Solano Avenue Stroll 50th Anniversary: What Albany's Grand Marshals Reveal

On September 13, the crowds came back to Solano Avenue for a landmark: the Solano Avenue Stroll turned 50. By the accounts filtering out of Berkeley and Albany that week, it looked the part: carnival rides, marching bands, a mile of vendor booths, and the kind of foot traffic that makes a two-lane street feel like a plaza.

If you follow Solano Avenue through the food press, you already know the other story being told about this corridor right now. SFGate ran a piece in January calling it a suburb quietly becoming one of the Bay Area's hottest food destinations, pointing to Best Friends wine bar, the Latin Californian menu at Brezo, and the Palestinian-inspired cooking that used to live under the name Lulu before it reopened this year as the counter-service Lulu's Little Kitchen. A new Mexican restaurant, Anahuac, opened in the old Fonda space at 1501 Solano in late January. That is the version of Solano Avenue getting written up.

It is not the version the Stroll itself keeps honoring. And once you notice the gap, it changes how you read what actually holds this street together.

The Grand Marshal Nobody Expected to Be a Stationery Store Owner

This year's parade grand marshal is Sonny Han, who runs Payn's Stationery, a shop that has occupied 1791 Solano for more than 70 years. Not a chef. Not one of the restaurateurs driving the coverage. A stationery store.

That choice was not an aberration. It was the pattern.

Fifty Years of Grand Marshals Point the Same Direction

Pull the Solano Avenue Association's own list of parade grand marshals and a shape emerges that the restaurant openings never show you.

Every one of these is a business measured in decades, not menu cycles. None of them are the names showing up in this year's restaurant roundups. That is not a knock on Anahuac or Best Friends or any of the newer kitchens drawing lines on a Saturday. It is a different kind of evidence about the street. The Stroll's organizers, year after year, have reached for longevity when they pick who leads the parade. That is a signal worth more than a Yelp ranking if you are trying to understand what actually endures here.

How a Thank-You Party Became the East Bay's Biggest Street Fair

The Stroll did not start as a festival. It started in the mid-1970s as an evening open house, organized by Ira Klein, who ran a Solano clothing and jewelry boutique called The Iris, and Lisa Burnham, who owned an interior design business called Northumbrian Antiques. The idea was simple: thank customers, introduce them to a handful of other merchants in what was then called the Thousand Oaks Merchants Association. It covered only the eastern stretch of the street, on the Berkeley side.

Growth was not automatic. As late as 1981, the event reached only as far as Santa Fe Avenue on the Albany side, and city officials were not initially convinced the cost of closing the street was worth it. The extra half mile to San Pablo Avenue came later, once funding was found. Robert Cheasty, a civil attorney who still runs a law firm on the avenue and served as Albany's mayor, has been involved with organizing the Stroll since 1984. Lisa Bullwinkel directed the event for sixteen years, from 1989 to 2005, before serving as grand marshal herself in 2007.

By the time the event reached its current scale, it had also picked up grand marshals well outside the merchant world. Wavy Gravy led the parade in 2000. Save the Bay co-founder Sylvia McLaughlin was honored in past years too. Those choices track a second, quieter thread in the honor roll: civic memory matters as much as commerce here.

The Restaurant Wave Is Real. It Just Isn't the Same List

None of this means Solano's newer food scene is beside the point. It is genuinely new activity on a street that has not always had it. In the past two years alone, the corridor has added:

• Best Friends, a natural wine bar
• Brezo, serving Latin Californian food
• Anahuac, a Mexican restaurant that opened in the former Fonda space at 1501 Solano
• Lulu's Little Kitchen, the counter-service reformat of the previous restaurant Lulu

Any one of these could plausibly earn a write-up next year. What none of them have yet earned is a turn leading the Stroll's parade, and given the pattern above, that is unlikely to change quickly. The honor tends to arrive only after a business has survived long enough to become part of the street's memory, not its news cycle.

What Happens on Solano the Day the Street Closes

If you were on the avenue on September 13, the shape of the day followed the format the Stroll has used for years. The micro-parade stepped off at 10 a.m. from Colusa Avenue on the Berkeley side and traveled west toward Masonic Avenue in Albany, ending near the BART tracks. Along the route this year were Albany and Berkeley police and fire departments, Cub Scouts Pack 30, the Cornell Walking School Bus, the Rotary Club of Albany, and Squabisch Pretzels, alongside Sonny Han as grand marshal. Once the parade cleared, the street opened to foot traffic only, closed to cars until the evening.

Organizers put annual attendance at roughly 100,000, drawn from across Northern California, though the corridor has seen far larger crowds in past decades during boom years for the event. There is no on-site parking, and side streets fill fast, so most residents who live within walking distance treat it as exactly that: a walk down to Solano, not a drive.

Fifty Candles, and an Uncertain Next Fifty

Here is the part that does not show up in the celebratory coverage. As the 50th anniversary approached, funding for the event had grown less certain, even as it carries the title of the East Bay's largest street festival. Albany Scanner quoted Sue Johnson, who has run her lamp shop at 1745 Solano for 54 years and helped organize the Stroll in its early years, in response to a question about whether she thought it would keep going: "But people love the Stroll and they keep coming back."

That is not a guarantee. It is a hope from someone who has watched the event grow from a sidewalk sale into something that closes a mile of street once a year, and who has also lived with its friction, including noise from performers set up right outside her door. The Stroll has never run on city budget alone. It runs on merchant buy-in, city permitting from both Albany and Berkeley, and volunteer organizing that has changed hands more than once since Klein and Burnham first threw the doors open in the 1970s.

That is worth sitting with if you live along this corridor. The businesses getting honored as grand marshals are not just decorative choices. They are the closest thing Solano Avenue has to a running scorecard of what has actually lasted here, block by block, through recessions, ownership changes, and now a wave of new restaurant openings that may or may not still be open for the 75th Stroll. The stationery store, the lamp shop, the sauna that opened during the Depression: those are the businesses the street itself has chosen to remember.

If you have questions about what is happening on your specific block of Albany, Berkeley, or the surrounding East Bay, from neighborhood character to what a home actually costs to hold onto here, Tracy Zhou is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.