Two years ago, the story coming out of William Land Park was about leaving. City officials and zoo leadership were deep into plans to move the Sacramento Zoo fifteen miles south to Elk Grove, where a bigger parcel promised the kind of modern habitats the current site couldn't fit. That plan collapsed in April 2025, when the Sacramento Zoological Society and the City of Elk Grove announced the relocation was off, citing financial concerns.
What's happened since is the more interesting part, and it says something about this neighborhood that a moving-away story never could. Instead of looking elsewhere, the zoo turned back toward the park it already sits in. By March 2026, the city council was reviewing a proposal to let planners study adding roughly 5.8 acres to the zoo's footprint inside William Land Park itself, a jump of about 41 percent over its current size. That's not a headline about decline. It's a neighborhood institution choosing to root deeper rather than move on, and it's happening at the same time three other Land Park operators are making a version of the same bet.
The Move That Didn't Happen
The Sacramento Zoo has occupied its corner of William Land Park since 1927, and its footprint has barely changed in six decades. The site sits at just under 15 acres, tucked inside a municipal park that covers more than 100 acres total. For years, that mismatch between a small zoo and a large park has been the source of every conversation about the zoo's future, including the one that nearly sent it to Elk Grove.
| Metric | Size |
|---|---|
| Current zoo footprint | Just under 15 acres |
| Proposed addition | About 5.8 acres (a 41% increase) |
| William Land Park total | More than 100 acres |
Dan Simon became zoo CEO in November 2025 and has made growth his stated priority since arriving. Zoo board president Elizabeth Stallard framed the stakes plainly to the Sacramento Bee:
"If we don't get more space in Land Park, we're going to have to go back to looking elsewhere."
That's the sentence that matters here. It reframes the expansion proposal not as a routine capital project but as the alternative to another relocation attempt. The nonbinding agreement went up for public review on March 12, 2026, ahead of a city council meeting on March 17. Whatever the final acreage ends up being once planners finish studying the site, the direction is settled: the zoo isn't trying to leave the neighborhood anymore. It's trying to grow inside it, which means anyone who walks that stretch of the park regularly should expect to see planning activity, and eventually habitat work, along the zoo's edges rather than another round of talk about moving south.
A Neighborhood Institution Changes Hands, Not Zip Codes
A few blocks away on Riverside Boulevard, Vic's Ice Cream has been a Land Park fixture for decades. After the death of longtime co-owner Craig Rutledge, son of original co-founder Ashley Rutledge, the shop was listed for sale. What happened next is the part worth noting: it didn't go to an outside chain looking for a Sacramento foothold. It changed hands within a group of Land Park locals, including Carlo Grifone and his daughter Samantha, Scott Matrenec of Frog & Slim on 16th Street, and Matt Rutledge, Craig's son.
The new ownership plans to close briefly for renovation and install new pasteurization equipment so the shop can go back to making its ice cream from scratch on site, giving the team more control over texture and creaminess than the shop has had in years. Samantha Grifone told the Sacramento Business Journal the group are Land Park families who wanted to carry the business's legacy forward. It's a small transaction in dollar terms, but it's a useful signal. When a neighborhood institution comes up for sale, who buys it tells you something about who still wants a stake in that specific street corner.
Why a Dumpling Shop Picked This Corner Over Somewhere Else
Hidden Dumpling House opened its third Sacramento location at 3305 Freeport Boulevard, in the former Yummy Cafe space, aiming for a May 2026 grand opening, which makes it one of the newest additions on that stretch of Freeport as of this summer. The restaurant already has two other locations in the city, so this wasn't a first-time gamble on Sacramento. It was a choice between neighborhoods, and the owner was specific about why Land Park won.
She told What Now Sacramento she was drawn to the neighborhood for its quiet charm and its proximity to Midtown, which makes managing multiple locations easier. The new space will carry the same handmade dumpling menu as the other locations, with 21 indoor tables and 12 more outside, and it will be pet-friendly like the rest of the chain's spots. That's a small business owner's version of the same math the zoo's board is doing: proximity to the busier commercial core, paired with a quieter residential feel, is worth building around rather than skipping past.
The Broadway Bet a Michelin Chef Is Making
The most direct evidence for this pattern comes from Chris Barnum-Dann, the chef and owner behind Michelin-starred Localis and the more casual Betty Wine Bar and Bistro. Betty's original Southside Park location had one of its best months ever in early 2026, its second-highest grossing month since opening in 2022. That performance gave Barnum-Dann the confidence to expand into a second Betty location on J Street, in a space that once held a Starbucks, with an opening timeline of roughly six months from the March 2026 announcement, which puts its debut just ahead of us as this summer turns to fall.
He's not stopping there. Barnum-Dann is also developing a tapas and pintxos bar, a high-end wine shop, and a market on Broadway, on the ground floor of the Tower Broadway apartment building near the Land Park landmark Tower Cafe, with those three businesses expected within about a year of the announcement. He described the location in blunt terms: he's betting that the stretch of Broadway between Midtown and Land Park, a corridor that's been challenged in the past, can support not one but three of his own businesses at once.
That's a chef with Michelin recognition putting real capital behind the same bet a dumpling shop owner made with a single lease and the same bet a zoo board is making with a request for more park acreage. None of these operators are strangers to Sacramento. All of them looked at other options and chose this specific stretch of the city anyway.
The Park That Ties It Together
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Land Park's daily rhythm has always run through William Land Park itself, which holds Fairytale Town, Funderland Amusement Park, a nine-hole golf course, walking trails, and a lily pond that draws a steady crowd of ducks and the people who feed them. The Tower Theatre, open since 1938 and still Sacramento's oldest continuously running picture palace, anchors the corner at Broadway and Land Park Drive with a summer lineup that's included its recurring Studio Ghibli Summer Festival and Musical Mondays screenings. Earlier this year, the theater's parking lot also hosted the ALL Women's District Pop-Up, its third annual run, bringing together more than 100 women-owned businesses for a day of art, food trucks, and live music.
Broadway itself already carries a mix of longtime local favorites, including Ethiopian, Nepalese, Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese kitchens alongside New Helvetia Brewing Company and Bike Dog Brewing Company. Add in Gunther's Ice Cream, Marie's Donuts, and Freeport Bakery, and you get a neighborhood that was never short on texture to begin with. What's changed is the direction of the newest investment. It's not arriving from outside and looking for a foothold. It's coming from operators who already know this stretch of the city and are choosing to go deeper into it.
Why This Is Worth Watching From Your Porch
The through line here isn't that Land Park is suddenly trendy. It's that four separate decision makers, a zoo board answering to a city council, a family selling an ice cream shop, a dumpling restaurant owner picking her third location, and a Michelin-recognized chef expanding his footprint, all looked at the option to go somewhere else and chose to stay put instead. The zoo's reversal from relocation to expansion is the clearest version of that story, because it's the one institution that actually had a real offer to leave and turned it down in favor of growing where it already stood.
If you already live around William Land Park, that's the thing to watch for over the next year: planning activity near the zoo's edges, a reopened Vic's with a new flavor case, and eventually a second Betty, a wine shop, and a market on Broadway that didn't exist last summer. None of it requires you to do anything. It's just useful to understand why it's all happening at once, and why it's happening here specifically instead of somewhere else in the city.
If you're curious how any of this touches the value or character of a specific block, or how Land Park compares to other Sacramento neighborhoods like East Sacramento, where Barnum-Dann is also expanding, that's a conversation worth having directly. Jared Labarga works with buyers and sellers across Sacramento, Solano, and Yolo Counties and is always glad to talk through what's changing in a neighborhood before it shows up in the numbers. Let's Connect.
