Ask a longtime Alamo resident for directions and at some point you will hear "past the horse." Not a street name, not a business name, just the horse, as if everyone already knows which building that means. Most people driving through do. The fiberglass horse standing on the roof at the corner of Danville Boulevard and Stone Valley Road has been part of the mental map of this town for so long that almost nobody stops to ask what building it is actually sitting on anymore.
That building has not functioned as the business people remember since 2019. For seven years it sat there with no clear next chapter. This summer, for the first time since it closed, someone finally wrote one.
A Feed Store That Predates Almost Everything Around It
The horse belongs to what was once Alamo Hay & Grain Co., a feed and equestrian supply store that opened at 3196 Danville Blvd in 1962, on a site that had been a grocery store in the 1950s before that. John Bellandi took over the business in the late 1970s. By his own account, kids were still riding actual horses down the street and into the store as late as 1979 and 1980, hitching up right where customers now park cars.
The little red building at the front of the property, which houses Alamo Shoe Repair, has its own layer of history underneath the current one. It served as the Alamo post office back in 1936. Almost nothing on that corner is what it was originally built to be, and that has been true for decades, long before this most recent vacancy.
A Landmark Stolen Three Times, Never Retired
Bellandi bought the horse itself in 1980 for $900, a fiberglass animal he nicknamed Easy Keeper because, in his words, it never needed feeding. Some residents call it Norman instead. Over the years it has been stolen as a prank three separate times, once turning up on the roof of Monte Vista High School before making its way back to Danville Boulevard.
None of the current commercial listings for the property say whether the horse is still up there today. They do not have to. The marketing language leans entirely on the fact that everyone already pictures it, describing the site as anchored by "an iconic rooftop horse statue" and a "multigenerational customer base" without needing to specify current condition. The horse stopped being a detail about a working business a long time ago. It became the address itself.
The Store Closed Abruptly in 2019. Nothing Has Replaced It Since.
Bellandi died in 2016. His widow, Anne Bellandi, kept the store running until it shut its doors abruptly in late July 2019, after nearly 60 years in business. The closure caught longtime customers off guard, and the reaction on social media at the time was less about the loss of a feed store and more about the loss of a fixture, the kind of business people had been driving past their entire lives without thinking it would ever not be there.
What happened next is the part that does not get talked about as often. For seven years, no new tenant moved into that storefront. No sign changed. The single most recognizable commercial address in Alamo effectively dropped out of the town's day to day rotation while the horse kept standing watch over an empty building. In a commercial core as small as Alamo's, a vacancy that size is not a minor gap. It is one of the more visible storefronts on the town's main road sitting unused for the better part of a decade.
Bundled With the Plaza Next Door
That changed this year. Commercial listings that surfaced in mid-2026 package 3194 and 3196 Danville Boulevard, the old Hay & Grain parcel, together with a second address a few steps away at 37 Alamo Square Drive. That second parcel is not vacant. It is described as energized by neighborhood-serving retailers, including Lever Coffee, a local café that has become part of the daily rhythm of that corner even while the building next door sat empty.
Pairing an inactive landmark with an active, functioning storefront is a deliberate move. The listing pitches the combined properties as a platform for "future retail, service, or mixed use activation" and points to the site's regional connectivity to Walnut Creek, Danville, and Diablo, with direct access to Interstate 680. In other words, the seven years of stillness at the Hay & Grain building were never really about the location being undesirable. The corner still works. What has been missing is a plan, and one only appeared on paper this year.
The Corner Itself Is Also Under Construction
The building is not the only thing changing shape at that intersection. Contra Costa County's Danville Boulevard and Orchard Court Complete Streets Improvement Project, which introduces a roundabout near the main entry to the surrounding plaza, began construction in early 2023, with modifications running from Stone Valley Road to just north of Jackson Way. That stretch overlaps with the corner where the old feed store sits.
By the time any new listing appeared for the Hay & Grain parcel this year, the county had already spent more than three years reshaping the road around it. The pavement and the real estate at that corner have been moving on two separate but overlapping timelines, one measured in construction phases, the other in years of an empty storefront waiting for its next use. Anyone who has found themselves rerouted around orange cones near that intersection over the past few summers has already been living through half of this story without realizing the other half was happening at the same time.
A town this small does not lose landmarks quietly. It just takes its time replacing them.
What This Means If You Drive That Corner Regularly
If you have used "past the horse" as a landmark for years, that habit is not going anywhere yet. A bundled commercial listing is a starting point, not a finished project, and small commercial pockets like Alamo's tend to move at their own pace. What is worth knowing now is that the corner is no longer frozen. After seven years of a vacant storefront and more than three years of roadwork on the same stretch of Danville Boulevard, both halves of that intersection are finally moving toward something new at the same time.
That kind of overlap does not happen often in a town with as small a commercial footprint as Alamo's, and it tends to be the first sign that a familiar stretch of a neighborhood is about to look different than it has for a generation.
I have lived in and around Danville and Alamo for more than 25 years, and corners like this one are exactly what I pay attention to, not because a horse statue and a feed store closure are dramatic on their own, but because small, slow changes to a town's most recognizable addresses usually say more about where a neighborhood is headed than any single new restaurant opening ever does. If you are curious about what a shift like this could eventually mean for property values or use along that corridor, or you just want to talk through what you have noticed driving that corner yourself, reach out to Kory Madge. I am always glad to compare notes with the people who actually live here.
