Fiesta La Ballona Turns 75 This Weekend, Right as the Helms District Starts Over Again

Two clocks are running on the same few blocks of Culver City right now, and they are ticking in opposite directions. One belongs to a festival that has not fundamentally changed its shape since 1951. The other belongs to a shopping district that has swapped out three of its anchor tenants in under two years. Both hit a kind of milestone this season, and if you live here, both are worth understanding on their own terms rather than as items on a generic "things to do" list.

The festival is Fiesta La Ballona, which turns 75 at Veterans Memorial Park the weekend of August 28 through 30. The district is Helms, where an IKEA now occupies the corner that used to belong to HD Buttercup, and where a pizzeria from Costa Mesa just took over the space a shuttered restaurant left behind. Neither story is really about novelty. Both are about what a place decides to protect when it has the chance to become something easier and more generic instead.

The Festival Didn't Rebrand for 75

Fiesta La Ballona started in 1951 as a joint effort between the City of Culver City and the Culver City Chamber of Commerce, and for three quarters of a century it has kept the same basic deal: free admission, local nonprofits running the booths, a stage full of local bands, and a carnival that rolls in every August like it never left. This year's 75th anniversary adds one real change: a second entertainment stage, the first time in the festival's history that there have been two simultaneous live music spots on the grounds instead of one.

The city commissioned a special anniversary logo from artist Tamara Gould and put out a call for residents to share old Fiesta memorabilia, vintage photos, programs, even costume pieces, some of which may show up as part of the weekend's display. That kind of archival effort only makes sense for an event that has actually been running long enough to have an archive worth building.

Here's what you need if you're planning to go:

• Dates and hours: Friday, August 28 from 4:30 to 10 p.m., Saturday, August 29 from noon to 10 p.m., Sunday, August 30 from noon to 8 p.m.
• Location: Veterans Memorial Park, 4117 Overland Ave.
• Cost: Admission to the grounds is free. Carnival rides require a ticket or wristband, sold in advance and at the gate. The beer and wine garden is 21 and over.
• Getting there: Parking around the park fills up fast. The city is pushing walking, biking with the on-site bike valet, Culver CityBus, or the Metro E Line Culver City station, which is a short ride from the park.

None of this is a departure from what Fiesta has always been. That is the point. A festival built on nonprofit booths and a free gate has had 75 years of chances to become a ticketed brand activation, and it didn't take any of them.

The Concert Series Just Wrapped, and That's Part of the Rhythm

A week before Fiesta closes out the summer, the city's other free tradition already did. The Summer Sunset Music Series, held Thursday evenings at Town Plaza inside The Culver Steps, ran from July 16 through August 20 this year, with a different genre featured most weeks and free seating on a first-come basis. The series traces back roughly 30 years to a run that used to happen at Culver City Hall's front plaza before COVID shut it down in 2020. The Culver City Arts Foundation revived it in 2023, and this year marked its fourth season back.

The two events don't overlap on the calendar, and that's not an accident so much as a pattern. Culver City's free civic events tend to hand off to each other rather than compete for the same weekend. The concerts carry the neighborhood through July and most of August. Fiesta picks up the last weekend of the month and carries it into September. If you caught the last concert on August 20 and assumed the summer programming was done, Fiesta is the reminder that it wasn't.

The Helms District Just Reshuffled Its Tenants Again

While the festival calendar stayed steady, the physical district a mile or so away has been anything but. The Helms complex sits on 11 acres that used to be the Helms Bakery, which opened in 1931, supplied bread to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and closed in 1969 after the founder refused to let the operation unionize. The Marks family bought the property in 1972 and turned it into a home furnishings and design hub, which is the version most current residents grew up with.

That version has been unwinding fast. HD Buttercup, one of the district's longtime anchors, closed in 2025. A revived Helms Bakery opened inside the complex in November 2024 and shut down again just over a year later, in December, after the operator told the Los Angeles Times that sales weren't consistent enough and that inflation and tariffs had pushed operating costs higher than expected. Lustig, a restaurant on the property, closed in early 2025 as well. That's three tenant losses inside roughly two years, on a property that had spent decades feeling fixed.

What moved in this spring tells you more about the district's direction than what left. IKEA Culver City opened with a soft launch and ribbon cutting on April 29 and a public grand opening block party on May 2, taking over a roughly 38,000-square-foot section of the old HD Buttercup space. For scale, a typical suburban IKEA runs 300,000 to 400,000 square feet, so this is closer to a tenth of the usual footprint, built specifically as a city-center format for people who are walking, biking, or taking transit rather than loading a station wagon. The company kept the building's original art deco exterior instead of applying its usual blue paint job, a small decision that says something larger about how a national chain is choosing to enter an already-established neighborhood.

There's a detail here that most people who drive past the new IKEA every week don't actually know: it isn't technically in Culver City. The property line between the City of Los Angeles and Culver City runs directly through the Helms complex, with the Venice Boulevard-facing side falling inside Los Angeles proper and the Washington Boulevard-facing side inside Culver City. The new IKEA sits on the Venice side, which makes it, officially, the first IKEA store within the city limits of Los Angeles, not Culver City, even though everyone in the neighborhood will call it the Culver City IKEA regardless of which municipality's tax rolls it lands on.

Two more additions are filling out the district's next chapter. Folks Pizzeria, a Costa Mesa favorite known for fermentation-forward pies and a tight natural wine list, opened this spring at 3273 Helms Ave., taking over the space Lustig left behind. It's the first expansion the restaurant has made outside Orange County. Hayama by WATAMI, a Japanese restaurant, is also part of this new wave, arriving alongside Folks as the district works to rebuild foot traffic after its recent stretch of closures.

Same Blocks, Two Different Rules for Staying Interesting

Put the two stories next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single roundup wouldn't reveal. Fiesta La Ballona has stayed recognizable for 75 years by refusing to change its basic terms: free, local, unticketed, run by the same kind of community booths it always has been. The Helms District has stayed recognizable through the opposite strategy, by making a national chain change its terms to fit the building instead of the other way around. IKEA didn't get to bring its standard big-box format or its standard paint job. It got a scaled-down, unpainted version that fits inside a 1931 art deco shell.

Neither approach is inherently better, and neither one is a coincidence. Both are decisions that people in this city, from festival organizers to a family-owned real estate firm that has held the Helms property since 1972, made on purpose. If you live in Culver City, you're watching two different working answers to the same question: what does this place keep, and what is it willing to let turn over. This week, you get to watch both play out within a mile of each other.

If you're weighing what a home near either of these corners might be worth to you now that the neighborhood around it keeps shifting, the team at Amy & Augustine Um tracks these changes as part of the daily work of representing buyers and sellers across Culver City and the greater Westside. Reach out anytime for a conversation about what's happening on your specific block.