Downtown Seaside, Seaside, CA

Downtown Seaside follows Broadway Avenue, the street where most of Seaside goes for coffee, a haircut or a plate of tacos. It is the most compact part of the city, with about 2,800 homes packed into well under a square mile next to Sand City. Housing is a mix of apartment complexes and small houses on compact lots, some of them dating to the late 1940s. Lower Broadway has been slowly reworking itself with newer buildings, so a fresh facade can stand right beside something that has been there for decades. Coffee is the easiest way to read the street. Counterpoint Coffee, at 565 Broadway, has good wifi, plenty of seating and charging, and fills with people working on laptops over pandan lattes and mochas. Acme Coffee Roasting Co. Sits in an alley off Palm Avenue and roasts its own beans, and it runs more like a grab-and-go counter than a living room. Other Brother Beer Co., at 877 Broadway, is the brewpub, with pork sliders, a mushroom melt and weekly trivia. For cakes and pastries, Angelina's Bakery has been a family-owned bakery and deli on Fremont Boulevard since 1998. There is no big park here. The coastal recreation trail runs along the bay shore on the other side of Highway 1, close enough to ride to from most Broadway addresses. Grocery Outlet sits inside the neighborhood, and a scattering of small Latin American and Filipino markets covers the specialty shelves. Monterey is a few minutes down Highway 1, which also links the rest of the peninsula. Space is what you give up. Yards are small, and the main streets carry steady traffic, so anyone after a quiet cul-de-sac will find it in another part of Seaside. Everything a household needs sits along two or three streets, which means a week in Downtown Seaside tends to repeat the same few stops.