"No burnouts." That's the entire code of conduct for the car show that takes over a stretch of parking lot at Union and Camden every second Saturday morning, and in twelve-odd years nobody seems to have needed a longer version.
The event is called Ronnie's Morning Get Together, and if you live in Cambrian you've probably driven past it without knowing its name. It runs from 7:30 to 11 a.m., all makes and years welcome, free to show up and free to just look. Coffee and donuts go fast, so regulars know to arrive before 8. The show has been going for roughly a dozen years now, long enough that one longtime attendee described it less like an event and more like a monthly reunion, the same faces and the same half-finished projects rolling back in every month whether they're done or not.
A Dozen Years, Two Parking Lots
The show didn't start where it sits now. For years it set up in the Starbucks lot on Hillsdale Avenue, a few blocks south. At some point it moved into the lot at Cambrian Plaza, on Union Avenue near Camden, and that's still where it's listed as of this September. Car show directories confirm the Saturday, September 12, 2026 gathering ran in that same Cambrian Plaza lot, so the move has stuck.
That kind of relocation usually kills a recurring event. A parking lot changes hands, a new landlord wants the space back on Saturday mornings, and the show either finds somewhere else to go or quietly stops existing. This one didn't stop. It just found a new lot and kept the same rules: free admission, no entry fee, no burnouts, and a crowd that some months tops 200 cars.
The Plaza That's Still Waiting on Paperwork
The lot the show now calls home sits inside Cambrian Park Plaza, the low-slung shopping center at the southeast corner of Union and Camden that's been there since 1953. The sign out front, big and yellow with a rotating carousel on top, picked up historic landmark status back in 2016. The center itself still has the layout longtime residents remember: storefronts clustered around small courtyards, white picket fences, picnic benches under the trees.
It's also, at the moment, a shopping center in limbo. The city council approved a major mixed-use rebuild for the site back in 2022, one that would eventually bring apartments, a hotel, and ground-floor retail to the property. Weingarten Realty bought the plaza in 2015 and the project has since moved under the Kimco Realty umbrella. As of this year the site's owner had filed to change the construction sequence, building the housing portion first and pushing the retail and hotel pieces later, a request the city was still reviewing as of early 2026. None of that has broken ground. The plaza, per the city's own project file, is still quietly doing business while the bigger plan sits in review.
A longtime advocate for the redevelopment told KQED what residents said they actually wanted out of the rebuilt site: a place with sit-down dining, somewhere people would come to linger. That is also a fair description of what the plaza's parking lot has hosted on the second Saturday of most months for about twelve years. Whatever the rebuilt center eventually looks like, the car show shows how much a gathering can draw with a parking lot, some donuts, and a rule against burnouts.
What's Already Open Around the Cars
Inside Cambrian Park Plaza itself, the tenant mix still includes a delicatessen, a flower shop, a dollar store, and a yoga studio, alongside the plaza's Wednesday farmers market, which current listings describe as an ongoing fixture in the same lot. It's a smaller, older-fashioned mix than a new development would bring, and it's the same mix that's been drawing people to that corner for years regardless of what happens with the entitlement paperwork next door.
Cross Union Avenue to the northwest corner, at the newer Camden Park Shopping Center, and the options widen. That center holds Lucky's, CVS Pharmacy, Peet's Coffee, Jamba Juice, Chipotle, Five Guys, Al Castello Ristorante, Crumbl Cookies, and Pizza My Heart, spread across roughly 610 parking spaces, one of the larger lots at that intersection. For anyone who spends a Saturday morning at the car show and wants a real breakfast afterward rather than a second donut, it's a two-minute walk across the crosswalk.
Two shopping centers, same intersection, two different stories. One is a 1953 original waiting on a permit decision. The other is a newer, fully leased center that never had to wait on anything. Both keep the corner busy on an ordinary Saturday.
The Rest of Union Avenue Doesn't Wait Either
A few blocks up Union Avenue, the Camden Community Center runs its own fall calendar without any connection to what's happening at the plaza down the street. Fall Break Camp starts September 28 and runs through October 2, 2026, and the center's fall class sessions, everything from dance to fitness to youth programs, run through November. None of it is tied to redevelopment timelines or permit reviews. It's simply what the neighborhood does every fall, the same way the car show is simply what the neighborhood does every second Saturday.
That's really the throughline here. Cambrian's actual gathering spots, the ones people already use, aren't waiting on the plaza's next chapter to get built. They're already running, on their own schedule, in the same parking lots the neighborhood has been using for a decade or more. The city's review of the plaza's plan continues on its own timeline. In the meantime, coffee, donuts and 200 cars keep the lot busy on a Saturday morning once a month.
If you're the kind of person who already circles the second Saturday on your calendar, or you're planning to be at Camden Community Center dropping a kid off for Fall Break Camp this week, none of this is news. It's just Tuesday, or rather it's just the neighborhood, running the way it always has while the bigger conversation about its future continues down the street.
If you've got questions about what's actually happening at that corner, whether it's the car show, the plaza's next chapter, or anything else in Cambrian worth knowing about before you make your next move here, Mark Vantress is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
