeps making the same choice, over and over, to protect and build public space where people stand still rather than space where cars pass through. A pandemic accident became a funded plaza. A rock-and-roll restaurant built its whole floor plan around foot traffic instead of parking. A market that survived a 1996 sale threat turned 100 last year in the same brick building it's occupied since 1927.
If you already live near this stretch of downtown, that's the thing worth noticing this fall when you're deciding where to grab dinner or what to do on a Saturday morning. The block is being built, on purpose, for people who are already standing on it.
If you're the kind of person who reads a story like this and starts wondering what a home near that same stretch of downtown might be worth, or whether now's the right season to make a move in Royal Oak, that's a different conversation, and it's one Megan Prieur is glad to have whenever you're ready. Get your instant home valuation to see where your Royal Oak property stands today.
Buying a home will likely be one of the most expensive purchases of your life and selling your home can be an incredibly emotional experience. When you're making a tough life decision like this, it's imperative that you're working with someone you can depend on, who will be available at a moments notice, and who puts you first.