Every year, somewhere around 6 a.m. on the Sunday before Halloween, a small crew of volunteers closes Larchmont Boulevard to cars between Beverly and First Street. By noon, an estimated 10,000 people are wandering a stretch of pavement they normally just drive down to get somewhere else. Ride tickets run $2 apiece, two to six tickets per ride depending on what it is, and by 5 p.m. the street reopens like nothing happened. This year's edition, the 61st, lands on Sunday, October 25.
If you have lived in Larchmont Village, Hancock Park, or Windsor Square for more than a season, you already know the fair. What most residents do not know is that the ground it stands on nearly changed hands this year, and that the same small volunteer machine that runs your Sunday farmers market spent part of 2026 fighting to keep it.
A Sunday That Used To Be A Friday Night
The fair is older than most of the businesses that now line the boulevard. The Larchmont Boulevard Association was organized in 1965 by Jane Gilman and Dawne Goodwin, who also founded the Larchmont Chronicle, and the fair itself started as an evening event on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, running 4 to 10 p.m. after the shops had already closed for the day. Former LBA president Dr. Tim Gogan has told the Larchmont Buzz that the idea came from Goodwin, who saw it as a way for local schools and charities to raise money once the retail day was done. Somewhere over the decades it moved from a late-summer Friday night to its current spot on the Sunday before Halloween, and the format shifted from an after-hours fundraiser into the full daytime street closure residents know now.
That kind of quiet migration, from one calendar slot to another, from evening to afternoon, is easy to miss if you only ever attend the version currently in front of you.
"Our singular sense of community is the primary ingredient that makes our Boulevard so extraordinary, and the annual family fair is a wonderful community showcase," LBA president Romi Cortier has said of the event.
That framing matters because the fair was never built to be a profit center for the LBA. Booth fees are $500 and include a table, two chairs, and a canopy, but nonprofit groups keep every dollar they raise at their own booths. What the LBA collects goes back into boulevard beautification and street security, not into the association's own pocket.
One Person Runs Both Sundays
The farmers market that sets up most Sundays at 209 N. Larchmont Blvd and the fair that takes over the street once a year are, on paper, two different events. In practice, they run through the same person. Melissa Farwell chairs the Larchmont Family Fair and also serves as Director of Market Coordination and Development for the California Certified Farmers Markets, the organization behind the year-round Larchmont market. On fair Sunday, a smaller version of the regular farmers market sets up in the same parking lot, with tables and chairs added so people can sit and eat between rides.
That overlap is not incidental. The lot behind 209 N. Larchmont, officially known to the city as Lot 694, is the physical hinge for both rituals. It is where the produce stands go up 52 Sundays and Wednesdays a year, and it is where the fair's smaller market and its overflow parking live on the one Sunday everything else shuts down.
The Near Miss Almost Nobody Noticed
In a year-end recap posted to the Larchmont Buzz, the LBA thanked three separate neighborhood groups, the Windsor Square Neighborhood Association, the Larchmont Village Neighborhood Association, and the Larchmont United Neighborhood Association, for helping defeat a proposed land lease at city parking lot 694. The LBA's own language on the matter was direct: the coalition helped save the farmers market and the little town square that hosts the fair and the Taste of Larchmont fundraiser alongside it.
A land lease at that lot would not have just changed where people park. It would have pulled the floor out from under the market that runs every week and the fair that runs once a year, both of which depend on that exact stretch of asphalt being available and undeveloped. Most people who show up on October 25 to buy a $2 ride ticket will have no idea that the lot underneath the bounce houses was, within the past year, a genuine possibility for redevelopment.
The fight was won quietly, through the kind of neighborhood association meetings that never make it onto anyone's calendar app, and the result is that this year's fair happens on the same footprint it always has.
The Smaller Fixes Nobody Notices Either
The same volunteer network that pushed back on the lot 694 lease has spent the past year working on projects that are easy to walk past without registering. North Larchmont Boulevard, from Beverly to Melrose, now has bistro lighting installed with the help of a community grant from Paramount, timed to welcome roughly 2,000 returning employees back to the studio lot. The Larchmont Village BID has been rolling out French-blue legacy benches and matching cornflower-blue trash cans along the boulevard, one bench and one can at a time, funded largely through small donations from longtime residents and businesses.
None of this shows up as a headline. It shows up as the boulevard feeling a little more finished every few months, which is exactly the kind of change that is hard to notice happening and easy to miss if you are not looking for it.
What This Fall Actually Looks Like
If you are planning around the fair this year, the basics haven't changed much from past editions:
- Sunday, October 25, noon to 5 p.m., Larchmont Boulevard closed to traffic between Beverly and First Street
- Admission is free, ride tickets are $2 each and rides typically run 2 to 6 tickets
- A smaller version of the regular farmers market sets up in the parking lot alongside the fair, with seating added
- Roughly 40 booths line the street each year, a mix of nonprofits, local schools, and LBA member businesses like Tailwaggers, Ritz Dry Cleaning, and Wilshire Escrow
- The regular Larchmont Certified Farmers' Market keeps its normal hours the rest of the year, Sundays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Wednesdays 1 to 5 p.m., at 209 N. Larchmont Blvd
The Part That's Easy To Take For Granted
The version of Larchmont that feels timeless, the Sunday market, the annual fair, the string lights that make an evening walk feel a little softer, is not actually timeless. It is maintained, year over year, by a small group of named volunteers working through a nonprofit association most residents have never attended a meeting of, defending a single city-owned parking lot that almost got leased out from under all of it.
Knowing that doesn't change what you'll do on October 25. You'll still buy the ride tickets, still run into three neighbors you haven't seen since the last fair, still leave with a program printed by a local school's booth committee. But it changes what you're actually looking at while you do it.
Jeffrey Sachs has spent nearly two decades working alongside the streets, schools, and civic groups that hold neighborhoods like Larchmont Village and Hancock Park together, long before any of it shows up in a listing. If you have questions about this pocket of Los Angeles, whatever they are, reach out and schedule a consultation.
