On an April evening this year, the Marguerite Clock Tower in Corona del Mar became a stage. Pinch Me! played live while people danced in the street outside it. A few doors down, Cozy Earth teamed up with the Tennis & Pickleball Club for a pop-up court and a DJ set, and the line at Drift Salon's braid bar ran past the flower crowns and into the sidewalk. Down at the Corona del Mar Branch Library, a petting zoo and a giant game of Connect Four pulled in kids who'd normally be dragging their feet past a closed building at 6 p.m.

That was 3rd Thursdays, and if you've lived in the village any length of time, you already know the format: open storefronts, live music, a scavenger hunt, a stroll from roughly MacArthur to Poppy along Pacific Coast Highway. What's easy to miss, because the night itself feels so full, is how rarely it actually happens. Not monthly. Three times a year: April, July, and October. This year those dates land on April 16, July 16, and the last one of the season, October 15.

Most coastal downtowns that run a street event like this run it every month, or close to it, chasing a First Friday model that eventually becomes wallpaper. Corona del Mar didn't build it that way, and the difference isn't cosmetic.

The Case for Doing It Less

Look at who actually organizes 3rd Thursdays and the reason for the sparse calendar starts to make sense. It isn't a city program. It's a coalition of more than 70 local businesses working with the Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce, Visit Newport Beach, and Greet Corona del Mar Magazine, built on what organizers describe as years of grassroots growth from residents and shop owners rather than a municipal events office. That's a lot of moving parts to coordinate, and coordinating them three times a year instead of twelve is a deliberate choice, not a resourcing problem.

The payoff shows up in the details. Attendees collect passport points across participating businesses for rewards, which only means something if the event stays occasional enough to plan around. Sherman Library & Gardens partners with Facial Lounge for a garden party. SCAPE Gallery runs a pop-up show inside the Annex Gallery alongside a group exhibition in the main space. The Balcony Salon and Michele Medspa turn their storefronts into stations for the night. None of that reads like a business trying to fill a slow Thursday. It reads like a community that only gets a handful of these nights and treats each one accordingly.

Compare that to what's happening a few miles up the coast, where the city of Newport Beach just launched its first-ever citywide Art Week this past August, an entirely new addition to the calendar built from scratch. Corona del Mar took the opposite path. It kept what it had small and protected it.

The Other Institution: 64 Years of Sandcastles

If 3rd Thursdays is the newer tradition, the Sandcastle Contest at Corona del Mar State Beach is the one that's been running since before most current residents were born. This year marks the 64th annual contest, scheduled for Sunday, September 27, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with a theme of "Surf, Sand & Sun." It's hosted by the Commodores Club of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce, and like 3rd Thursdays, it has never belonged to the city calendar. It belongs to the same volunteers and families who keep showing up.

That continuity isn't an abstraction. At the 62nd contest, a competitor named Curt Hayden talked about what decades in the sand looks like up close.

"We've been here for 38 years. We were little boys then. Now our children are helping us."

That's not a marketing line. It's what happens when an event stays rare enough to matter but consistent enough to build a family history around. The contest draws roughly twenty entries a year from families, groups, and school and church teams, ranging from first-time builders to entrants who've competed for two decades or more. Nobody's optimizing for foot traffic. They're optimizing for showing up again next September.

What's Actually Left on the Calendar This Year

If you're mapping out the rest of 2026 in the village, the list is short, and that's the point. From here, there are exactly two dates.

• September 27: The 64th Annual Sandcastle Contest at Corona del Mar State Beach, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., free to attend, with team registration available through the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce.
• October 15: The final 3rd Thursday of the year, 5 to 8 p.m., running the length of the village business district.

After October 15, the village goes quiet on this front until the cycle starts again next spring. No filler event in November or December to keep the momentum going, no attempt to stretch the format into a year-round draw. The scarcity is the strategy, and it's worked for decades in the case of the Sandcastle Contest and long enough already with 3rd Thursdays to have its own instagram following and a loyal rotation of participating shops that keeps growing each season.

There's a version of civic life where more events signal more vitality. Corona del Mar has quietly bet on the opposite: that a resident who knows there are only two dates left this year is more likely to actually plan around them than someone scrolling past the fortieth "community night" of a busy fall calendar. The 45th Annual CdM Scenic 5K back in June operates on the same logic, once a year, run by the same Chamber infrastructure, with entrants who return annually rather than a rotating crowd of first-timers.

None of this is manufactured nostalgia. It's a village that decided its best traditions deserved to stay occasional, and then built the volunteer and business infrastructure to make sure they'd last. If you're already living here, the two dates above are worth the calendar entry. If you're the kind of person who reads a piece like this and starts wondering what it would take to actually be here for the next one, Leo Goldschwartz has spent his career inside these streets and is always glad to talk through what living in Corona del Mar actually looks like, no pressure, no pitch required.