How street festivals help Oakland's small businesses 69%
By Brenda Y. Vasquez89%
7/16/2026, 6:00:48 PM
Keywords: Oakland Festivals, Oakland First Fridays
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Confirmation Bias, and Optimism Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 24.1% saturation with 338 hits. Analysis detected 2,497 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,404 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.2% and a BS Rank of 69% (5,532 of 17,854 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 69.00% of the article peer group.
Oaktown Thursdays and First Fridays on Telegraph Avenue, the Temescal Street Fair, Día de Los Muertos in Fruitvale, and the Laurel StreetFair World Music Fest have all become iconic entries on Oaklandʻs cultural calendar.
With streets closed off to cars and thousands of visitors, each of them features dozens of food trucks that enjoy long customer lines for their tacos or pizza or sizzling oysters, and dozens of vendors who attract heavy foot traffic for their T-shirts or baskets or jewelry.
The festivals are an obvious economic opportunity for this army of mobile vendors.
But what about the brick-and-mortar businesses along the sidewalks behind them, which hold down the streets when the festivals clear out?
Candi Martinez is a community organizer who has produced festivals in Oakland for the past 11 years, from Oaktoberfest in the Dimond to the Lakeshore Spring Festival near Lake Merritt, which she helped revive in May after 18 years.
“In that time,” she told The Oaklandside, “I have realized how culture serves as a pathway to policy, to the economy, to social justice, and truly fostering community and how important that is.”
She said business improvement districts get behind these festivals to help boost business on their commercial strips.
This year marked the 20th anniversary of Oakland’s First Friday, which persists as one of the Town's most recognized street festivals, despite its recent struggles.
The Oaklandside stopped by the event in July to speak with the businesses that line its route along Telegraph Avenue from West Grand to 27th Street to see how the festival has impacted their bottom line.
Jason Lujick, the owner of two bars, the Legionnaire Karaoke Saloon and Beeryland, both near 23rd Street, said First Fridays have been great for business.
“People are obviously out here to experience the festival, and they're gonna buy food from the vendors, and obviously that does affect my business,” he said.
“But we still make at the restaurant [Beeryland] at least $3,000 to $4,000 more than on an average Friday.”
“Even if they don’t buy something, they’ll come back the next day.”
Bessma Khalaf, owner of Of Soil and Moss
That extra business, Lujick said, does come with some downsides.
“The people that come to Telegraph Avenue normally, they're townies.
They're people that care about Oakland, that care about the neighborhood, and they'll respect the neighborhood,” he said.
But for First Fridays, “a lot of people are coming from out of town, and they don't respect the neighborhood.
They will spray paint my bathroom, they will mess up the place,” he said.
Ali Tahsini, owner of the Double Standard, a bar near 25th Street, said one critical way the city can support small businesses is to make sure that a block is safe.
“And in all honesty, I feel like First Friday brings that safety,” he said.
“It's always lit up.
There's plenty of people, and there's plenty of presence.
And when you see people walking the street, there's a lot of them, people feel safe walking the street amongst them.”
Tahsini said First Fridays were pivotal in the growth of his business.
“There was a time that the exposure by having all these random people come in for this street festival really actually helped our businesses become recognized, which otherwise they might not have been,” he said.
Martinez said Oakland’s festivals “serve as natural stewards of public safety.
I think our communities are stronger when we have more opportunities to come together and get to know each other.
Music, art, culture and dance can serve as a pathway to that.”
Lujick and Tahsini both mentioned that false media narratives about the festival have been harmful.
“It seems like every time there's some sort of incident, whether a car accident or anything outside of this corridor, within five blocks, six blocks of this corridor, they always blame it on First Fridays,” Tahsini said.
“They're constantly misrepresenting general Oakland issues associated with First Friday to cancel this event, and I don't think that's right.”
Bessma Khalaf owns Of Soil and Moss, a plant store that has been operating on Telegraph near 23rd Street for 13 years.
Khalaf said First Fridays means staying later than normal, “but it's only once a month, and it's usually worth it.”
She said First Fridays visitors don't always make purchases that night, but she can tell that the foot traffic is beneficial for business exposure.
“Customers come back, even if they don’t buy something; they'll come back the next day, 'cause I'm open on Saturday, and be like, 'I didn’t buy anything yesterday, but I loved it, and I remembered, and I came back.'
Or, 'I took a card,' and they'll come back later on.”
Khalaf is an artist herself and she was a street fair vendor before she opened up her storefront.
“Our communities are stronger when we have more opportunities to come together.”
Candi Martinez, festival organizer
Shari Godinez, the executive director of KONO Community Benefit District, whose job is to enhance the vitality of the Koreatown and Northgate neighborhoods through improving safety, beauty, and economic opportunity, said that pathway is not unusual.
She said she knows of over a dozen vendors who were part of First Fridays and now have their own brick-and-mortar stores.
“It's just really important for economic development,” Godinez said.
Yet she said negative media reports, along with the loss of vending space due to a new bike lane, have reduced the number of First Friday vendors.
“We're down to 50-something vendors,” she said.
“We used to get over 100.”
Temur Khwaja, owner of Marwa Market and Grill, a halal restaurant and food market on Telegraph Avenue near 25th Street, has been operating out of Oakland for about 20 years now.
He said he moved his business to Telegraph because of First Fridays and the visibility it brought to his store.
He said before COVID-19, business was booming.
Now he hopes the festival can return to its heyday through more “advertising, visibility, security.”
Oaktown Thursday, one of the Town's newest street festivals, had its inaugural event back in June on another stretch of Telegraph Avenue, farther south.
Sean Sullivan, a founder of the event and owner of Fluid 510, spoke with The Oaklandside about why he believed the event was needed.
“We have thousands of new residents who've joined the Downtown footprint since the pandemic, but not enough of them go out on a regular basis, which is in part why some of these businesses are struggling,” he said.
“And so we wanted to give an opportunity to showcase Oakland's art scene and culture, and then send them into these local businesses right after.”
One business owner just outside the Oaktown Thursdays footprint — which stretches from 17th Street to Broadway — told The Oaklandside she was upset that she hadn't received notice about the festival in advance.
“You need to always talk to the existing businesses,” said Mama T, owner of Mama T restaurant, a takeout spot known for its fish sandwiches that sits slightly north of 17th Street.
“Don't leave us out.
I should not have to go online to find out that something is happening.
They should have come around to me.”
“We can't guarantee that every single merchant's gonna see a surge in business — especially right away.”
Sean Sullivan, owner of Fluid 510
Her shop typically closes by 4 p.m., and so she wasn’t in a position to reap the benefits of First Thursdays, which kicks off at 5 o’clock.
She said that when she left at 6 p.m. the evening of the festival, the only people who’d arrived were the vendors themselves.
When we asked Sullivan about his outreach efforts, he said he realized afterward that in some cases staffers were alerted about the event but failed to inform the owners.
“I found out after the fact that there was a bartender at Van Kleef's who knew but who wasn't working that night, and not everybody knew.”
He said he’s been involved with the Uptown Arts and Entertainment District Association, a merchant group that meets monthly, to prevent this from happening again.
“We can't guarantee that every single merchant's gonna see a surge in business — especially right away,” he said.
“When you go to other festivals, you see that this doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen with the first one, but it can happen.”
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