The first thing longtime market-goers noticed at the new Foley Family Community Pavilion this spring was the roof. A partially translucent canopy, open sides, a metal-fabric front that echoes the old warehouse it replaced. The second thing they noticed, if they came on a Saturday morning looking for the tomatoes, was that the roof wasn't over the tomatoes at all. The produce, the eggs, the flowers, the entire certified-farmer core of the market, was parked outside on North Street, same as it had been in a parking lot for years. The building Healdsburg spent a decade fighting to save and $10.4 million to finish shelters almost everything at the Saturday market, while the produce remains outside.
That's not a complaint about the pavilion. It's a fact about how the market actually works now, and it splits the week into two different experiences depending on which day you show up.
Why the roof doesn't cover the farmers
The Saturday market has more than 20 certified produce vendors, and state agricultural rules require them to be grouped together with room for the trucks that haul their goods in. Many need double or triple parking spaces. None of that fits under a pavilion designed with a covered platform at its center, so on Saturdays the entire produce section sets up outside, spread across the parking lot and a stretch of North Street that the city closes to traffic for the morning.
Tuesday looks nothing like it. About a dozen farms show up, most with smaller vehicles and smaller footprints, and that's small enough for the produce to actually move under the covered structure. Add in Quail & Condor and Downtown Bakery and Creamery for baked goods, and the Tuesday market becomes the version of the pavilion the renderings probably showed you: shaded, covered, contained.
So the question "is the market under the new roof now" doesn't have one answer. It depends on whether you're asking about a Tuesday errand or a Saturday one.
The Tuesday market's move to the pavilion
The Healdsburg Tribune reported that the Saturday market's move to the pavilion wasn't controversial. It had outgrown its parking lot and welcomed the extra room. The Tuesday market had been rooted in a different location. For years it ran on the Healdsburg Plaza itself, the kind of location where a hotel guest could walk out their door and buy peaches, or a downtown employee could shop on a lunch break. Moving it away from that spot wasn't something the market's own management, its vendors, or the surrounding community wanted. The Tuesday market relocated on May 12, 2026, a walk of less than two blocks from where it had always been.
Whether that two-block walk registers as a minor inconvenience or a real loss probably depends on how attached you were to shopping between Plaza tastings. For regulars, the change is less about distance than the shift from the Plaza to the pavilion.
The building itself almost didn't survive to host either market
The pavilion sits inside what used to be called the Cerri Building, a produce distribution and canning warehouse the Cerri family built in the early 1920s, when Healdsburg's economy ran on fruit, vegetables, and nuts moving out by rail. The city bought the property in 2005 with plans to tear the building down for a surface parking lot. Public objection to losing one of the last examples of that agricultural-era architecture stopped the demolition, but it took nearly 20 years of planning, design work, and fundraising before the building reopened as the Foley Family Community Pavilion. The ribbon-cutting came on December 15, 2025, with roughly 200 people on hand, Mayor Evelyn Mitchell among them, and the transformation credited in large part to Courtney Foley, who helped secure the donation that made the rebuild possible. The city added $2.5 million on top of the fundraised total to get it finished.
That backstory matters because it explains the design choices that now shape market days. The covered platform at the center wasn't sized for two dozen farm trucks. It was sized for a community gathering space that happens to host a farmers market, along with concerts, dances, and the Healdsburg Senior Center's new Car Show Social. On Saturdays, the produce, in other words, was never going to be the thing under the roof. The Tuesday farms could fit beneath it.
What else moved into the space
The most interesting addition isn't the farmers market at all. Vamos North Bay, a local nonprofit, now runs a night market called Tianguis y Bazar at the pavilion every third Saturday, aimed at first-time and novice entrepreneurs, with food, music, and dancing built around it. Attendees at the pavilion's opening specifically noted the bilingual signage on the building's history timeline, a detail that speaks to who the space was designed to welcome beyond the market's usual daytime crowd.
That layering is worth understanding if you live nearby, because it changes what "market day" even means at this address. The city has kept a separate list of "signature events" tied to the Plaza itself, including Merry Healdsburg, Dia de Muertos, the Fourth of July celebration, and the regular Tuesdays and Sundays in the Plaza series. Those stay put. What's shifted to North Street is the everyday commerce, the twice-weekly market rhythm, and now a monthly night market serving a different audience entirely. The Plaza keeps its calendar of civic occasions. The pavilion has become the place for recurring, working-class commerce, literally built to hold up to 8,000 people under a canopy designed for exactly that kind of turnout.
The practical version, for anyone planning a Saturday or Tuesday
For residents adjusting their routine, the 2026 market schedules are:
- Saturday market: April through November, 8:30 a.m. to noon, at 3 North Street, with produce and certified farm vendors set up outside in the lot and along North Street.
- Tuesday market: May through late September, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the same address, with a smaller footprint that fits mostly under the covered pavilion.
- Third Saturdays add the Tianguis y Bazar night market, run separately by Vamos North Bay.
One rule worth knowing before you bring the dog: Sonoma County Health Department guidelines keep animals away from the food and farm vendor booths. Dogs are welcome up on the covered platform, in the open area beneath it, and out on the patio, and they can move through the market via the craft aisle at the back, where the coffee vendors and Fruity Moto are set up. It's a small adjustment from the old Plaza and parking-lot arrangement, but it's the kind of detail you only learn by getting turned back once.
The market itself has been running since 1978, the third certified farmers market established in California behind Davis and Gardena. Forty-eight years without a permanent address, and the one it finally got turns out to serve the market's smaller day better than its bigger one. That's not a flaw in the building. It's just what happens when you design a covered gathering space for a community and then ask it to also hold two dozen farm trucks one morning a week.
If you're getting oriented to how downtown Healdsburg actually runs day to day, not just what the tourism calendar says, that kind of on-the-ground detail is exactly what Sue Winton tracks across the neighborhoods she works in. Let's Connect if you want a local read on how a corner like North Street is actually used, not just how it's zoned.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
