Abbot Kinney Boulevard will fill with vendor booths, food trucks, and live music again on September 27, when the Abbot Kinney Festival returns to Venice after sitting out 2024 and 2025. The free, one-day street fair marks its 40th edition this year, running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. along the boulevard, with organizers framing the comeback as a milestone moment for a neighborhood tradition that had never before gone dark for two consecutive years outside the pandemic.
According to the Santa Monica Mirror, the festival is the largest annual fundraiser for the nonprofit Abbot Kinney Festival Association, with proceeds supporting Venice youth, arts, and community programs. Organizers told the outlet the 2024 and 2025 cancellations came down to sponsorship challenges and lingering pandemic effects on local businesses, a gap that stands out given the event's long run of uninterrupted Septembers before COVID-era public health restrictions forced its suspension in 2020 and 2021, according to a Venice community discussion referencing Venice Paparazzi reporting.
Longtime Venice figure Patti Reiss called the festival's return meaningful for longtime neighbors, businesses, and visitors alike, the Santa Monica Mirror's report noted. This year's lineup includes hundreds of local and independent vendors, food trucks, a KidSquad area with family programming, live music under the Spirit of Venice stage, DJ sets at the Annex area, and beer gardens throughout the route. A VIP garden section, open to attendees 21 and older, requires a $40 donation.
Getting There Without a Car
Organizers are encouraging attendees to bike, carpool, or take public transportation to the festival, and free bike valet stations are planned at both ends of the route, per the same Mirror account. That logistical push matters on a street that has grown increasingly congested with tourists in recent years — a dynamic tied to the boulevard's transformation from an artsy commercial strip into one of the city's most closely watched retail corridors.
A Fundraiser Rooted in the 1980s
The festival traces back to September 1984, when it was established to showcase local artisans and raise money for Venice neighborhood nonprofits, according to historical context from SoCalPulse. Since then, the Abbot Kinney Festival Association has disbursed more than $300,000 in proceeds to local groups supporting youth, arts, and civic programs, per figures reported by the Santa Monica Mirror in earlier coverage. Among the concrete beneficiaries was the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Committee, which received a $1,700 grant in 2016 to print educational curricula about World War II internment, according to the committee's own account — funding tied to the corner where local residents of Japanese descent were ordered to report in 1942.
In its pre-hiatus form, the one-mile street fair spanning Abbot Kinney Boulevard drew an estimated 120,000 visitors, 300 artisan vendors, four live music stages, and three beer gardens, according to event-industry figures compiled by BizBash. The route runs the full stretch between Venice Boulevard and Main Street.
The Boulevard's Long Road to 'Coolest Block in America'
The street itself carries its own layered history. It was originally named West Washington Boulevard until October 1990, when the Los Angeles City Council renamed it to honor Venice founder Abbot Kinney and end confusion with other Washington-named thoroughfares, according to Los Angeles Times archives — a change local merchants pushed for to help market the commercial district. Kinney, a developer and tobacco magnate, founded the “Venice of America” resort town in 1905 with Italian-inspired canals, before the City of Los Angeles annexed the municipality in 1926, per background from the Los Angeles City Planning Department; most of the original canal network was later filled in during the late 1920s to make way for roads.
GQ Magazine's 2012 designation of Abbot Kinney Boulevard as the “Coolest Block in America” accelerated its shift from artsy neighborhood strip to high-rent retail corridor, a transition Forbes has since traced through the influx of corporate flagship stores and international fashion brands along the street. Upscale dining anchors that stretch too, including Felix Trattoria, which Esquire named the best new restaurant in America in 2017 and which sits near the boulevard's northern end. As of this year, the corridor is also seeing two boutique hotel developments under construction, including a 78-room project, according to a Venice Place development brief — a shift urban planners expect will bring hotel guests to support weekday dining and retail beyond weekend events like the festival's return.
