By 8 a.m. on Ventura Place, the barricades are already up. Produce tents line the block between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Radford Avenue, a line forms at the breakfast burrito stand, and somewhere near the lawn a petting zoo is doing its usual business with a toddler who does not want to leave. The Studio City Farmers Market has run this way for years, a non-profit jointly owned by the Studio City Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Studio City Residents Association, with more than 80 farmers, artisans, and food vendors setting up rain or shine. Park at the CBS structure past the main gate on Radford, or the Chase Bank lot if that fills first.
None of that is new. What is new is what happens after.
For most of this market's history, the Sunday routine had a natural stopping point. You shopped, you carried your tote bags to the car, and if you needed anything else, an errand at a specific gym, a specific grocery store, a particular retail brand, you likely got in the car again and drove somewhere else in the Valley or over the hill entirely. That stopping point quietly disappeared this year, and the reason has less to do with the market itself than with what has filled in around it.
The lodge closed the gap
Walk east from the market's edge at Radford along Ventura Boulevard and you reach the corner of Coldwater Canyon, where the Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge sit on 95,000 square feet of what used to be a fishing-lake resort favored by Clark Gable, John Wayne, and Bette Davis. The current version opened after a $100 million redevelopment designed by Gensler with landscape work from OLIN, and its two anchor tenants are the reason the walk is worth making: an Equinox, and an Erewhon that opened in December 2021 as one of the few locations serving the Valley.
That detail matters more than it sounds. For years a Studio City resident who wanted that specific grocery run had to cross into the Westside or drive out to Calabasas, where Erewhon has an older location. Now the run happens on foot, inside a Sunday morning that already starts at the market.
The retail mix around those two anchors kept filling in through the spring, and the piece that closed the loop for good arrived in late May 2026, when the apparel brand Marine Layer opened at the Lodge. It is a small addition on paper, one more storefront in an already-leased center, but it is the kind of tenant that turns a single-purpose errand into a multi-purpose one. A grocery stop, a fitness class, and a clothing pickup now live on the same block instead of three different trips across three different weeks.
The practical shape of a Sunday looks something like this now:
- 8:00 a.m. Market opens on Ventura Place, produce and breakfast first
- 11:00 a.m. Coffee or an Erewhon run at the Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge, an easy walk east on Ventura
- 1:00 p.m. Up the switchbacks above Fryman Canyon while the morning marine layer is still burning off
That third stop is not incidental. The Betty B. Dearing Trail through Wilacre Park and Fryman Canyon runs a loop of roughly three miles with about 450 feet of elevation gain, starting from the lot at Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Fryman Road, a few minutes' drive south of Ventura. Parking runs a modest fee, a few dollars at the main lot, and the trail stays open year round with no permit required. For a resident who started the day at the market, the trailhead is close enough that the whole sequence, produce to protein shake to trail, can happen without ever getting on the 101 or crossing over to the Westside.
None of these three stops is a new fact about Studio City on its own. The market has run for years. The Lodge has been open since its redevelopment. Fryman Canyon has been a local trailhead for decades. What changed in 2026 is that the gaps between them filled in enough that a resident can treat all three as one continuous morning instead of three separate destinations on three separate days.
Tujunga Village runs its own version
Not every Studio City weekend routes through Ventura Boulevard, and the neighborhood's other pocket makes that clear. One block north, Tujunga Village runs on a slower, smaller rhythm centered on Aroma Cafe, a long-running coffee counter that still draws a crowd most mornings, and independent shops like Verona by Jeni B a few doors down. It is a genuine walk-everything corridor, coffee, a boutique stop, a stroll, without the retail-anchor logic that drives the Ventura loop.
Once a year the Village stages its own version of a closed-street event. The Tujunga Village Spring Music Festival, hosted by the Tujunga Village Merchants, took over Tujunga Avenue this past May with live music, a wine garden pulled from the surrounding restaurants, a display of vintage Porsches, and a dog adoption drive on the sidewalk. It is a single afternoon rather than a weekly habit, but it tells the same story as the Ventura loop from a different angle: the neighborhood's two commercial spines run on separate calendars, and a resident who only knows one of them is missing half the picture.
The market picked up a nighttime twin
The one genuinely new invention on the calendar this year did not come from a private developer or a merchants association. It came from the market's own block. Studio City closed Ventura Place to traffic for the first annual Ventura Place Night Market, turning the same stretch that hosts Sunday mornings into an after-dark pedestrian event with more than 20 local artisans and businesses setting up under string lights instead of morning sun.
That distinction is worth sitting with. The Sunday market has run long enough that most residents stopped noticing it as a decision, it is simply what Sunday looks like here. A night market on the same block is not a rebrand of that habit. It is a second use for the same public space, timed for people who cannot make an 8 a.m. market or who want a version of it that ends with dinner instead of starting with breakfast. Two market days on one block, one civic and bright, one after dark, is a genuinely different pattern from the one this neighborhood has run for years.
What actually changed
None of this reads as a single dramatic event. No landmark closed, no headline development broke ground this year. What happened instead is quieter and, for anyone who already lives here, more useful to understand: the walk between three long-standing anchors, the market, the Lodge, and the Fryman Canyon trailhead, finally closed enough that a resident can treat a Saturday or Sunday as one continuous loop rather than a series of separate errands spread across a car-dependent week. Add a night market that gives the same block a second identity after dark, and a Tujunga Village calendar running its own parallel rhythm a block over, and the neighborhood's weekend looks meaningfully different than it did even two years ago.
If you have lived here through all of it, you likely sensed the shift without naming it. If you are newer to Studio City, this is the version of the neighborhood you are actually getting to know, not the one built entirely around a single Sunday market, but one where a morning can move from produce stand to grocery run to trailhead without a single freeway on-ramp.
For residents who eventually find themselves thinking about a move within these same few blocks, whether that means trading a condo near Ventura for something closer to Tujunga Village, or simply understanding how these two pockets differ day to day, Witek Lewin Group knows this stretch of Studio City block by block. Reach out when the conversation turns from where to spend a Sunday to where to live one.
