"We're hanging in there," Jerry Tessier said about a year after his family's company reopened downtown Redlands' historic citrus packing house as a food hall. "Honestly, it's not doing the sales that we thought to start out with, like we have at our food lab in Riverside." That's an odd thing to hear about a building that's fully leased, sits under soaring steel beams from 1912, and took nearly a decade to bring back to life. It's also the most useful sentence anyone following downtown Redlands right now can read, because it says something the glossy grand-opening coverage didn't: a full building and a full register are two different things.
Meanwhile, across town at Harkins Mountain Grove 16, a film series that's been running since 1999 and never got a renovation budget, a press tour, or an Instagram account worth mentioning just opened its 2026 fall lineup on schedule, the way it always does. Nobody wrote a "will it survive" story about it. It just runs.
If you live downtown, both of these things are happening on your street this month. Only one of them is a genuine surprise.
What Full Occupancy Actually Bought
The building at the center of this is the old Mutual Orange Distributors packing house, a masonry-and-steel structure with brick walls, arched doorways, and skylights that once graded and shipped Redlands citrus when oranges were fetching top dollar per pound. Arteco Partners, the Tessier family's Pomona-based firm, bought it after the city sold off a building that had been broken into, vandalized, red-tagged, and left leaking for years. The restoration ran roughly $11 million. It opened seven days a week in February 2025 as Redlands Public Market, with a grand opening that spring.
What's inside now is genuinely full. More than a dozen independently owned food and beverage vendors operate out of the space, including Take Your Seat, a Southern California brunch concept opening its third location, and Cornerstone BBQ, a Redlands favorite also opening its third location, this one built around a dry-aged deli where you can pick a cut from the butcher case and have it prepared on the spot. Downstairs, the basement holds My Friend's House, a speakeasy Tessier co-owns with Alex Teran, who also runs Riverside's Game Lab. There's an arcade branded the Riverside Game Lab, a farm stand, a 7,000-square-foot outdoor courtyard with live music, and a vintage 1904 trolley car you can eat inside.
None of that is a rumor or a soft-launch promise. It's the finished product, curated deliberately. Tessier has said the leasing process meant turning down concepts that didn't fit, including several pizza shops that wanted in, in favor of a more varied mix. Even with that much care in the build-out, and even with the courtyard doing what courtyards do on a warm evening, the first year came in under what the ownership group expected, by their own account, measured against the sales pace of their existing food hall in Riverside.
That gap between what a project looks like from the outside and what its ledger says is the part worth sitting with if you live near it.
The Series That Never Needed a Reopening
Now compare that to the Redlands Cinema Classic, the film series founded in 1999 by Annette Weis as a fundraiser for the Redlands Art Association's Margaret Clark Art Education Enrichment Fund. It screens eight films a year, four in spring and four in fall, all foreign, art, independent, or specialty titles, and every dollar left over after costs goes to arts education in Redlands schools. There was no capital campaign for this. There's no building to photograph. Tickets are $20, sold online, at the Redlands Art Association gallery on State Street, or at the theater door.
This year's fall series opened September 2 with Primavera, an Italian feature about violinist and composer Antonio Vivaldi teaching at the Ospedale della Pietà. It continues through Lebanon on September 9 and 10, a story of childhood sweethearts in Beirut, then moves through its Brazil and Japan features later in the month before closing with two showings of the Manhattan Short Film Festival on September 30 and October 1, where Redlands audiences vote on ten international short films alongside more than a hundred thousand filmgoers in cities across six continents.
The series wasn't even guaranteed its current home. Ahead of its spring 2025 season, its previous venue, LOOK Cinemas, told organizers it could no longer host the screenings for technical and economic reasons. The series didn't fold. It moved to Harkins Mountain Grove 16 and kept its regular Wednesday evening and Thursday matinee slots, its loyal patrons, and a run stretching back to 1999 intact. A venue dropping you with no warning is a harder problem than a slow first year in a new building, and this organization solved it without a headline, more than a year before this fall's lineup opened.
Why the Newer Bet Is the Riskier One
The difference isn't quality of experience. RPM's courtyard, its speakeasy, its dry-aged BBQ counter, all of that is real and worth your evening. The difference is what each place is asking of a visitor.
Redlands Public Market asks you to decide to go somewhere new, on a night when a dozen other options exist, in a building whose reputation is still being written in real time by the people trying it for the first time. Cinema Classic asks you to keep doing something you already do twice a year, at a price that hasn't changed, for a cause that's been the same nonprofit fund since 1999. One is competing for discretionary attention against every other new spot in the Inland Empire. The other has spent a quarter century turning attendance into a habit instead of a decision.
That's not a knock on RPM. Tessier himself has pointed to a similar early stumble at Riverside's Food Lab, where an original vendor also didn't make it and got replaced, calling that kind of turnover "not uncommon" in a food hall's first year. The building's original coffee shop already closed and a new one is expected to take its place. Adaptive reuse projects this ambitious tend to take longer to find their rhythm than a five-star opening weekend would suggest, and a decade of delays before the doors even opened means the market is still, in a real sense, in its first year of being tested by the neighborhood it's supposed to serve.
What's Actually On the Calendar This Month
If you're deciding how to spend a September weekend downtown, here's what's real right now:
- Redlands Public Market, 330 3rd St., open daily, with the courtyard, arcade, farm stand, and My Friend's House speakeasy all running. Weekend evenings draw the bigger crowds; weekday afternoons are your best bet if you want the space to yourself.
- Redlands Cinema Classic Fall 2026, Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m. and Thursday matinees at 2:30 p.m. at Harkins Mountain Grove 16, running through the Manhattan Short Film Festival on September 30 and October 1. Tickets are $20 online or at the Redlands Art Association gallery on State Street.
- Downtown's Morning Market, the city's certified farmers market, runs Saturdays from 7 to 11 a.m. through November 21 at the municipal lot off Redlands Boulevard, with more than 25 vendors selling produce, baked goods, and handmade items.
None of these require you to pick a side. RPM is worth your time precisely because it's still figuring itself out, and every table filled is part of what decides whether it becomes the kind of fixture Cinema Classic already is. But if you want the version of Redlands entertainment that's never once made you wonder whether it'll still be there next year, that film series across town already answered that question decades ago.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks this stuff because you're curious what it means for property here, not just what's for dinner, our Inland Empire neighborhood guide tracks the broader patterns across Redlands and the rest of the region. And if a shift like this ever has you wondering what your own place downtown is actually worth, Acquire'd Real Estate will get you a straight answer. Get a cash offer whenever you're ready to find out.
