Venice had two anniversaries this year, and only one of them needed a comeback tour. The Abbot Kinney Festival, a forty-year tradition that used to shut down the boulevard with more than 300 vendor booths and something like 150,000 people shoulder to shoulder between Venice Boulevard and Main Street, sat out 2024 and 2025 entirely. Its all-volunteer board cited a sponsorship slowdown that hit street festivals across the country and said the pause would give them room to restructure. It returns this Sunday, September 27, running its usual 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the neighborhood has been talking about it for months.
Meanwhile, in August, the Venice Basketball League quietly marked its own twentieth anniversary with a two-day Legends Weekend at the courts on Ocean Front Walk. No sponsorship gap. No restructuring. No season it skipped. It just kept running games on the same asphalt it has used since before most of the storefronts on the boulevard existed in their current form.
That contrast is the actual story of this fall, more than the festival itself. One Venice institution needed capital, a production budget, and two years of retooling to come back. The other never had a reason to leave. If you want to understand what has actually changed about your neighborhood this year, and what hasn't, that gap is where to look.
Two Anniversaries, Two Different Machines
| Abbot Kinney Festival | Venice Basketball League | |
|---|---|---|
| Track record | 40 years, until the pause | 20 years, no pause |
| Runs on | Sponsorship dollars, a paid production budget | Volunteer organizers, a public court |
| 2024-2025 | Canceled both years | Ran on schedule |
| This year | Returns September 27 after a board restructure | Marked its 20th with Legends Weekend in August |
The festival's scale is exactly what made it vulnerable. A one-day event that closes a mile of street to cars and hosts hundreds of vendors needs sponsors who write checks well in advance, insurance that scales with crowd size, and a production apparatus that can't just be switched back on the week before. When festival sponsorship dried up nationally, Abbot Kinney's version went dark along with plenty of others like it.
The basketball league needed none of that. It needed the same court it has always had and people willing to show up and organize games. There was no lease to renew, no sponsor to lose, no infrastructure to rebuild before the twentieth anniversary could happen. It happened because nothing about it depended on anyone else's decision.
What Actually Had to Be Built Back
The boulevard's biggest bets this year are the kind that take years to place. At the north end, the Venice Place Project is building a 78-room hotel designed by local architect David Hertz, with a landscaped courtyard, multiple pedestrian access points, and Felix Trattoria anchoring the food side. At the corner of Abbot Kinney and Main, an unrelated 43-room hotel called 881 Abbot Kinney is going up at the same time. Both were aimed at the 2025-2026 window.
Two hotels on one boulevard is not a coincidence of timing. It's a bet on the thing Venice has never really had: overnight guests. A day-tripper eats lunch and leaves. Someone staying in a hotel room eats dinner on a Tuesday, orders dessert, and comes back for coffee in the morning. That's a different economy, and it's one you can only build with years of construction and financing, not a single good season.
Heading into this wave, the boulevard was already close to full. A December 2024 survey of the corridor found fewer than 10 of the roughly 100 storefronts along the mile-long stretch sitting vacant, a near-full occupancy rate at a moment when retail vacancy has been a persistent problem across much of Los Angeles. The hotels and the restaurant openings that followed weren't filling empty space so much as raising what the existing space could support.
What Just Showed Up, No Construction Required
Not every new arrival needed a building permit. Some of the most talked-about additions were operators making a bet with a lease and a kitchen, nothing more.
- RVR, the izakaya from chef Travis Lett, who spent years running the Gjelina kitchen a few blocks away before a five-year break, opened in October 2024 in the small space where he'd previously run a short pop-up. It has reservations booked weeks out.
- ¡Salud! opened at 417 Washington Boulevard in late January 2026, with the Venice Chamber of Commerce holding its ribbon-cutting on January 24. By early March, the same room hosted a Chamber mixer that drew roughly 100 locals, a fast turn from new tenant to neighborhood fixture.
- BADMAASH, the Los Angeles Indian restaurant group founded in 2013 by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, opened its third location at 1616 Abbot Kinney in March 2026, its first with a full cocktail program.
- The Tasting Kitchen reopened at 1633 Abbot Kinney under chef Casey Lane, who first built the restaurant's reputation back in 2009. This time it's moved to a seven-day schedule with late hours running until 1 a.m.
- Enrique Olvera reworked his former ATLA space into San Damián, a Mexican mariscos concept with a taqueria planned for the patio.
Down toward the boardwalk, the changes have been smaller and quicker to open. Bodega + Palms took over the longtime Mitchell's Market space, and Westside Oyster Club moved into the old Blue Plate Oysterette footprint with a Cape Cod-style raw bar. Neither required years of planning, just a new tenant and a build-out.
Not every bet on this stretch is permanent. Cozey, a Canadian furniture company, opened a roughly 5,000-square-foot pop-up showroom at 1220 Abbot Kinney in April, and it's already booked to close in December. That's a company testing whether Venice shoppers buy sofas, not a company staking a decade on the answer. It sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from a 78-room hotel, and both showed up on the same block this year.
What Never Needed a Comeback
While all of that was happening, or not happening, on Abbot Kinney, two things on the calendar never stopped. First Fridays kept running monthly through the entire festival gap, with food trucks like Cousin's Maine Lobster, Kogi BBQ, and Dogtown Dogs cycling through the lineup the same way they always had. Nobody had to relaunch First Fridays this year because nobody had to cancel it in the first place.
And the courts on Ocean Front Walk kept running games straight through two Septembers when the boulevard's marquee event didn't exist. The Legends Weekend that marked the league's twentieth anniversary this August wasn't a revival. It was a continuation of something that was never interrupted, which is a different kind of milestone than the one the festival is celebrating this weekend.
What the Return on the 27th Actually Tells You
When you walk Abbot Kinney on Sunday, you'll see a version of the street that looks busier and more finished than the one you walked in 2023. That's real. Two hotels under construction, a run of chef-driven openings, and a boulevard sitting near full occupancy are genuine signs of a commercial corridor that worked hard to get back to where it wanted to be.
But the festival's return isn't proof that Venice came back to life. It's proof that the parts of the neighborhood that depend on sponsors, leases, and construction schedules finally caught up to a rhythm that the free stuff, the public court, the monthly food truck night, never lost. If you're looking for what's actually durable about this place, it was never on the vendor booth side of the street.
If you're weighing what any of this means for the value of a home nearby, or thinking about what a Venice property could support as a rental or a resale, Joanna Steinberg has spent years reading exactly this kind of shift on the ground here. Reach out to start that conversation.
