The Thursday night street fair, from a resident's point of view

Shopping · Palm Springs

What happens at the Thursday evening street fair in Palm Springs?

One evening a week, all year round, Palm Springs closes a stretch of Palm Canyon Drive downtown to traffic and fills it with a street fair: date and citrus growers, produce, food stalls, craft and art vendors, and music on the sidewalks. It happens on Thursday evenings and has done for decades. Walking in is free, and it is the most reliably local thing on the downtown calendar.

Short visitors go once, treat it as an event, buy something that fits in a suitcase, and call it charming. Live here for a month or more and it stops being an event and turns into logistics. This is where you buy your dates and your citrus. This is where the produce is better and cheaper than the supermarket version in season. And because it happens every single week, you do not have to see all of it in one night, which is the mistake everybody makes the first time.

Arrive early and go straight to the produce and food end rather than starting with the crafts. Growers sell out of the good things, and the first hour is when the selection is still complete and the crowd is thin enough to talk to the person who actually grew the fruit. Bring your own bags and small bills. Then turn around and walk the whole closed street once with no intention of buying anything — that is the pass that tells you what has changed week to week. In the cooler months this becomes the evening you build the rest of Thursday around.

It runs all year, but it is not the same all year. From November through April the street is full, the weather is close to perfect, and you will be moving slowly through a crowd. From June through September, when Palm Springs runs highs commonly between 108 and 115 degrees and much of the city has cleared out, the fair is smaller and quieter and still warm enough at dusk that you will want to arrive as late as you can. Parking is the real annoyance either way: the closure removes the obvious spaces, so park a few blocks out on a residential edge and walk in, which is what people who live here do.

One note on expectations. This is a genuine street fair, not a farmers market with a strict producer-only rule, so there is craft jewelry next to kettle corn next to a date grower with a hand-lettered card. The food is street food. The real value sits in the produce, the dates and the citrus, and in the fact that you can make it a habit instead of an outing.

If you're here for a month or more

Put it in the calendar as a standing weekly errand rather than a highlight. Over a stay of a month or more, buying citrus, dates and vegetables here once a week trims the grocery run and gives you a reason to be downtown on foot in the evening, which is when Palm Springs is at its best. From Downtown, Uptown or Movie Colony you can walk both ways; from Sunmor, Deepwell or Racquet Club Estates, drive to the edge of the closure and walk in from there.