On the first Thursday of the month, a free trolley starts looping through Laguna Beach around six o'clock, and the galleries along Coast Highway leave their doors open until nine. Most people who do this walk assume it happens in one continuous stretch of window-shopping between Diamond Street and Myrtle, the two intersections that mark First Thursdays Art Walk's official downtown footprint. That assumption held for about a decade, while a gallery two miles south sat empty of its own artwork and operated only as a website.
This September, that changed. William Merrill Gallery reopened its physical storefront at 2950 South Coast Highway in South Laguna, and the reopening says something more interesting than "new gallery in town." It says the Art Walk's map is wider than the part most residents actually walk.
The address has a longer story than the gallery
Bill Merrill opened his gallery under his own name in 1992, originally closer to downtown, before eventually moving the business entirely online for roughly ten years. The South Laguna address he's returned to has its own history: it was Black Iris, a floral and giftware shop that had operated there for 43 years before Merrill sold the business in January 2026 and kept the property. Black Iris didn't disappear. Under new owner Carole Agar, it now runs as a custom floral-design service without a retail storefront, which is part of why the space came open for Merrill to move his gallery back into a physical room.
The new location is showing work from 17 international artists and providing studio space for three resident artists, and it's open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with additional visits by appointment. That's a working gallery with real hours, not a soft-launch pop-up. It also means the space that spent 43 years selling flowers is now hanging paintings, which is the kind of small civic detail that only shows up if you've been watching that stretch of highway for a while.
Why "First Thursdays" doesn't mean what it sounds like
First Thursdays Art Walk describes its territory as running up and down Pacific Coast Highway from Diamond Street to Myrtle. That's a compact, walkable stretch through the downtown village, close enough to the Laguna Art Museum that most people do the whole loop on foot in an evening. South Laguna, where Merrill's gallery sits, is not inside that boundary. It's roughly two miles south, past the shops most visitors think of when they picture Laguna's gallery scene.
And yet Merrill's new location counts as part of the Art Walk's broader footprint. That's the detail worth sitting with: the organization's reach already extends past the part of town people picture when they hear "gallery row." The free trolley exists precisely because the Art Walk has never actually been a single walkable strip. It's always been two clusters loosely connected by a shuttle, and most residents have only ever needed the northern one.
Merrill's reopening is a small test of whether that southern cluster can hold its own weight again.
Two different galleries scenes, not one long row
The north end, close to the Laguna Art Museum, is where the city's oldest institutional art history lives. The Laguna Beach Art Association built its first custom gallery there in 1929 after a fundraising drive, and that lineage runs through galleries like Dawson Cole Fine Art, founded in 1993, and the Whitney Gallery, an artist-owned space built around painter and sculptor Marc Whitney's own work. Sandstone Gallery has held its spot on this historic Gallery Row since 1981, more than 45 years in one location, longer than any other gallery on that stretch. This is also the part of town where LagunaART.com Gallery and Studios sits next to the museum, across from Urth Cafe, and where the trolley drops people every few minutes on a First Thursday night.
South Laguna's cluster, sometimes called the HIP District, has a different character. Artist Eye Gallery sits at the center of it, and Cove Gallery, an artist-owned space representing around 14 local artists, is nearby. These read as working artists' spaces more than curated institutions, which is part of why a gallery reopening here lands differently than one reopening downtown. It's not a museum extending its footprint. It's an individual owner betting that people will still make the trip.
What actually happens on a Thursday night now
If you already do First Thursdays, the practical shift is small but real. The Laguna Art Museum opens free from 5 to 9 p.m. that night, and Hotel Laguna starts its own artist showcase at 5 p.m., featuring three selected artists in rotation. Those two stops anchor the downtown loop the way they always have.
Getting down to South Laguna for Merrill's gallery means either driving the two miles or catching the free trolley that the Art Walk funds specifically to connect the wider area. That's the mechanism worth knowing before you plan the evening: the walk part of "Art Walk" only covers the village core. Anything past Myrtle Street is a trolley trip, not a stroll.
For residents who've done the downtown loop enough times to know every gallery by name, that two-mile gap has quietly represented the edge of the map. Merrill's reopening doesn't erase that gap. It just gives people a specific, current reason to close it.
What the reopening actually signals
A gallery owner spending a decade running a business entirely online and then choosing to reopen a physical storefront is a specific kind of bet. Online galleries don't need street parking, walk-in traffic, or proximity to a trolley stop. Merrill's decision to put artwork back on a wall in South Laguna, rather than simply keeping the business virtual, reads as a vote of confidence in that specific stretch of Coast Highway rather than in Laguna's gallery scene generally. He could have reopened anywhere. He reopened where Black Iris used to be, in the part of town that isn't inside the Art Walk's official boundary lines but has always been part of its actual footprint.
That storefront already proved it could hold a business for decades. Black Iris ran there for 43 years before Merrill moved in. Now it's an art gallery's turn to find out how far south the Thursday night crowd is willing to go.
What to watch for
The next First Thursday falls on October 1. If you've never made the trolley trip past Myrtle Street, this is a reasonable month to start, both because Merrill's exhibition is fresh and because the museum's free evening hours and Hotel Laguna's rotating artist night are already part of your routine if you do this monthly. The interesting question isn't whether the gallery scene downtown stays strong. It's whether South Laguna's smaller, artist-owned cluster, with Merrill's gallery now back in the mix alongside Artist Eye and Cove, starts pulling more of the Thursday night crowd south of where the trolley usually turns around.
If you're the kind of Laguna resident who tracks which storefronts change hands along Coast Highway, or you're curious what else might be shifting in South Laguna's slower, artist-owned corner of town, Avedis Mossessian keeps an eye on that stretch too. Let's Connect.
