For anyone who lives here, the calendar quietly changes shape after the Fourth of July. The first half of the season spreads out. The last month tightens. Three of the biggest remaining Belvedere events all sit within a five-minute walk of each other, and the fourth item on the list is a construction fence at 1-22 Mallard Road that will reshape what that same walk looks like for the next seventy years.
If you have been meaning to actually use the summer you paid property tax for, this is the stretch to do it. Here is what is running between now and Labor Day, and why the geography of it matters more than the schedule.
The Loop That Holds The Rest Of The Season
Draw a rough triangle from Belvedere Community Park to the Belvedere Tiburon Library to the lagoon edge at Beach Road. That triangle contains almost every scheduled resident event left on the 2026 calendar. It is a walkable loop, not a driving one, and that is the point of the next few weeks.
Anchors on the loop:
- Belvedere Community Park at San Rafael Avenue — Sunday afternoon concerts, picnic culture, and the only large lawn in the city that gets consistent use.
- Belvedere Community Center, 450 San Rafael Avenue — where the Mallard Pointe project meetings and city sessions land.
- Belvedere Tiburon Library — the Home Made Film Festival hub and where the Saturday workshops run.
- Harvey's Garden at Blackie's Pasture and the lagoon path — the connective tissue for anyone walking the loop instead of driving between stops.
The Belvedere Community Foundation funds a specific cluster of these institutions, which is why so many of them run on overlapping calendars and volunteer benches. If you have wondered why the same faces show up at three different events in a weekend, that is the mechanism.
Sunday, August 9: Native Elements At Community Park
The second-to-last concert of the season is the reggae date. Native Elements takes the Community Park stage at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 9, playing reggae, roots and lovers rock. Concerts are free and sponsored by donations, with support from the City of Belvedere and the Belvedere Community Foundation.
A detail worth holding onto: this is the 29th year of free summer concerts in Belvedere. That longevity is why the picnic rituals feel established rather than improvised. Blankets go down early, families claim the same slope of lawn they used last August, and the crowd is almost entirely local. If you are new to the tradition, arriving twenty minutes before four is more than enough. The park is not a festival ground, and the scale stays neighborhood.
The Film Festival Nobody Talks About Enough
The quieter story of this summer is the Third Annual Belvedere Home Made Film Festival, run out of the library. The festival kicked off with a red-carpet gathering, with free filmmaking workshops offered all summer on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
If you have kids in the ten-to-fifteen range who spent June and July asking to make TikToks, the workshops are the answer that gets them off the phone and into a room with a camera. The workshops are free, which is the part most parents miss. If your household has never walked into the library's Makerspace, this is the summer to fix that.
For adults, the finished screenings later in the season are the payoff. It is one of the few local events where the audience is looking at work made by their own neighbors rather than curated from somewhere else.
What Is Actually Happening At Mallard Pointe Right Now
The construction fence between the lagoon and City Hall is the item most residents want a real answer about. Here is the current state, in the order the city has moved through it this year.
The project is approved. The 40-unit plan at 1-22 Mallard Road replaces 22 existing units with a mix of an apartment building, townhomes, duplexes and single-family homes, with four units required to remain affordable to low- and very-low-income households for 55 years under state law. The approved plan is a net increase of 18 units, including one accessory dwelling unit and the four workforce apartments.
The city hired a coordinator this spring. In April 2026 the City Council authorized a $200,000 contract with Santa Rosa-based Phillips Seabrook Associates to provide a project coordinator and senior building inspector, paid at $175 an hour, capped at $50,000 in fiscal year 2025-2026 and $150,000 in fiscal 2026-2027. That coordinator is Eric Seabrook, and he and his team held a public meet and greet at the Belvedere Community Center on June 4 to walk residents through the status.
The design pedigree is local. The lagoon-front residences were designed by Sutton Suzuki Architects, whose work across Belvedere and Marin County spans more than three decades, and Mallard Pointe is among the firm's final projects.
The number to hold onto: the project is being designed to account for sea level rise and will be FEMA compliant, with the first occupied floor located at Base Flood Elevation plus one foot, roughly 11 feet above sea level.
That eleven-foot number is the single most important spec for anyone who lives on or near the lagoon. It sets the reference elevation that adjacent owners will eventually be compared against for their own remodels, insurance conversations, and future improvements. The Mallard Pointe finished-floor line is going to become the shorthand people use when they talk about lagoon-front construction on the peninsula, whether or not that is the developer's intent.
If you want to see the site before construction moves into its next phase, the walk from Community Park down San Rafael Avenue to Beach Road takes about eight minutes. It is worth doing once before the fencing changes.
Labor Day Sunday Closes The Season
The finale is Foreverland, a Michael Jackson tribute act, on Labor Day Sunday, September 6, at 4:00 p.m. in Community Park. The Labor Day slot is the most crowded of the four concerts every year and functions as the unofficial end of the residential summer. School routines re-anchor the following week, the tempo of the lagoon changes, and the walking loop gets quieter until the fall gallery openings at the library.
If you plan to bring guests down from the city for one Belvedere weekend, this is the one. Parking tightens after 3 p.m., so the case for walking from home is stronger here than at any other concert on the schedule.
Worth Adding To The Loop
Two lower-key items to fold in if you want a full summer weekend inside the same triangle:
- StoryWalk at the Richardson Bay Audubon Center, 376 Greenwood Beach Road. The installation lets visitors read a picture book along the grounds, with a half-mile oak woodlands trail and shorebird viewing on the property. Under an hour, kid-appropriate, and a genuine break from the pavement.
- Harvey's Garden at Blackie's Pasture on the way back. It is the reset point between the Audubon Center and downtown, and the maintained plantings are quietly one of the Community Foundation's better-run projects.
Why This Summer Reads Differently
Every August in Belvedere feels similar on the surface. What is different in 2026 is the density of the calendar in a five-minute radius, and the fact that Mallard Pointe has moved from paper into on-site work during the same weeks residents are walking past it to a concert. That timing is not going to repeat. The lagoon frontage will look different by next summer, the finished-floor benchmarks will be visible, and the conversations about adjacent property values will have started in earnest.
If you own on the peninsula and have not been paying close attention to how the coordinator role is being structured, the Belvedere Community Center meetings are the room to be in. If you rent or own on the lagoon side specifically, the eleven-foot elevation reference is worth writing down.
If you are thinking about what your own home looks like against these shifts, whether that means a valuation, a design conversation, or a longer view on the block, Daniel Nebenzahl works in exactly this stretch of Belvedere and Tiburon and is happy to walk the loop with you. Request Your Home Valuation when you are ready.
