Street Festival and Car Show

On July 18, 2026, the show cars were parked along San Benito Street in downtown Hollister by 9:30 in the morning. The 39th annual Street Festival & Car Show ran from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. In earlier years it had run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. “We have people who were looking for something a little bit earlier in the day,” said Teri Escamilla, event manager for the Hollister Downtown Association, the nonprofit that stages the festival. Sponsors and judges told her an earlier finish was the current trend. The association had advertised 250 or more vehicles. Escamilla counted 195 in the show and estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 people came to look at them.

Connie DeLuna of Hollister brought her grandson, Sebastian Flores, who wanted to see the Red Corvette Transformer. “We have the 4th of July rally, but this is just a whole different crowd,” DeLuna said. “It’s young people, older people, residents and non-residents.” Anita Warren comes every year to look at the old cars. “I love the Mustangs,” she said. “My goal is to get a red 1966 one.” She also said she runs into old classmates from Sacred Heart. Walt Willard of Gilroy won the Best Original Car Award for a 1965 Mustang Fastback he said took two years to restore. Ernie Gonzalez, at the show for his fourth year with his award-winning 1955 Chevrolet sedan, liked hearing strangers recognize it: “Reminiscing and saying ‘I had one of these when I was young.’ It’s my first car, but I’m very proud of it.”

Stages at both ends of the street

The 2026 program listed two stages of live music and entertainment, food concessions, a row of vendors, sales and specials at downtown restaurants and shops, raffle prizes, dealer new-car displays, and a kid area. Admission and parking were free. Reports from earlier years show how the street is laid out. In 2021 the North Stage stood at Fourth and San Benito streets and the South Stage on the Veterans Memorial Building Plaza, and the festival spilled onto Fifth, Sixth and Seventh streets. In 2015 four bands played the main stage at the north end: Change in the Weather, Kevin Hamm with Straight Shot, Straight Shot with Mississippi Slide, and Moon Dance. The south end that year belonged to nine community groups, among them the San Benito Dance Academy, the Itzpaplotl Aztec Dancers, Folklorico Juvenil de Lucy Rodriguez, and Hula Halau ‘O Pi’ilani.

In 2017 the vendors lined Seventh Street between San Benito and Monterey streets, selling shave ice, kettle corn and baked potatoes. Bobby Love & Sugar Sweet and The Flashbacks were on the bill, and the kids’ area filled the 400 block with bounce houses and face painting. Two years earlier, 63 vendor and information booths had set up. The Marines came for a second year and invited passersby to do pull-ups. The Hollister Fire Department parked a new Type 6 wildland engine, not yet in service, beside the kids’ zone. Children took turns with the hose, aiming at a cutout fire target set atop a bucket that caught the water so it could go back into the pump. “It lets the kids experience on a small scale what it’s like to hold the fire hose,” said Mel Nielsen, “and they loved it.”

Best of Show goes on the poster

The car show draws muscle cars, lowriders, exotic European cars and trucks. According to the association’s 2017 announcement, owners tell the history of their cars while visitors take pictures. Each year’s Best of Show car appears on the following year’s poster and T-shirts. One was a bright red 1974 De Tomaso Pantera GTS owned by Bruce Himebauch of San Juan Bautista. Another was Tomas Morale’s gold 1965 Buick Riviera Grand Sport, the 2021 winner.

In 2015, twelve judges led by Noel Provost looked over 206 cars. A new judge suggested putting a green sticker on each car once it had been seen, so every owner would know. That year the show added lowrider car and lowrider truck categories. “Hollister has traditionally been a lowrider town,” Escamilla said, “so it was great to have that element be a part of the show today.” Some awards carry names: the Johnnie Marfia Memorial for best Mustang, the Mike Cunningham Honorary for best Corvette, the Martha de la Rosa Memorial. Best in Show that year went to Joann and Ron Berti of Pacific Grove for a bright yellow 1932 Ford Sedan, their fourth year at the show. An arm injury kept Joann from driving her own car, so for the first time she let Ron drive it over from the Monterey Peninsula. “We got all sorts of waves on the highway,” he said.

The Longest Distance Traveled award has gone to William Rice of Peyton, Colorado, in 2015, and to Charlie Barton of Nampa, Idaho, who drove 720 miles in 2021. Kevin Stopper of Hollister took Best Rat Rod in 2021 with a car he had won in a $30 raffle. It was Project X of the Keeping Hot Rodding Alive Youth Group, built from scratch by teenagers in under 10 months, and Stopper was raising money for the group at the show.

A tie settled on the rock wall

The chili cook-off joined the festival in 2015, through a partnership between the association and the Hollister Firefighters Union, and it raised money for the Tony Aguirre Scholarship Foundation. Hollister Fire Chief Bob Martin Del Campo said the foundation was named for “one of our last fire chiefs that we had lost about five years ago.” It helps high school graduates who want to become police officers, firefighters and EMTs. That same year a climbing wall from the weekly farmers’ market appeared in the festival’s kids’ zone for the first time.

The judges could not separate CalFire Santa Clara, from the Pacheco Pass Station, and the San Benito County Sheriff’s Department. “Their recipe for chili was so good, it was a tie,” Martin Del Campo said. “With Type A personalities, we don’t live by ties. So the tie-breaker was, first one up the rock wall, and down, wins.” CalFire Captain Herb Alpers went up against Sheriff Deputy Rick Uribe and won. “I usually hike up hills with the hose on my back,” Alpers said. “I usually don’t climb like that.” Uribe said, “I thought I could do it with my shoes off, and apparently I couldn’t.” Alpers kept CalFire’s recipe secret. Uribe said the deputies “threw it all together.” By 2017 the cook-off was in its third year, held on the 400 block at the corner of Fourth and San Benito.

July, August, September

The Hollister Free Lance reported in January 2010 that the festival had started in 1986 and was held in July until it began to conflict with the biker rally tradition that started in 1997. For the better part of the following decade the festival ran in August; in 2009 it fell on Aug. 15. With the downtown, larger version of the rally gone, the association moved the 2010 festival back to July 17. Denise Cauthen-Wright, then the association’s events coordinator, hoped the move would bring more exposure with fewer car shows competing on the same weekend, Reno’s Hot August Nights among them. “I did a lot of research on determining when all the car shows were,” she said.

The festival stayed in July through at least 2017. It was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. The 34th edition, held Sept. 25, 2021, put 292 vehicles on the street, and downtown food businesses were overwhelmed with customers. A man named Uriel said his three children had heard about the festival at school. The 38th festival also fell in autumn, on Sept. 27, 2025. The 39th returned to July.

A sidewalk sale and free watermelon

According to the association’s 2017 announcement, the festival began as a giant sidewalk sale that gave away free watermelon. By that year the car show had been part of it for 25 years. The two sources differ on when the festival started. The Free Lance gives 1986. Escamilla dates it to 1989: “I was able to be at the first event, in 1989. I was working as a retail store downtown.”

The watermelon has outlasted the sidewalk sale. In 2015, volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ran the booth at the south end, a crew of 25 that included eight full-time missionaries. Three bins of watermelon came from Swank Farms, Tonascia Farms and Phil Foster Farms. “We keep the watermelon on ice and it’s cold,” said Ken DeHaan, who worked the booth. When people hung back shyly, he and the others called out the free slices like carnival barkers. “The watermelon was a draw then,” Escamilla said, “and it’s still a draw now.”