For thirty years, the daily-life gravity of the Forest Hill Boulevard pocket pointed uphill. You walked, drove, or coasted the last block to Country Club Gate for a prescription, a gallon of milk, a card for a grandkid's birthday, a flu shot in October. The shopping center at 150 Country Club Gate was the reason a house near Pacific Grove High School felt like it sat inside a small, self-contained town rather than on the far edge of one.
In 2026, that gravity is shifting. The reason is a single dark storefront at 160 Country Club Gate, and the reason it is still dark tells you something honest about how this corner of Pacific Grove now works.
The 21,708 Feet That Went Dark
Rite Aid filed its second Chapter 11 in three years on May 5, 2025, and 160 Country Club Gate Center appeared on the closure lists that followed. Court filings show the store occupied 21,708 square feet on a lease that ran through June 30, 2029, which is why the fixtures came out but the box is still standing empty rather than being reassigned to another operator. As Forbes reported in the weeks after the filing, neither CVS nor Walgreens was interested in absorbing the physical stores; CVS took prescription files for 625 Rite Aid pharmacies but only agreed to occupy 64 of the buildings.
The closure showed up on the initial court-documented California closure list alongside stores in Salinas, Redwood City, and San Rafael. Pacific Grove was one of the smaller footprints on that page. That is what makes it more interesting, not less: this is the kind of anchor slot that a national tenant will not touch in 2026, and the local operators large enough to fill it can be counted on one hand.
Twenty-one thousand square feet in a 109,000-square-foot center is not a vacancy. It is a question the landlord is asking the neighborhood, in slow motion.
What's Actually Still There
Walk the center today and the anchor slot is the outlier. Lucky California still runs the grocery side of the property, and the smaller tenants that give the center its texture are all trading:
- PG Vibes at 194 Country Club Gate, open 6 a.m. weekdays for smoothies and breakfast bowls
- Subway at 190
- Domino's at 154, the late-night option most residents forget is inside the center at all
- Independent shops selling lamps, shoes, and jewelry that a national landlord would call "eclectic" and a resident would call "the reason I don't drive to Del Monte Center"
The current lease sheet for the property, published by Pacific Grove Economic Development, lists three suites available at Country Club Gate: 332, 1,471, and 3,396 square feet. Nothing near the size of the former pharmacy. Read that carefully. The landlord is not chopping the Rite Aid box into inline retail. It is being held for a single tenant, and the small-suite churn is happening around it.
Where the Prescriptions Actually Went
If you filled scripts at 160 Country Club Gate, the file moved. In most Rite Aid closures across the peninsula, records transferred to a nearby CVS or Walgreens under the sale terms Rite Aid negotiated in bankruptcy court. For the Country Club Gate customer, the nearest active pharmacies are now the CVS at 1055 Cass Street in Monterey, the Walgreens at 1055 Fremont Street in Monterey, the Safeway Pharmacy at Del Rey Oaks, and Carmel Drug Store on Ocean Avenue for anyone willing to make the trip a small errand.
The functional consequence is real. A prescription pickup that used to be a fifteen-minute walk from a Forest Hill Boulevard front door is now a car trip into Monterey or a much longer walk down Forest Avenue to the Safeway pharmacy inside Forest Hill Center. That is where the second half of this story lives.
The Forest Avenue Backstop
The Forest Hill Center up Forest Avenue, wedged between Safeway and Trader Joe's, has quietly absorbed some of the daily-errand traffic that used to end at Country Club Gate. It is a 12-unit U-shaped center with a 720-square-foot retail suite currently listed at $2,500 triple net, per the same Pacific Grove Economic Development sheet. That is a signal about lease velocity in this corridor: the small boxes turn, the anchor slots do not.
For a resident, the practical map is now three-pointed rather than one-pointed. Groceries at Lucky at Country Club Gate. Pharmacy and second-choice groceries at Safeway and Trader Joe's on Forest. Anything requiring a full drugstore assortment out to Monterey. The old model of "the whole errand list, in one lot, ten minutes from the house" no longer holds inside Pacific Grove's western edge.
A Mile Downhill, the Calendar Fills In
The other half of the shift is not commercial. It is cultural, and it is happening a mile downhill at the waterfront that Country Club Gate residents can reach on foot in twenty minutes.
Pacific Grove's summer calendar in 2026 is thicker than it has been in a decade, and the flagship event has changed identity. The Feast of Lanterns, the July tradition Pacific Grove ran for more than a century, was retired after a public reckoning with its origin story. In its place, the Youth Ambassadors of Pacific Grove have built the Summer Lights festival, which Monterey County Now covered last summer as a full week of programming with a pet parade on Lighthouse and a Lovers Point main day. It is not a rebrand. It is a different set of authors, mostly high schoolers, running a different celebration on the same beach.
The rest of the season, as posted by the Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce, reads as a resident-facing document rather than a tourism brochure:
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| July 4, 2026 | 250th Independence Day Celebration, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. | Jewell Park |
| July 10–12 | MotoAmerica Superbike SpeedFest of Monterey | WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca |
| Fridays through summer | Sunset Music Series, 6 to 9 p.m. | Asilomar Social Hall deck |
| July 18 | Lucy's on Lighthouse 6th Anniversary hot dog contest, 12 p.m. | Lucy's on Lighthouse |
| Friday nights | Loud and Local Night, 7 to 9 p.m. | PG Meetinghouse |
| October 3 | Butterfly Parade and Bazaar, 10:30 a.m. | Robert H. Down Elementary |
None of that is downtown-tourist programming. Asilomar's Friday deck series is small-batch: live music, seasonal small bites, s'mores. Lucy's turning six is a milestone the neighborhood tracks because Lucy's is the neighborhood. Loud and Local at the Meetinghouse is a room that seats maybe eighty people. These are events sized to the residents who live within walking distance of them.
What the Corner Actually Says About 2026
Put the two halves together and the shift becomes legible. The commercial anchor at the top of Forest Hill Boulevard is stuck in a national-chain limbo that no one in Pacific Grove can resolve on a local timeline. The Rite Aid lease runs to 2029. ROIC, the REIT that owns the center, has to find a single operator big enough to take a 21,708-foot box in a market where CVS and Walgreens themselves are contracting. In the meantime, the daily-errand map has quietly redistributed itself down the hill.
The good news for anyone who already owns here is that the redistribution did not empty the neighborhood. It thickened it. Forest Avenue absorbed the pharmacy trips. Lovers Point absorbed the summer social calendar. The small suites at Country Club Gate keep turning, and Lucky is not going anywhere. What changed is the answer to the question "where does life actually happen on my end of Pacific Grove?" In 2019, the answer was one shopping center. In 2026, it is a triangle with a dark corner and two brighter ones.
The dark corner is the story to watch. When a tenant is finally announced for 160 Country Club Gate, that decision will reset the walking map for every house between Forest Hill Boulevard and Pacific Grove High School. Until then, the neighborhood is running on the answer it has already found.
If you own a home in the Country Club Gate or Forest Grove pocket and you're curious what a shifting daily-life map means for value on your specific street, the team at Truszkowski Freedman & Associates reads Pacific Grove block by block. Work With Us when you're ready for a conversation grounded in what your corner of the peninsula is actually doing.
