Drive out to the reservoir this month and the first thing you'll see is scaffolding. The tower that has poked above the water since 1929, the one every dog walker and stroller-pushing parent has used as a landmark for generations, is wrapped in protective fabric and getting shorter by the week. A crane mounted on a floating barge lifts sections off its top. Debris trucks roll out a back route so downtown never sees them.
Head the other direction, into the heart of Lafayette on Mt. Diablo Boulevard, and you'll find the opposite kind of scene. A building that sat behind construction fencing for most of a decade is finally full. The patio is loud. The wait for a table is real. Two landmarks, moving in opposite directions, in the same town, in the same six months.
That timing is not a coincidence worth shrugging off. It is the actual story of Lafayette in 2026: a town that tends to sit on big decisions for years, watching several of them land at once.
A Design Mistake Ninety-Six Years in the Making
The reservoir tower's problem was never really about age. It was built too tall the first time around.
Construction on the dam began in 1927 with plans for an embankment roughly 33 feet higher than what exists today. As crews built up the earthen fill, the clay foundation beneath it started to move, and engineers had to scale the dam back to a safer height. The outlet tower, however, had already been built to serve that original, larger design. So it stayed at its full height, leaving the East Bay with a spillway tower that has been about 40 feet taller than the reservoir actually needs since the day it opened.
For most of a century that mismatch was a curiosity, the odd, almost gazebo-topped structure that made for a good photo backdrop. It became a genuine problem only after the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis, when the failure there forced the evacuation of 188,000 people and led California's Division of Safety of Dams to tighten seismic standards statewide. Under the new scrutiny, Lafayette's excess height stopped reading as charm and started reading as risk. State flood mapping tied to the project shows a potential dam failure would inundate parts of Lafayette and Walnut Creek, including a K-8 school, the Lafayette Police Department, and the Lafayette BART station.
"With age and deterioration, there's more risk that it could crack or break, the higher, the taller it is."
That's Christopher Tritto, an EBMUD spokesperson, explaining the logic to CBS San Francisco as crews began cutting into the tower on July 10, 2026. The plan, a $14 million retrofit funded by ratepayers, shortens the 170-foot structure by 40 feet rather than tearing it out entirely. EBMUD has said it's salvaging what it can from the original structure, including a window installed in the late 1920s, and is weighing ways to turn other pieces into some kind of public keepsake once the work wraps.
None of this happened quickly. EBMUD was already weighing whether to fix or remove the tower as far back as 2018. A citizen's technical committee spent years afterward pushing the district to keep the tower at its original height, meeting with state regulators and presenting counter-proposals through 2023 and 2024. The state ultimately sided with EBMUD's shortened design in November 2024, and it took until this summer for the physical demolition to actually begin.
What You'll Actually Notice on Your Next Walk
If you loop the reservoir regularly, here's what's different right now and what's expected to hold through the fall.
- The tower is fully wrapped in scaffolding and protective fabric, and demolition is visible from most points around the water.
- Debris comes off by crane and barge, then leaves the park by truck using the Acalanes Road onramp, a route that keeps construction traffic away from downtown Lafayette entirely.
- On the paved Lakeside Nature Trail, flaggers are stationed near the work zone, and both pedestrians and drivers should expect occasional delays of about 10 to 15 minutes while crews move equipment across the path.
- Fishing, hiking, and picnicking remain open throughout construction, though EBMUD paused group picnic site reservations from February through July 2026 and has said it will release select dates back as the schedule firms up. If you're planning a gathering out there this fall, it's worth checking current availability before you commit.
- A second, unrelated EBMUD project is also underway nearby: upgrades at the Lafayette Water Treatment Plant on Mt. Diablo Boulevard are temporarily closing a portion of the Walter Costa Trail.
- With both the tower retrofit and a separate wastewater system replacement running at the reservoir at the same time, EBMUD has called this stretch through fall 2026 the peak construction footprint for the site. Tower work itself is expected to finish by the end of October.
None of this closes the park. It just means your usual lap might run a few minutes longer, and the view you've had your whole time in Lafayette is about to look different for good.
Half a Mile Away, a Different Kind of Landmark Finally Filled In
The building at the corner of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Dolores Drive, directly across from Trader Joe's, spent most of the last decade as scaffolding and empty storefronts. Locals watched it sit there long enough that finishing it stopped feeling like a certainty. Then, in late 2025, The Brant delivered its ground-floor commercial space, with 66 residential units stacked above it. By March 2026, the anchor tenant was pouring beer.
That tenant is Western Flyer Brewing, and its owner Logan Jager spent more than fifteen years working toward opening it. He'd had chances to build elsewhere. He didn't take them. In an earlier interview with Diablo Magazine, Jager put it plainly: "When we started this process, we only wanted to open in Lafayette." The taproom that resulted from that patience runs roughly 5,400 square feet, designed by Costa Mesa architect Erin Morris and built out by Walnut Creek's own Terra Nova Industries. A waist-high glass barrier lets patrons watch the 10-barrel brewing system at work while they eat from a menu built around coastal tacos, birria, chicken tinga, and quesabirria, alongside hamachi tostadas and housemade tortillas pressed to order. The taps lean lager-forward, with a Mexican Lager, Rice Lager, American Lager, and a rotating hop-forward Development Series.
Western Flyer wasn't even first to the block. A French bakery beat him there. Brioche de Paris opened in late December 2025, with early customers spotting it serving on January 1, at 998 Moraga Road, steps from the longtime anchor restaurant Sideboard. It moved into the space that had belonged to Hollie's Homegrown, bringing a skylight, counter seating, a coffee bar, and a full lineup of French breads, pastries, and sandwiches. Hollie's, displaced, is set to reopen later this year inside The Brant, the same building Western Flyer now calls home. One local business made room for a French bakery down the street, then lined up to move into the building where Lafayette's newest brewery just opened.
The Slow Clock Finally Moved
Downtown Lafayette already had a microbrewery, Headlands Brewing Co, which has operated there for years. What changed in 2026 isn't that Lafayette got its first brewery. It's that several operators who had been circling the town for years all landed within months of each other, at the same time a decade-old public safety debate finally moved from meetings to a barge crane.
The clearest proof that the corridor's density actually shifted, rather than just refreshed, showed up on May 19, 2026, at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce's Taste of Lafayette Restaurant Stroll. Tasting tickets, priced at $80 to $85, sold out before the event even started. Non-ticket holders could still enjoy free music at Lafayette Plaza and a Plaza Bar that stayed open to everyone. The detail worth sitting with is the participant list. Five names appeared as new for 2026: Western Flyer Brewing, Tropa, Fathers Brewing, Deer Hill Vineyards, and Local Vines, joining an established lineup that includes Sideboard, Postino, Batch & Brine, and Lafayette Public House. A tasting stroll that's run for years doesn't add five new names in a single cycle unless something on the ground genuinely expanded.
For anyone who's lived here through a few of those slow years, that's the real update. The tower that's watched over the reservoir since before the Depression is finally getting the retrofit residents have debated since at least 2018. The building that sat half-finished for most of a decade is finally the reason your Friday night reservation takes longer to land. Both took a long time. Both landed the same year.
If you're already planning your fall walk around the reservoir, budget a few extra minutes near the dam. If you haven't been to the corner of Mt. Diablo and Dolores lately, it's worth the detour before or after.
For homeowners in Lafayette watching how these changes are reshaping the town's day to day, it's often the right moment to have a conversation about what's next, whether that's understanding how a shifting downtown affects your own property's story or simply getting a clear-eyed read on the local market before you decide anything. The Rita Dhillon Team has spent decades paying attention to exactly this kind of detail in Lafayette and the surrounding Contra Costa communities. Book an Appointment whenever you're ready to talk.
