If you spent the last two weeks getting your invitations to leave summer behind, you were not imagining it. The Summer Sunset Music Series wrapped its final Thursday show at The Culver Steps on August 20. The Downtown Business Association ran its last Third Wednesday tasting crawl, Tropical Staycation, the night before that, on August 19. Both were free, both were well attended, and both had the unmistakable feel of a season finale, the kind of programming built to send you off with a cocktail sample and a live band before the calendar turns toward fall.
Except the neighborhood's actual biggest gathering of the summer hasn't happened yet. Fiesta La Ballona, the Culver City tradition that predates the sunset concerts, the tasting crawls, and the redeveloped downtown they're staged in, lands at Veterans Memorial Park on August 28 through 30. This year it turns 75. It is not run by a business association or a city marketing office. It is not sponsored, ticketed, or built around a hashtag. It is exactly the kind of thing a neighborhood keeps doing long after the branded stuff around it changes shape, and the fact that its milestone anniversary is getting less advance fanfare than a Wednesday cocktail crawl tells you something about how Culver City's calendar actually works.
What Downtown Already Finished
Tropical Staycation was the third and final installment of the Downtown Business Association's summer Taste of Summer series, a monthly run of self-guided passport crawls held on the third Wednesday of June, July, and August. Storefronts along Culver Boulevard, Main Street, and Town Plaza served up spiked and virgin cocktails to anyone carrying a paper passport, with a raffle at the end for people who collected enough stamps. It is a downtown business promotion dressed up as a street party, and it works exactly as intended: foot traffic into restaurants and shops that might otherwise see a quiet Wednesday in August.
The Sunset Music Series finale the next night closed out a run that started July 16 and played every Thursday at 7 p.m. in Town Plaza at The Culver Steps, the retail and office complex at 9300 Culver Boulevard developed by Kennedy Wilson and Hackman Capital Partners. This was the series' fourth year in its current form. Before 2020, a version of it ran for roughly three decades on the front plaza of Culver City Hall, produced by Boulevard Music, until the pandemic shut it down. The Culver City Arts Foundation pitched the city council on reviving it in 2023, kicking in $32,000 that first year and about $23,000 the year after to help cover the cost. It's a good series, but it's worth noticing that it took a nonprofit fundraising campaign and a change of venue, from a public plaza to a private development's amphitheater steps, to bring it back.
Both events are genuinely good nights out. Neither is old enough or unbranded enough to be what the neighborhood has actually been doing every August since long before downtown looked anything like it does now.
What's Actually Turning 75 This Weekend
Fiesta La Ballona has been held at Veterans Memorial Park, 4117 Overland Avenue, every August since the 1940s. This year's edition, running Friday through Sunday, August 28 to 30, marks its 75th anniversary. Admission to the grounds is free. Rides and food are pay as you go. The booths are staffed by local nonprofit organizations, not vendors booked through an events company, and the stage lineup pulls from local bands rather than touring acts. The rides come from the same traveling carnival operators who have circulated through Southern California parking lots for decades.
None of that has changed to accommodate a redeveloped downtown, a new wave of restaurant openings, or a city marketing calendar built around Instagram-friendly drink names. It's the same format the festival has run for three quarters of a century, in a public park rather than a leased plaza, funded by the institutions that have always funded it.
Here's the contrast laid out plainly:
| Event | Who runs it | Where | What it costs | How long it's been around |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Third Wednesday: Tropical Staycation | Culver City Downtown Business Association | Storefronts along Culver Boulevard, Main Street, and Town Plaza | Free tastings, businesses set their own pricing on anything beyond samples | A recent addition to the summer calendar |
| Summer Sunset Music Series | City of Culver City's Office of Economic and Cultural Development, with the Culver Arts Foundation | Town Plaza at The Culver Steps | Free | Fourth year in its current form, revived after a pandemic-era pause of a series that ran roughly 30 years at City Hall |
| Fiesta La Ballona (75th) | Local nonprofits, City of Culver City | Veterans Memorial Park | Free admission, rides and food pay as you go | Every August since the 1940s |
Two of these three events are recent civic or business inventions, useful and well run but built to serve a downtown that only recently rebuilt itself around The Culver Steps and Platform. The third one was already decades into its run before either of those developments existed.
The Same Pattern Shows Up on the Restaurant Scene
You can see a version of this same split in what's happening with Culver City's food businesses right now. Monroe Place, the sandwich counter that built a following downtown on baguettes stuffed with burrata and confit tomato and a Persian-influenced turkey sandwich called the W.L.F., just opened a second location in Hollywood. That's a Culver City business exporting itself outward, the kind of organic growth that happens when a neighborhood spot gets good enough that its footprint stops making sense.
Compare that to the churn inside the newer commercial developments downtown, where restaurant rosters at Platform and The Culver Steps turn over as leases end and concepts get swapped for whatever's next. Both patterns are normal for a growing food scene. But only one of them started as a single counter that Culver City residents built a habit around before anyone else knew the name.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this is an argument against the newer stuff. The Sunset Music Series is free, family friendly, and worth planning a Thursday around next summer. Tropical Staycation gets people into storefronts that need the traffic. Both are well-executed civic programming, and Culver City is better for having them.
But if you've lived here long enough to have opinions about which downtown restaurant used to occupy which storefront, Fiesta La Ballona is probably the one date on this list you already have circled without needing a press release to remind you. If you're newer to the neighborhood, or you've let the festival slide the last few years because the branded summer calendar crowded it out, the 75th anniversary is a good year to walk into Veterans Memorial Park and see what a Culver City institution looks like when it hasn't been redesigned around a logo. Free admission, local bands, a carnival that's been setting up in the same kind of parking lots for decades, and a crowd that's mostly neighbors who show up every year without anyone marketing it to them.
That's the thing about a neighborhood that's added a lot of new development in a short window. The new plazas and the new tasting crawls get the calendar attention because they're new. The thing that's been happening since the 1940s doesn't need the attention, because it's never needed it to keep going.
If you're watching Culver City from the outside and wondering what kind of place it actually is underneath the redeveloped downtown and the steady restaurant openings, that's a fair question, and it's one LA Realty Concierge spends a lot of time answering for people considering a move here. Mikka Johnson works this market block by block, from the streets around Veterans Memorial Park to the storefronts downtown, and knows which parts of a neighborhood's character are durable and which are just this year's programming. If Culver City is on your list, schedule a concierge consultation and get the version of this market that comes from someone who's watched it for longer than a single summer calendar.
