If you caught Ronstadt Live at Holladay City Hall Park this past Saturday, you watched the summer concert series close for the year. That's the easy read on Holladay's calendar right now: the music stops, the plaza gets quiet, and nothing much happens until the tree lighting shows up in December.
That reading misses the busiest month the city has left this year. Between now and mid-September, Holladay runs three of its biggest annual gatherings back to back, exactly two weeks apart, in two different places, for two different crowds. Knowing which is which, and where, changes how you plan the weeks ahead.
Two Addresses, Two Different Falls
Holladay Village Plaza and Holladay City Hall Park sit close enough that people talk about them as one place. They aren't. The plaza, built in 2012 at the corner of 2300 East and Holladay Boulevard, was designed around a round, stepped platform about 20 feet across and 3 feet off the ground, meant to anchor public art and community gatherings. It's boxed in by a grocery store, a lumber yard, a bicycle shop, an art gallery, a bank, and a run of restaurants and retail, with high-end condos just beyond. City Hall Park sits directly north, and it's built for a different kind of afternoon: a skate park, a picnic pavilion, a children's playground, and open green space.
The practical version: if an event needs a stage, a crowd, and a reason to browse the shops afterward, it happens at the plaza. If it needs a lawn, a parking lot, and room for kids to run, it happens at the park. That split isn't incidental. It shows up in exactly which events land where over the next several weeks.
Three Events, Two Weeks Apart
Here's the actual sequence, and it's tighter than most residents realize.
| Date | Event | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 22 | Ronstadt Live (final Summer Concert) | City Hall Park | Free outdoor concert series closer |
| Sept 5 | Annual Holladay Car Show | City Hall Park | All makes and models, benefiting ALS, running more than a decade |
| Sept 19 | Blue Moon Festival | Village Plaza | Arts and makers only, roughly 4,000 expected |
Each one lands exactly two weeks after the one before it. The concert series closed on August 22. Two weeks later, on September 5, the car show fills the City Hall Park lot from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., a benefit for ALS that's been running for more than ten years. Two weeks after that, on September 19, the action shifts from the park to the plaza for Blue Moon.
The concert and the car show share a venue but nothing else. One is a stage and a lawn full of folding chairs. The other is rows of parked vehicles and a slow walk between them. Both belong to City Hall Park because both need pavement and open space, not storefronts.
Blue Moon is built differently on purpose. Booth space that night is reserved for individual artists and makers, not commercial vendors, and organizers are planning for a crowd of roughly 4,000. That number is worth sitting with. The Holladay Arts Council's entire 2025 season, every concert, play, and exhibit combined, reached just over 26,000 people across the whole year. If this year's Blue Moon crowd lands where organizers expect, one September evening will account for something close to a sixth of everything the arts program did all last year. That's not a footnote event. That's the plaza's biggest single night.
There's a smaller detail worth knowing about where the plaza is headed. The city has earmarked $175,000 to commission a permanent art installation for that same stepped platform where Blue Moon sets up its booths, chosen through a public call-for-entry process. The platform hosting a one-night arts festival this month is the same one slated to eventually hold something permanent, which means the empty round stage in the middle of the plaza isn't going to stay a blank canvas indefinitely.
The Market That Doesn't Follow Everyone Else's Calendar
While all of this is happening, the Holladay Farmer's Market keeps running at 4800 South Highland Drive, and it's worth knowing why it doesn't behave like the other markets around the valley. It operates out of covered, indoor space, which means it isn't subject to the same rain-or-snow cutoff that shuts down open-lot markets across the Salt Lake area as the weather turns. A small artist market runs woven between the produce vendors, and shoppers can order ahead through the Foraged app for pickup rather than browsing table to table. It takes cash, card, SNAP, EBT, FMNP, and WIC.
That indoor setup means the market isn't tied to the same end-of-season clock as the concert series or the outdoor festivals. Everything else on this list has a hard date. The market doesn't.
What Comes After Blue Moon
Once the festival wraps on September 19, Holladay's structured calendar goes quiet for a stretch. The market keeps running regardless of what else is on the schedule. Later in the fall, the city also puts on Holla-ween, a costume-and-treats afternoon for kids and pets at the back of City Hall that in past years has included a pet costume contest with a prize for best-dressed pet, Pumpkin Bowling, face painting, and a Trail of Treats hosted by local businesses. The exact date shifts from year to year, so it's worth checking the city's events page as October approaches rather than marking a date now.
What seems fixed, based on how the city has run it before, is the format: a short afternoon window, treats supplied by local businesses, and no shortage of costumed dogs.
What This Means for Planning Your Weeks
If you're mapping out the next month, the pattern is simple once you see it. Nearly everything structured on Holladay's fall calendar lands in a four-week window between August 22 and September 19, split evenly between a park built for cars and kids and a plaza built for art and browsing. Whatever the city adds after that, Holla-ween included, rounds out the season, but the heavy lift happens in that first month.
Knowing the plaza and the park aren't interchangeable also means knowing what to bring. Blue Moon is a walk-and-browse evening near restaurants and shops, worth arriving early for since sunset hits around 7:30 p.m. in late September. The car show is a park event, better suited to a blanket, a folding chair, and no expectation of anywhere to duck in afterward.
For anyone who's lived in Holladay long enough to remember when the plaza's stepped platform sat empty most of the year, the fact that it's now in line for a permanent piece of commissioned art is a small but real shift. It's the kind of change that doesn't show up on a for-sale sign but does show up in how a neighborhood's center of gravity moves over a few years.
If you're weighing a move within Holladay, or into it, proximity to the plaza versus proximity to the park is the kind of detail that matters more than it looks on a map. The Secrist Team works these streets closely enough to know which ones are a five-minute walk to Blue Moon and which back up to the quieter side of City Hall Park, and that kind of local read is part of what shapes a smart offer before a listing ever goes live.
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