The MB10K and the Hometown Fair Are Sharing the Same Weekend This Year

"The turnover in downtown Manhattan Beach is unprecedented right now and we are all talking about it," Kelly Stroman, executive director of the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professionals Association, told a local reporter this summer. She was talking about storefronts. She could just as easily have been talking about the calendar. On October 3 and 4, two of the town's longest-running community traditions land on the same 48 hours, and anyone walking between them is going to pass a downtown that looks almost nothing like it did in October of last year.

Forty-Nine Years of the Same Morning

The MB10K turns 49 this year. It started in 1978 as a race a handful of local runners organized so Manhattan Beach could have a race "in town," and it has stayed a partnership between the city and an all-volunteer race committee ever since. Nobody on that committee gets paid. Registration for the October 3 race closed early, the field sold out, and more than 4,000 runners are expected to fill the streets starting at a 7:30 a.m. gun.

The course runs a split start from Ardmore Avenue and 4th Street and Valley Drive and 3rd Street, merges at 15th Street, follows the greenbelt through residential Manhattan Beach, and finishes on the Strand within sight of the Pier. Roads along the route have closed at 6 a.m. in past years, with traffic easing back to normal by around noon, so anyone who isn't running should plan the morning around it rather than through it.

What the race actually funds is the part that doesn't show up on race day. Organizers say the event has put more than $825,000 into local scholarships and youth programs over its history, alongside an $11,000 exercise facility at Manhattan Beach Middle School and par course upgrades at the Strand and 26th, along the greenbelt near Manhattan Beach Boulevard, and at Polliwog Park. Village Runner, the local running shop, handles bib pickup. Mira Costa's cross country and rugby teams, its choir and drama department, and Sandpiper Juniors and area Boy Scout troops staff everything from water stations to the finish line. It is, in a real sense, the school district's own kids running the race that pays for the school district's own equipment.

The Fair Picks Up Where the Race Lets Off

By the time the last runners clear the finish line, the two-day Hometown Fair is already setting up for its October 3 and 4 run, open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days. It is the same formula it has always been: games, music, food, booths, a fundraiser that plows its proceeds into scholarships, school programs, and local nonprofits rather than into anything flashier. For a family with a runner in the house, the morning starts with a road closure and ends with a fair schedule, which means the entire day is spoken for before anyone has had coffee.

The Storefronts Between the Start Line and the Finish Line

What changes this year is what both events pass on the way. Downtown Manhattan Beach has turned over enough storefronts in the past six months that Stroman's word for it, unprecedented, is the right one. On Manhattan Avenue, Coucou, a French bistro concept already established in Venice and West Hollywood, has opened in the space that used to be Nando Trattoria. A few doors down, Ounce of Salt, a jewelry line by local designer Jen Baick, has moved into the former Rolling Hills Flower Mart space, and Framebridge is set to open this fall where Kate Lester Home used to be.

Over in Metlox Plaza, Bacio di Latte gelato is already scooping, and Sogna Toscana has cleared the Planning Commission to build out the old Lemonade space, patio included, facing Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Along the boulevard itself, Blank Street Coffee has signed for the former Peet's location, Great White has moved into the old Pitfire space, and Velvet by Graham & Spencer has taken over where Gelato & Angels used to be. Gum Tree, the longtime boutique and café brand, lost its lease and is relocating to a smaller space nearby rather than closing outright, while Beyond Yoga moves into its old spot. Ocean View Cafe closed, and Alfred Coffee has signed on to take its place.

None of that turnover was engineered around race weekend or fair weekend. It is simply what downtown looks like right now, and it happens to be what tens of thousands of feet will pass on the first weekend of October, whether they are running past it at 7:45 a.m. or strolling past it with a fair program in hand.

What's Still a Parking Lot

Two of the biggest gaps downtown are not storefronts changing hands but plots still deciding what they will become. The site next to Vons, known as 400 MBB, and the former Lot 3 parking structure, demolished in 2024 after engineers found it seismically unstable, have both been the subject of a year of city design work and public input, with final concepts for both sites slated for City Council review this September. Until something is built, Lot 3 remains a 69-space surface lot behind the shops on Manhattan Beach Boulevard, which means fairgoers and race spectators looking for a place to park downtown that weekend are working with less capacity than the corridor is designed to eventually hold.

The Tuesday That Doesn't Change

If the weekend of October 3 and 4 is downtown at its most compressed, the Tuesday on either side of it is downtown at its steadiest. The Manhattan Beach Farmers Market has run every Tuesday in the Civic Center Plaza off 15th Street since 2006, and it isn't affected by any of the turnover happening a few blocks away. More than 60 vendors set up rain or shine, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the same footprint it's held for two decades. The Roundhouse Aquarium sets up a booth with tide pool specimens on select Tuesdays throughout the year, and the next one after fair weekend lands October 27, not the Tuesday right after, so anyone timing a visit around marine touch tanks should check the date before heading down.

That steadiness is worth noticing precisely because everything else downtown is in motion this fall. The race has run essentially the same course for 49 years. The fair has run the same weekend format for just as long. The farmers market has held the same Tuesday slot since before some of the new storefronts' leases existed. What's changed is what's on either side of all three: new restaurants, a relocated boutique, two sites still waiting on a final design, and a downtown business association whose director is telling reporters, on the record, that she has never seen this much change at once.

Anyone who lives here already knows the race and the fair by heart. What's worth knowing this year is that the walk between them now passes a downtown that's rewriting its own storefronts faster than the events themselves ever have.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely, whether you're renting nearby, own here already, or are just trying to figure out where to grab coffee before the starting gun, that's the same instinct The Nicol Real Estate Group brings to every South Bay conversation. Reach out if you ever want a local's read on what's changing in Manhattan Beach, race weekend or not.