The sand sculptures at the Turnaround are already losing their edges. That's the deal with SandFest: whatever gets carved into that stretch of beach over four days gets handed back to the tide and the wind within a week, and by the time you read this, the fifth annual event has wrapped and the crowds that came to watch ten master sculptors and nine advanced amateurs shape sand from Canada, Mexico, and eight U.S. states have mostly gone home.
If that's the only version of this week you saw, you missed the more interesting story. The sculptures were never going to last. What did last, quietly, over the course of this year, is a run of new storefronts that have nothing to do with festival season at all, and they say more about where Seaside is headed than anything built out of sand ever could.
Four Days, Two Events, One Stretch of Beach
This year's SandFest ran September 17 through 20, right off the Turnaround, with the usual structure: masters working solo pieces through the weekend, advanced amateurs starting a day behind them, and a Saturday-night S'moreFest with fire pits and an acoustic set that turns the beach into something closer to a block party than a competition. New this year was a quick-carve contest on the final day, where two-person teams had ten minutes to turn a five-gallon pillar of sand into whatever they could manage before the clock ran out.
What made this particular week worth noting is that the Wheels and Waves Car Show ran the exact same four days. Two events that draw entirely different crowds, one built around slow, deliberate sculpture and the other around polished chrome and engine noise, ended up sharing the same few blocks of downtown at the same time. If you live near the Prom and wondered why parking felt tighter than usual this weekend, that overlap is the answer. Worth remembering if you're planning around it next September.
What Opened While Everyone Was Watching the Sand
Festivals get the headlines because they're loud and temporary. The businesses that opened around them this year are quieter, and most weren't built with a festival crowd in mind at all.
Tides & Tails, a new self-wash dog spot on South Roosevelt Drive, is the clearest example. It's not on Broadway, it's not aimed at a weekend visitor with two hours before checkout, it's a place you go after your dog has spent the afternoon rolling in something on the beach and you don't want that in your car for the drive home. That's a resident's problem, not a tourist's.
Seaside Pen Shop is the same kind of bet. A storefront built around fountain pens, calligraphy pens imported from Japan, and notebooks isn't chasing foot traffic from someone in town for a weekend. It's chasing the kind of customer who comes back a second and third time, which is a different business model than most of what lines the beach-facing blocks of Broadway.
Gaming Galley & Cove Cafe fits the same pattern: a board game spot stocked with everything from kid-friendly options like Go Fish and a canine-themed spin on Monopoly called Dog-opoly to more niche historically themed games. That's a place built for a Tuesday night, not a Saturday afternoon rush.
The Mexican Food Scene Just Placed Two Different Bets
The most interesting expansion this year came in food, and it happened in two directions at once.
Taqueria Los Compas, a food cart out of Astoria that built a following one order at a time, now has a brick-and-mortar location in the heart of Seaside. The move signals a bet that a single, sharply focused menu, built around birria in forms that go well beyond the standard taco (birria-topped fries, birria ramen, even birria pizza served with broth for dipping) can support a permanent storefront rather than a cart that packs up at the end of the day.
Kiosco Mexicano made the opposite bet. Instead of narrowing, it expanded, relocating into a larger space that now functions as a full indoor Mexican plaza: a market, a butcher counter, a bakery, and a counter-service restaurant called Axolotl Mexican Cuisine serving tacos and enchilada plates, alongside the Equinox Card Shop for gifts, jewelry, and trading cards, plus piñatas and imported groceries. It's open late, which matters in a town where a lot of restaurants quietly wind down once the dinner rush thins out.
One business is doubling down on doing one thing extremely well. The other is betting that Seaside's appetite for Mexican food and goods is big enough to support an entire small marketplace under one roof. Both bets are running at the same time, a few blocks apart, which tells you something about how confident local operators are feeling about year-round demand, not just summer demand.
The Contrast That Actually Matters
SandFest measures its draw in sculptors flown in from three countries and a spread of states. That's an impressive number, but it's a number about visitors passing through for four days.
The number that actually says something about Seaside's direction this year is smaller and easier to miss: eight new storefronts, spread across food, retail, and services, none of them built primarily around festival traffic. A dog wash, a pen shop, a board game cafe, a VR arcade, a broasted chicken spot, a live music venue with a sangria bar, and two very different Mexican food concepts. That's not a tourism number. That's a town filling in its own errands-and-evenings infrastructure, the stuff that has to work in February as much as it does in July.
What's Still Ahead This Season
The SandFest crowd is gone, but the calendar isn't finished yet. A few things worth having on your radar:
- Seaside Farmers Market continues on Saturdays into late September at the Sunset Recreation Center parking lot along Highway 101, with the food court running noon to 6 p.m. and the main market from 1 to 6 p.m.
- First Saturday Art Walk, now in its 22nd year, runs 5 to 7 p.m. in the Historic Gilbert District between Holladay and Broadway. The next one lands October 3.
- Seaside Turkey Trot, a Thanksgiving morning 5K with a costume contest, kicks off at 9 a.m. on November 26, with doors opening at 8.
None of these are new. What's new is the density of things to walk to between them, now that the blocks around Broadway have filled in with places that weren't there a year ago.
The Part Worth Sitting With
Festivals are useful for measuring how many people will show up for a weekend. They're a bad way to measure whether a town is actually growing into itself. The more honest measure is what opens and stays open once the sculptures wash out and the car show trailers pull away, and this year that measure points somewhere specific: toward South Roosevelt Drive, toward a pen shop and a board game cafe, toward two different theories about how much appetite this town has for good Mexican food. That's not the kind of change that shows up in a festival recap. It's the kind that shows up when you run your errands six months from now and realize the town quietly got a little more useful while you weren't looking.
If you're the kind of person who keeps half an eye on what's changing around town and wonders what it might mean for your own address, Jamay Hadley and Taylor Martin at PNW Real Estate Experts are always glad to talk it through. Get a free home valuation whenever you're curious what a year like this one has done to your corner of Seaside.
