Fell's Point Fall Events 2026: Festivals and Local Plans
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Pull up the Fell's Point Fun Festival's own website this week and you'll see the same line in three separate places: a first-ever Night Market on October 10th, five to nine at night, hundreds of booths under the string lights. Then click over to the festival's food truck application, the document vendors actually have to sign, and the printed hours say something else. Friday, October 2, five to nine, folded into the same three-day weekend that runs October 2 through 4.
That leaves a practical question for festivalgoers: is the Night Market part of the October 2 through 4 weekend, or is it scheduled for October 10?
Read the festival's public pages closely and a pattern shows up. The core weekend, October 2 through 4, carries the main stage at Broadway Square, the 225-plus vendors, and Make Mine a Maryland Park at Jackson's Wharf. But the Imagination Station at Thames Street Park is dated October 11 and October 12. The Pet Parade, one of the festival's longest-running traditions, is scheduled for October 12. And that Night Market sits on October 10, before those two dates. Lined up, that's a second footprint entirely, October 10 through 12, a full week after the anniversary weekend most people already have circled.
The vendor operations document tells a tighter story. It lists Night Market hours as part of Friday, October 2, opening night of the single Oct 2-4 weekend, and requires food trucks to staff "all days and hours of the festival including but not limited to the Friday Night Market on Friday, October 2."
Here's what that looks like side by side:
| Event | Public festival pages say | Vendor/food-truck application says |
|---|---|---|
| Night Market | October 10 | Friday, October 2 |
| Main festival weekend | October 2-4 | October 2-4 |
| Imagination Station | October 11-12 | not listed |
| Pet Parade | October 12 | not listed |
If you're planning around this, wait to make plans until the festival confirms the date. The listings leave open whether this year includes programming beyond the October 2 through 4 weekend.
The anniversary is not what matters here. The festival started in 1967 as a fundraiser to fight a highway project that would have linked I-83 and I-95 straight through Fell's Point, wiping out a large piece of the neighborhood in the process. The organizers won, the roads never came, and the festival that started as a protest has grown into a free, six-block weekend the neighborhood has spent nearly six decades learning to route around. Locals know the drill: pick your Saturday errands carefully, park two blocks farther than usual, expect Broadway Square to be someone else's living room for 72 hours.
The public pages also list an evening Night Market and other programming on October 10 through 12, after the October 2 through 4 weekend. An evening Night Market, whichever date it lands on, skips the daytime tourist traffic entirely. If those dates hold, the festival would offer evening programming beyond the October 2 through 4 weekend.
The festival isn't the only notable development in Fell's Point this year. Two of the neighborhood's most talked-about new bars opened in spaces that had anchored the block for decades.
As The Baltimore Banner reported, Bar Alice Anne opened this spring at the corner of Wolfe and Aliceanna, in the building that housed Bar Lobo until it closed in 2020. Among the owners are Liz and Kevin Irish, the team behind The Local Fry and the now-closed Toki Tako in Hampden, and the new spot leans into a Korean-Irish menu of rotating banchan, shrimp toast, and kimchi olives. Liz Irish described the concept to Hoodline as "a bar first and then restaurant second," which explains the small kitchen with no hood vent tucked behind the bar. Co-owner Chris Richards, who lives around the corner, said in The Baltimore Banner, "What's great about Fell's Point is the mix of everyone."
A few blocks over, Baltimore Magazine reported that The Wren opened in February in the space Birds of a Feather occupied for 44 years before closing in 2024. It comes from Will Mester and Rosemary Liss, who run the bistro and wine bar Le Comptoir du Vin in Station North. The menu changes on a chalkboard, the kitchen stays closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and there's a fireplace lounge the owners hope to use for book clubs and small live music nights down the line. Mester described the format in Baltimore Magazine: "A pub is a relaxed and natural sort of setting to have a meal."
Together, they add two new options to Fell's Point's dining and drinking scene.
Fell's Point Main Street has its own calendar running well past October, and unlike the festival's dates, none of it is in dispute:
Food news is stacking up alongside it. Dimples, the cheesesteak spot that opened in Locust Point late last year, picked Fell's Point for its second location after less than six months in business, a fast turnaround for a neighborhood that isn't short on cheesesteak opinions already.
The anniversary is the least interesting part of this fall. For Fell's Point residents, the practical question is whether the festival will have programming on both October 2 through 4 and October 10 through 12, as its public pages suggest. The public-facing marketing describes a second footprint the week after the main event. The document vendors sign says otherwise. Check the festival's official channels close to the date for schedule updates.
Meanwhile, two of the most-discussed bar openings of the year took place in long-established Fell's Point spaces. That's a better read on where Fell's Point's evenings are headed than any festival attendance count.
If you're the kind of resident who already has an opinion on which bar filled the Bar Lobo-sized gap on Aliceanna Street, or you're weighing what a fall like this one means for a neighborhood you already call home, Christina Giffin keeps close watch on this stretch of the waterfront for exactly that reason. Let's Connect whenever the conversation turns from this year's calendar to what's next.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
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