The Larchmont Family Fair Turns 61 This Fall, on the Lot It Almost Lost

Every year since 1965, the Larchmont Boulevard Association has closed four blocks of Larchmont Boulevard between Beverly and First for one Sunday afternoon of rides, a costume contest, a pie-baking contest, and a stage full of neighborhood kids performing for judges who hand out cash prizes. It has run so consistently, through a two-year pandemic pause and back again, that most people who live in Hancock Park, Windsor Square, or Larchmont Village treat it the way they treat the seasons changing. It just happens.

What most fairgoers do not know, because it played out in neighborhood council meetings and LBA newsletters rather than on the boulevard itself, is that the ground under the fair nearly changed hands last year. The parking lot where the rides go up, where the Sunday farmers market sets up every week, where Taste of Larchmont happens each spring, is legally a city-owned asset known as Lot 694. In 2025, a proposed land lease at that lot threatened to hand over the space the LBA has spent seventy years turning into the neighborhood's unofficial town square. The Windsor Square Neighborhood Association, the Larchmont Village Neighborhood Association, the Larchmont United Neighborhood Association, and the LBA fought the lease together and won. The fair returning this fall for its 61st year is not just a tradition continuing. It is a tradition that had to be defended to continue.

The fair funds what you notice on the walk there

If you have strolled Larchmont Boulevard this year and noticed the boulevard looks a little sharper, that is not incidental. Over the past two years the LBA and the Larchmont Village BID have rolled out a beautification push: French blue Legacy Benches paid for by donor families, matching cornflower blue trash cans replacing the old green Big Belly units, and new native plantings in the parking lot flower beds. The BID committed $10,000 toward the new cans, matched by another $10,000 from Council District 13, with individual property owners covering the rest of a roughly $30,000 total project budget. A single Legacy Bench, plaque and installation included, runs $3,200, and the LBA has been selling them to families with real roots on the boulevard, including a bench honoring the Carroll family, whose Hollywoodland Realty traces back to 1923, and Tailwaggers, which has been on the boulevard since 2003.

In April, that same beautification instinct showed up somewhere less decorative. LBA president Romi Cortier had been photographing the association's street projects and kept noticing how dingy the curb paint looked next to the new benches. He teamed up with Sam Uretsky, president of the Larchmont United Neighborhood Association, whose board members Chris Shanley and Georgea Fenady physically measured every curb on the four blocks between Melrose and First. LUNA turned those measurements into a map, which LADOT staffer Drew Way converted into three work orders, and city crews repainted the red curbs across the boulevard that same month.

None of this is charity. It is funded, in large part, by the fair itself. Proceeds from booth fees, ticket sales, and sponsorships go straight back into the LBA's budget line for security, landscaping, and street beautification, the same line that paid for the benches and helped make the case for city crews to show up with red paint. The fair is not a party the boulevard throws for itself. It is closer to an annual fundraising drive dressed up as a party.

Why the lot mattered more than a parking spot

The Larchmont Boulevard Association is a 501(c)(6) merchant association, not a charity, which means donations to it are not tax deductible and its budget depends almost entirely on what businesses, property owners, and fairgoers choose to give it each year. That structure is worth sitting with. There is no dedicated city funding line that keeps the benches painted or the curbs red. There is a volunteer board and whatever the fair, the sponsorships, and the booth fees bring in.

Which is why the Lot 694 fight was never really about a parking lot. The Sunday market, the Taste of Larchmont, and the Family Fair all depend on having a piece of asphalt in the middle of the village that can be shut down to traffic and turned into a gathering space on demand. Lose that lot to a long-term lease, and the LBA loses the physical stage for the one annual event that funds everything else it does. The neighborhood associations that killed the proposed lease were not just protecting a market. They were protecting the mechanism that pays for the boulevard's upkeep.

"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 told the Larchmont Buzz last summer.

That sentiment reads differently once you know how close the showcase came to losing its stage.

The volunteers who actually run it

The fair has no paid staff. Melissa Farwell, who serves as Director of Markets for Raw Inspirations and runs the Larchmont Farmers Market week to week, has organized the fair for years on top of that job. Edie Frère, who owns Landis Gifts and Stationery on North Larchmont, chairs the booth committee and personally mails invitations to the schools, churches, and nonprofits that fill roughly 40 booths every October. The Larchmont Boulevard Association itself traces back to 1955, founded by local business owners according to Jane Gilman, who also founded the Larchmont Chronicle. The fair came a decade later, in 1965, conceived as a way for the boulevard's merchants to thank their customers.

That volunteer structure is also why the fair looks a little different every year without ever losing its shape. Farwell has talked openly about rearranging the layout season to season, moving food vendors near the Rotary clock one year, shrinking the farmers market footprint to make room for more seating the next. The constants are the ones the neighborhood counts on: a costume contest for kids up through age 18, "Larchmont's Got Talent," which pays $500, $250, and $100 to its top three acts, and a pie-baking contest whose winning recipe gets served for a month at a local restaurant.

What to expect this fall

The LBA had not posted an official date for this year's fair as of this writing, but the pattern from the last three years is consistent enough to plan around. The 59th fair landed on October 27, 2024. The 60th landed on October 26, 2025. Both were the last Sunday of the month, run from roughly noon to 5 p.m. If that pattern holds for the 61st, the fair should fall on October 25, 2026.

Expect the boulevard to close to traffic early that morning, well before the noon start, so volunteers can set up rides and booths. In recent fairs, attractions have included a Blue Crush Slide, and food has come from a mix of local restaurants and boulevard institutions, including La Bettola di Terroni in the beer and wine garden, Esco's Pizza serving slices, and the Wilshire Rotary making pretzels. The LBA estimates roughly 10,000 visitors come through over the course of the single afternoon, filling a boulevard that on an ordinary Sunday feels considerably smaller.

If you want a booth, reservations go through Frère and the fee has held at $500 for an 8-foot table, two chairs, and a canopy, with nonprofits and schools keeping whatever they raise for their own organizations. If you just want to walk the boulevard with your family, the day costs nothing beyond whatever tickets you buy for the rides.

The takeaway for anyone who lives here

The fair itself will look the way it always looks: bounce houses, a stage full of kids performing, the smell of pizza and pretzels drifting down a boulevard closed to cars for one afternoon. What changed is what you now know about how fragile that permanence actually is. The lot underneath it belongs to the city, not the neighborhood, and it took four volunteer organizations working together to keep it available for community use. The benches and trash cans that make the walk from your car to the fair a little nicer did not appear on their own. They came from a fundraising structure that has no fallback if the fair itself, or the ground it stands on, ever goes away.

That is worth knowing whether you have lived three blocks off the boulevard for twenty years or you are just now getting oriented to the neighborhood. The charm holds because specific people keep choosing to maintain it, not because the city guarantees it will.

For more on how Hancock Park and its surrounding streets continue to evolve, including the property side of that story, the Hancock Park neighborhood guide has additional context. And if you are the kind of neighbor who likes knowing what is actually happening on your boulevard before it shows up in a headline, Sonya Chun has spent more than two decades paying attention to exactly these details across the Eastside. Let's Connect.