Dairy Belle Freeze served this community for 68 years. Meanwhile, Tennyson Road ran with blood and the city still has no plan to protect the businesses or the people who call it home

The soft-serve is gone. The dipped cones, the garlic fries, the carne asada fries loaded with flavor, the thick chocolate shakes that tasted exactly the same as they did when your parents were kids — all of it, gone. After 68 years rooted at 2285 W. Tennyson Road, Hayward’s beloved Dairy Belle Freeze has changed hands, and the community that grew up around it is grieving.

For the Chang family, this wasn’t a business decision made in a boardroom. It was a heartbreak. After 35 years of ownership, they made the gut-wrenching announcement that they would be stepping away — following the unexpected passing of beloved family member Cheech, and with their father long retired. In their farewell message, they thanked Hayward for decades of loyalty, love, and memories. They didn’t walk away because they wanted to. They walked away because life, in its most painful form, gave them no other choice.

The community responded the way Hayward always does — with love, with nostalgia, with hundreds of comments and shared memories flooding social media. Stories of Little League trips, Friday night cruises, after-school ice cream runs, and first dates. Dairy Belle wasn’t just a restaurant. It was a landmark. It was a ritual. It was home.

But amid all the grief, there is a question that deserves to be asked — loudly, and directly to the people running this city:

Where was Hayward’s leadership while one of its oldest and most treasured institutions stood on uncertain ground? And why did it take decades of bloodshed on Tennyson Road before the city finally acted — only to act badly?

Blood on Tennyson Road — The Deaths the City Could Not Ignore:

Before we talk about ice cream and garlic fries, we need to talk about something far more serious. Because Tennyson Road is not just a street with a beloved burger stand. It is a street with a documented, tragic, and inexcusable history of killing the people who try to cross it.

On the evening of March 18, 2015, a 21-year-old mother named Denesha Turner left the Weekes Branch Library on Patrick Avenue, pushing her 11-month-old son Arthur in a stroller, heading home toward their apartment off Tennyson Road. It was a walk she made regularly. She loved reading to her baby boy at the library — it was their routine, their tradition. Around 7 p.m., as she crossed Tennyson Road near the northbound Interstate 880 onramp — in a crosswalk — a white Honda CRV struck her and her infant son. Arthur suffered major head injuries. Denesha was declared brain-dead days later and taken off life support on March 25, 2015. She was 21 years old. Her baby survived.

Her mother, Benita Noble, told reporters at the time: “She was at the library reading him books, something she loved to do. She was just on her way home.”

She never made it.

Then, on the evening of February 14, 2026 — Valentine’s Day — a 59-year-old grandmother named Olga Hernandez was crossing West Tennyson Road at Baldwin Street in a marked crosswalk with a 6-year-old boy beside her. A vehicle struck them both. Olga was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead. The 6-year-old suffered facial fractures. Hayward police confirmed that neither drugs nor alcohol were factors in the crash. A grandmother, in a crosswalk, on Valentine’s Day, doing exactly what a pedestrian is supposed to do — and she paid for it with her life.

Two women. Two crosswalks. Two separate decades. One road. 

Two women and children are in the crosswalks. Hit, killed, and injured.

If the administration did everything right and Dairy Belle’s transition was purely a matter of family circumstances entirely disconnected from the city’s actions, then let the record show it, publicly and clearly. When one business leaves, another will take its place. The sight of a vacant storefront is unappealing. Vandals will come to break in, and graffiti will invite lawlessness. Homeless encampments and trash will make the neighborhood unrecognizable.

And in the years between those two deaths, at least seven more people were killed in crashes on or near Tennyson Road. Christopher Cassel, 29. Jose Enciso Hernandez, 26. Richard Leon Heard Jr., 55. Valerie Martinez, 58. Lydia Guerra, 26. This is not a street with a safety problem. This is a street with a body count.

The people of Hayward have been dying on Tennyson Road for years. The city knew it. And when it finally decided to act, it produced a plan that safety advocates say doesn’t even do the job properly.

A Street in Chaos, A Business Left to Fend for Itself:

Dairy Belle sits on that same Tennyson Road — a corridor that the City of Hayward has been actively and aggressively redesigning under its “Safe Streets Hayward” initiative. This sweeping plan calls for significant road reconfiguration, lane narrowing, parking removal, and full street redesign along the entire Tennyson corridor. Construction activity, planning uncertainty, and the looming specter of street-level disruption have hung over every single business on this road for months.

Improving pedestrian and cyclist safety on Tennyson Road is not just worthy — given the death toll, it is long, agonizingly overdue. Nobody disputes that something needed to be done. The tragedy is that even now, with the political will finally mustered and the planning dollars finally committed, the city appears to have produced a plan that manages to fall short on safety and abandons the small businesses that built this community at the same time.

Under Mayor Mark Salinas and the Hayward City Council, the Safe Streets Hayward initiative has moved forward — including an expansion of the program to the downtown Jackson Loop, bringing the same model of street redesign and reconfiguration to yet another corridor lined with small businesses. The administration has championed these projects as progress. The people burying their neighbors and watching their beloved institutions close their doors are less convinced.

The City’s Own Documents Tell the Story:

Here is something remarkable. Buried inside the City of Hayward’s own Safe Streets Hayward planning documents for Tennyson Road Segment 4 — the very segment where Dairy Belle operates — city planners themselves acknowledge that local vendors utilize the parking lanes along this stretch of road. They wrote it down. They knew. They documented it in their own paperwork, and then proceeded to design a plan that cycling advocates say completely fails to offer a single safe, protected bike lane option for that segment anyway.

Let that sink in for a moment. The city identified that local small businesses and street vendors depend on those parking lanes. They put it in their official planning documents. And then, according to critics including the advocacy group Bike Hayward, they produced a corridor plan for Segment 4 that neither adequately protects cyclists nor meaningfully addresses the needs of the small businesses it disrupts. The worst of both worlds, delivered with bureaucratic confidence.

Bike Hayward, hardly a fringe anti-city group, issued a critical alert calling the Tennyson Segment 4 proposal a “Safe Streets plan in name only,” pointing out that the city appeared to be prioritizing a handful of redundant on-street parking spots over genuine safety infrastructure — even while those same spots are essential to the small businesses that keep Tennyson Road economically alive. The city managed to frustrate safety advocates and leave business owners exposed, simultaneously. That takes a remarkable kind of policy failure to achieve.

And now that same model — Safe Streets, street reconfiguration, the Loop redesign — is being applied to the downtown Jackson Loop, extending the uncertainty and disruption further through the commercial heart of Hayward.

68 Years of History, Zero Protection:

Dairy Belle Freeze has been standing on Tennyson Road since 1957. Sixty-eight years. It predates the internet, predates most of the people reading this article, and predates every single elected official currently sitting in Hayward City Hall. It survived recessions, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and a global pandemic. It outlasted every other Dairy Belle location in the entire Bay Area, becoming the last surviving outpost of a once-beloved regional chain — a living, breathing, soft-serve-serving piece of California food history.

And through all of that, the City of Hayward has had no formal heritage business protection program, no legacy small business preservation framework, no dedicated support structure to help iconic, decades-old community institutions survive the pressures of urban redevelopment and street-level disruption. Other cities have implemented exactly these kinds of safeguards. San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry formally recognizes and supports businesses that have shaped the city’s history and identity for 30 years or more. Los Angeles has similar mechanisms. Hayward has nothing comparable.

A business can serve this community for nearly seven decades, become an irreplaceable piece of cultural identity for tens of thousands of residents, anchor a neighborhood through generation after generation of change — and when the pressure comes, whether from personal tragedy, rising costs, or a city actively tearing up and redesigning the road it sits on, it faces that pressure entirely alone. No registry. No protection. No phone call from the mayor’s office. Nothing.

Mayor Salinas and the Council Owe This Community Answers:

Mayor Mark Salinas and the Hayward City Council have spoken often and passionately about supporting small businesses, investing in working-class neighborhoods, and honoring the culture and character of communities like the one that grew up along Tennyson Road. The Safe Streets initiative was championed by this administration as a solution — to the deaths, to the danger, to the decades of inaction. And yet Denesha Turner died in 2015. Olga Hernandez died in February 2026. The deaths kept coming. The plan that finally emerged is described by safety advocates as critically flawed. And Dairy Belle is gone from the hands of the family that made it what it was.

At some point, good intentions have to produce good outcomes. The community deserves to know whether they mean anything in practice — and it deserves specific, public answers to some straightforward questions.

Did the city ever formally reach out to legacy businesses along Tennyson Road to assess how the Safe Streets corridor redesign would impact their operations, their parking, their accessibility, and their ability to survive? Was there a small business impact study? Was there a mitigation plan for businesses like Dairy Belle? Has the mayor’s office ever proposed, sponsored, or seriously explored a Legacy Business Registry or heritage protection program for Hayward? Given that the city’s own planners documented that local vendors depend on the parking lanes along Segment 4 of Tennyson Road, what concrete steps did the administration take to protect them? And as the downtown Jackson Loop redesign moves forward — another corridor, another round of construction disruption, another set of small businesses left to wonder what comes next — what is the plan to prevent more closures, more lost icons, more communities left grieving?

These are not attacks. They are not political games. They are the basic questions of accountability that any community has the right to ask of its elected leadership. If the answers are good ones — if the administration did everything right and Dairy Belle’s transition was purely a matter of family circumstances entirely disconnected from the city’s actions — then let the record show it, publicly and clearly.

But if the answers reveal that a 68-year-old community institution was left to navigate a city-disrupted landscape without a single program, policy, or initiative designed to help it survive — while the very street it sat on accumulated a decade’s worth of preventable deaths — then that is a failure of civic leadership, and the people of Hayward deserve to know that too.

To the Chang Family:

None of this changes what you gave this city. Thirty-five years of showing up. Of flipping burgers and dipping cones and serving carne asada fries to generation after generation of Hayward families. You inherited a 68-year legacy and you honored it completely — with love, with dedication, with your whole family — right up until the moment that life made it impossible to continue. The city should have had your back. It should have had the backs of every family like yours.

Hayward will never forget you. That much is certain.

To the Memory of Denesha Turner and Olga Hernandez:

You deserved safe streets. You deserved crosswalks that protected you. You deserved to make it home. The city failed you, and your names should be spoken every single time a Hayward official stands at a podium and talks about Safe Streets, progress, and the future of this city. You are the reason the conversation exists. You are the reason it matters.

To City Hall:

Dairy Belle has changed hands. You cannot undo that. But there are other legacy businesses still standing on Tennyson Road, still standing downtown, still serving — still holding the cultural fabric of this community together, one order at a time. They are watching. They are wondering whether this city sees them, values them, and will fight for them when the next wave of pressure comes.

The question for Mayor Salinas and the Hayward City Council is simple, and it deserves a simple, direct, public answer:

What are you going to do to make sure Dairy Belle isn’t the last one?