What does it take to shut four blocks of a working commercial street to traffic, twice, in the space of six weeks, and have it read as a feature of the neighborhood rather than an inconvenience? On Larchmont Boulevard this fall, the answer turns out to be one civic association, one round of streetscape upgrades finished within the last year, and two very different events built to lean on the same infrastructure.
The first closure came on Saturday, September 19, when the 500 block of North Larchmont, between Clinton Street and Rosewood Avenue, filled with more than 60 vintage and exotic Porsches for Cars Under the Stars, a new event organized by the Larchmont Boulevard Association in partnership with the Porsche Club of America-Los Angeles. The second comes on Sunday, October 25, when the boulevard between Beverly and First closes again for the 61st annual Larchmont Family Fair, a much older tradition returning with the same LBA volunteers behind it. Neither closure is a coincidence. Both are the same organization checking whether the street it has spent the past year rebuilding can actually hold a crowd.
The Same Four Blocks, Twice in Six Weeks
Line the two events up next to each other and the overlap is hard to miss.
| Cars Under the Stars | Larchmont Family Fair | |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Saturday, September 19, 2026 | Sunday, October 25, 2026 |
| Hours | 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. | Noon to 5 p.m. |
| Closed footprint | 500 block, Clinton to Rosewood | Larchmont Blvd, Beverly to First |
| Run by | LBA president Romi Cortier, with the Porsche Club of America-LA | LBA volunteer Melissa Farwell |
| First held | 2026, inaugural | 61st annual running |
| What it leaned on | New bistro lights and median plantings, tested at dusk | The full length of the boulevard, tested by volume |
Both events are produced by the Larchmont Boulevard Association. Both close a stretch of the same commercial street. Both send their proceeds into the same pool of money the LBA uses for security, landscaping, and the boulevard's ongoing beautification work. The difference is scale and pedigree. One is a single-evening experiment in its first year. The other is a six-decade-old institution that, according to LBA board member Edie Frère, drew an estimated 10,000 visitors to last year's 60th anniversary edition. Running the small one first was not an accident of scheduling.
Why the Car Show Came Before the Fair
Cars Under the Stars was built around a very specific image: the Hollywood Sign visible above Larchmont as dusk falls, the boulevard's bistro lights coming on, and rows of Porsches lining the closed street beneath both. LBA president Romi Cortier had been picturing that composition for years, from the vantage point of the salon he has run on Larchmont for more than three decades. The bistro lights that make the shot possible were strung above that stretch of the boulevard only last December, which means the September car show doubled as the first real evening test of a lighting installation that had never seen a crowd.
"I wanted to create that perfect Los Angeles moment, the Hollywood Sign at dusk, the bistro lights coming on, and these beautiful Porsches lining Larchmont Boulevard."
Cortier's co-organizer was Lisa Balazs, a garden designer and vintage Porsche owner who runs Virgo Design & Landscaping, the same firm the LBA had already hired to clear and replant the medians along that block ahead of the show. Balazs also founded the Ladies & Porsches chapter of the Porsche Club of America-LA, which supplied a chunk of the more than 60 cars on display. CD13 Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez and district deputy Mark Fuentes attended, and the Porsche club presented the LBA with a check toward its beautification fund before the night was out.
Read that lineup again and a pattern shows up. The same landscaping company that spent the spring replanting the medians at Larchmont's city parking lot also staged the September car show. The same association that funded the bistro lights used them as the reason to hold an event under them for the first time. A 60-car show on one block, run by people already embedded in the boulevard's physical upkeep, is a low-risk way to find out whether new infrastructure performs before a fair that will bring thousands to the same street a month later.
The Fair the Street Has to Be Ready For
The Larchmont Family Fair does not need a test run. It has run for 61 years, organized annually by the Larchmont Boulevard Association, and last year's 60th edition included a plaque presented to LBA founder Jane Gilman's honor from Assemblymember Zbur's office, recognizing her role in starting the fair and later founding both the Larchmont Chronicle and the Windsor Square Hancock Park Historical Society. This year, the fair is being run again by LBA volunteer Melissa Farwell, who also serves as Director of Markets for Raw Inspirations, the company that operates Larchmont's regular farmers market.
That overlap matters, because the fair's footprint is not an empty street. It is the same city parking lot, Lot 694, that hosts the boulevard's Wednesday and Sunday markets year-round, and the same lot the LBA spent more than a year replanting after 15 months of electrical delays held up the work. That landscaping, finished in March 2026 with native plants like white sage and California poppies alongside climate-appropriate lavender, was completed by Virgo Design & Landscaping, Balazs's firm again, ahead of a fair that will ask thousands of people to walk through it in a single afternoon.
Lot 694 has a second layer of relevance here. Earlier this year, the LA Department of Transportation formally closed the file on a proposed land lease for the lot, a plan the LBA and the neighborhood's other associations had already fought off once before. In its year-end letter, the LBA described the fight in plain terms: defending the lot meant defending the market, the Taste of Larchmont, and the Family Fair itself, since all three depend on that same patch of asphalt staying available. The fair returning for a 61st year on the same lot the LBA just spent a year re-landscaping and just finished defending from redevelopment is not background noise. It is the reason the fair has ground to stand on at all.
What Two Closures Actually Tell a Neighbor
None of this changes what either event feels like on the day. A Saturday evening with Porsches under string lights and a Sunday afternoon with carnival rides and a beer garden are different occasions built for different moods. But both draw on the same year of decisions: bistro lights installed in December, medians replanted in March, a parking lot redevelopment defeated for the second time, and a landscaping firm whose owner also happens to organize car shows in her spare time.
For anyone who already treats Larchmont as their main street, the practical upshot is straightforward. Plan around two Saturday and Sunday closures six weeks apart rather than one. Expect the Wednesday and Sunday markets to keep their usual footprint outside of fair weekend, when the market typically shifts into a smaller setup inside the same lot so the day isn't lost entirely. And notice, if you're walking the 500 block after dark before the fair, that the lights overhead and the plantings underfoot were tested once already, on purpose, before the bigger crowd arrives.
If you've been thinking about what a stretch of boulevard like this says about the block it fronts, or what a year of visible civic investment tends to mean for a street's long-term footing, that's a conversation Jonnelle Lewin is always glad to have over coffee on Larchmont.
