Scan the Culver City calendar this month and it looks like a neighborhood on a growth spurt. A cult Costa Mesa pizzeria moved in this spring. A compact-format IKEA opened inside the Helms Bakery District around the same time. A festival at Veterans Memorial Park is marking a milestone anniversary this month. A free concert series is packing Town Plaza every Thursday night through the third week of August.
None of it is actually new. Look closer and almost everything driving Culver City's August is a return: a program the city let lapse and revived on different terms, a storefront filling a space that already failed once, a 75-year-old event reshaped to fit a smaller footprint than it used to have. That distinction is not just trivia for people who like local history. If you live here, it tells you which August plans are worth reorganizing a week around and which are simply auditioning for a longer run.
The Concert Series That Died and Came Back Smaller
The Summer Sunset Concert Series feels like a fixture of Downtown Culver City, and in a sense it is, just not continuously. The series ran for roughly three decades at the front plaza of Culver City Hall, produced by the local outfit Boulevard Music, before the pandemic shut it down in 2020. It stayed dark for three years.
In 2023, the Culver City Arts Foundation asked the city council to bring it back, and pledged $32,000 toward the first season to make that happen. The relaunch moved the series off City Hall's plaza entirely, resettling it at Town Plaza inside The Culver Steps at 9300 Culver Boulevard. The following year, the Arts Foundation's commitment dropped to about $23,000, which means more of the cost has been shifting onto the city's own Office of Economic Development and whatever sponsorship the Steps' retail tenants can absorb.
This year's run started July 16 and continues every Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. through August 20, which leaves two more concerts on the calendar as of this writing: August 13 and August 20. The city's own events team keeps the format loose. Seating is first-come, first-served, small blankets and low chairs are fine in the designated areas, and no alcohol is allowed on-site, though you're encouraged to eat at the restaurants surrounding the plaza before or after.
Edgar Varela, the city's special events manager, has described the goal simply: to book acts "who tour worldwide, from all different genres." That's a wider net than a neighborhood concert series usually gets, and it's a direct result of the 2023 relaunch putting real programming money behind what used to be a volunteer-adjacent civic tradition.
Seventy-Five Years, Three Days Instead of Seven
Fiesta La Ballona has an even longer arc, and this year it hits a real number: 75 years since its 1951 launch as a joint project between the city and the Culver City Chamber of Commerce.
The original Fiesta was a weeklong affair. Culver Boulevard closed from Main Street to Overland for a parade built around Culver City's role in the movie industry, and attendees dressed as characters from films shot locally. There were contests for nearly everything: a kiddie costume contest, a baby beauty contest, a float contest, a window-dressing contest, even a beard-growing contest, with fiesta ribbons handed out to winners. Square dancing and communal barbecues filled the evenings, and the Culver City Plunge hosted aquacade swim events.
The modern version is a three-day festival, not a week, and it's contained entirely within Veterans Memorial Park at 4117 Overland Avenue rather than spilling onto city streets. This year's dates are August 28 through 30, and organizers are marking the 75th anniversary with the same core elements that have carried the event for decades: carnival rides, live music across multiple stages, a beer and wine garden, food trucks, and the aquacade tradition at the municipal pool.
| Then | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Summer Sunset Concert Series | Roughly 30 years at Culver City Hall's plaza, produced by Boulevard Music | Revived in 2023 at Town Plaza, The Culver Steps, funded in part by the Culver City Arts Foundation |
| Fiesta La Ballona | Weeklong event since 1951, parade closing Culver Blvd from Main to Overland | Three-day festival at Veterans Memorial Park, August 28-30, marking 75 years |
Neither program disappeared and neither one came back the same size. That's the pattern worth noticing before you plan around either one.
Helms Bakery District Isn't New, It's Restocked
The Helms Bakery District tells the same story from the retail side. The complex has cycled through a stretch of closures and tenant turnover in the past couple of years, and the current wave of openings reads less like fresh growth and more like a deliberate restock aimed at pulling foot traffic back.
Folks Pizzeria, a Costa Mesa favorite known for fermentation-forward 14-inch pies and a tight natural-wine list, opened its first location outside Orange County this spring at 3273 Helms Avenue. That address belonged to Lustig, which closed in early 2025. Chef-owner Joey Booterbaugh and partner Chloe Tran built Folks into a cult following since 2019, and Culver City is where they chose to test whether that following travels. It's not a new restaurant concept, just a proven one changing zip codes.
The district also added a smaller-format IKEA around the same time, a scaled-down version of a format the company has already tested elsewhere, not an original idea built for this specific corner. Developers behind the property have been actively courting restaurants to round out the retail mix after the earlier closures, which means Folks was one piece of a larger strategy rather than an isolated bet.
The Rhythm Underneath the Openings
Even the neighborhood's smaller, less headline-grabbing programming follows the same logic. The Downtown Culver City Business Association runs seasonal events on a repeating annual cadence rather than one-off stunts: Summertini Time landed in mid-July this year, and a Tropical Staycation is scheduled for August 19. These aren't new ideas being tried for the first time. They're the DBA's tested summer formula, run again because it worked the last time.
If you want one more date on the books before Fiesta weekend, Jazz in the Park is scheduled for August 15 at Syd Kronenthal Park, a named, specific spot on the city's west side that doesn't get the same foot traffic as Downtown but hosts its own slice of the summer calendar.
Here's what that leaves on the calendar for the rest of August, in order:
- August 13 ā Summer Sunset Concert Series, Town Plaza at The Culver Steps, 7-9 p.m.
- August 15 ā Jazz in the Park, Syd Kronenthal Park
- August 19 ā Tropical Staycation, Downtown Culver City Business Association
- August 20 ā final Summer Sunset Concert Series date for the season, Town Plaza
- August 28-30 ā Fiesta La Ballona's 75th anniversary, Veterans Memorial Park
Why the Distinction Matters
None of this is really about novelty. It's about which bets the city and its business community are willing to keep making. A concert series that lost its city hall home and its full original funding but still found its way back to a new plaza tells you something about how much this specific tradition matters to the people running Downtown Culver City. A festival that shrank from a week to three days but kept running for 75 straight years tells you the core of it, the aquacade, the beer garden, the parade energy even without the actual parade, still works. And a bakery district restocking itself with a business that already has a following elsewhere is a much safer signal than a district full of first-time concepts hoping to find one.
If you're already living here, that's the read worth carrying into the rest of August: the events and openings that have already survived a version of themselves once are the ones most likely to still be around next summer. The brand-new ones are the ones actually being tested.
Culver City's comebacks are rarely loud about being comebacks, which is part of why they're easy to miss if you're only skimming the calendar. But once you notice the pattern, it changes how you read everything else the neighborhood puts out this time of year, including which projects are worth your attention and which ones are just filling a gap until something better comes along.
If you're the kind of person who pays attention to which parts of a neighborhood are built to last, that instinct tends to carry over into how you think about a home here too. Work With JoJo if you'd ever like to talk through what Culver City actually looks like street by street, not just on a calendar of events.
