Good Old Days Street Festival

The Good Old Days Street Festival fills downtown Pacific Grove’s Lighthouse Avenue with arts and crafts booths and food stands. Vendors come from several states. The Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce, which runs the festival, calls it the largest gathering of arts and crafts vendors in Monterey County. Admission is free, and it goes on rain or shine. The 67th edition ran Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, 2026.

The counts depend on who is counting. Before the 2026 festival, the Chamber advertised more than 40 bands and performers and more than 200 artisan and food vendors. The listing site What’s Up Monterey describes the 2027 festival, set for May 1 and 2, as having more than 60 bands and shows on five stages, 225 arts and crafts vendors, and 35 food vendors. Wikipedia’s entry on the city places the festival in mid-April. The 2026 and 2027 dates both fall in early May.

Five stages on Lighthouse Avenue

The 2026 stages stood at cross streets along the avenue:

• Good Old Days Stage, 13th Street. Acts included the Del Monte Brass Band, The Money Band, The New Wave Band and 17 Mile High.
• Lighthouse Stage, Fountain Avenue. The DiFranco Dance Project shared a 10:00 a.m. slot with the PGHS Breaker Girls. Hovering Breadcat, Rod Squad and Side Hustle followed.
• Forest Stage, Forest Avenue. The day opened at 9:30 a.m. with Zumba Gold and Rock the Block. Azahar Flamenco danced there more than once, between sets by the Al James Band and Red Beans & Rice.
• Monarch Stage, Monarch Pub, 617 Lighthouse Avenue. Headrush, Sean & the Skinwalkers, Blue Funk Syndicate and Blue Fire played.
• Rotary Stage, Mechanics Bank, 561 Lighthouse Avenue. Dan Frechette and Laurel Thomsen played, along with The Edge Band.
• Otter Stage, Park Street, Saturday only. It gave its program to student dancers from Stevenson School and the Carmel Dance Center.

Glenn Leon-Guerrero performed in Chautauqua Hall at 1:00 p.m. on both days.

Pancakes, a parade, and a firefighter challenge

The 2026 festival began before the booths opened. The PG Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast served from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. Saturday at 16th Street and Lighthouse. The PG Rotary Good Old Days Parade stepped off at 10:00 a.m. on Pine Avenue. Rotary also ran the wine and beer gardens at 13th Street and at Grand Avenue.

The corner of Park Street and Lighthouse belonged to children. It held carnival rides, a petting zoo, and on Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., the Kids Firefighter Challenge. The Monterey Herald reported that people there rode a slide and a small train around the block, and had their faces painted. What’s Up Monterey adds a fire muster and a pie eating contest to the program.

A quilt show in Chautauqua Hall

The quilt show hangs in Chautauqua Hall, at Central Avenue and 16th Street. The Monterey County Historical Society names the quilt show, the parade, and the arts and crafts festival as the substance of the spring event. The Society lists Good Old Days with the city’s other seasonal festivities: the Feast of Lanterns, which marks the city’s incorporation in July 1889, and the Butterfly Parade and Bazaar in October.

The hall was built in 1881 as a gathering place for the Pacific Grove Methodist Camp Meeting. According to the Chamber, it hosted lectures, concerts, worship services and community meetings, and it is the city’s oldest surviving public building. Adam W. Weiland, Director of Historic Research for the Pacific Grove Heritage Society, records another use: when each summer ended, the tents of the camp were taken down and stored in Chautauqua Hall. The hall was registered as a historical landmark in 1970. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 2026.

Tent lots and a locked gate

The tents belonged to a religious retreat. Weiland writes that the Reverend J.W. Ross, a Methodist minister, visited the area with his wife in 1874. They judged it ideal for a Methodist Retreat. On June 1, 1875, the Pacific Grove Retreat Association was formed in San Francisco to run a Christian Seaside Resort there. St. John Cox surveyed the Retreat area from the bay up to Lighthouse Avenue, and from First Street to Pacific Avenue. Lots of 30 by 60 feet, enough for a tent, sold for fifty dollars. In the first year, twelve to fifteen wood-framed tents housed about fifty people.

Rules followed in 1883. They banned intoxicating beverages, gambling, dancing, profanity and fast buggy riding. A fence circled the Retreat, with a stile-gate for walkers and a wagon-gate for vehicles. In Monterey, Weiland reports, people joked: “Pacific Grove must have left her gate open last night as it is foggy in Monterey today.” The Historical Society records that the sale of liquor was prohibited until 1969. Wikipedia names July 4 of that year, at the opening of the Pacific Grove Art Center, as the first time alcohol was served to the public.

The wagon-gate did not last. Benjamin J. Langford was a Monterey County attorney and state senator who owned a house inside the fence. He tired of the long walk to the Retreat office for the key. One late evening, he took an axe to the gate. It was never replaced.

By 1910, the tents had given way to rows of small board-and-batten cottages. Many were built directly over the tents, with the canvas left in place as insulation. On Lighthouse Avenue between Grand and Fountain, the El Carmelo Hotel opened in 1887. A department store later took its site, founded by R.L. Holman, who had started with a small drygoods store called the Popular in 1891.

His son, W.R. Holman, arrived in 1888 and ran the store for almost 75 years. In 1977 the Heritage Society asked him what the town had looked like then. He described pine trees so thick with butterflies that “you couldn’t see any foliage hardly at all-just one solid mass of hanging butterflies in great cones.”