Pacific Coast Highway between Avocado and Poppy runs on two clocks in summer. One belongs to the day trippers heading for the State Beach parking lot. The other belongs to the Village, and it starts around the time the beach crowd loads up and heads home.

If you already live here, the second clock is the one worth reading. This year in particular, a few dates line up in a way that rewards paying attention.

The Thursday the Village belongs to itself again

The 3rd Thursday street event has quietly become the best five-to-eight-o'clock window of the season. 3rd Thursdays runs three times per year, on the third Thursdays of April, July, and October, with 2026 dates falling on April 16, July 16, and October 15. The July date is the one that matters for summer planning.

The format is loose but the anchors are consistent. Pinch Me! Band plays under the Marguerite Clock Tower, and the street effectively becomes a dance floor. Around them, the businesses residents already walk past every day open up in unusual ways. In April the block featured a Balcony Salon pop-up shop, complimentary skin-health consultations from Michele Medspa, and a pickleball pop-up plus a live DJ set from Cozy Earth and The Tennis & Pickleball Club. Expect a similar shape for July.

The details that make it worth staying past one drink are the ones a resident can read as a real evening:

• SCAPE Gallery running its Annex pop-up "Adornments" alongside the main gallery's tree-inspired group exhibition, "The Language of Trees"
• El Ranchito on happy hour, live music at Five Crowns, and Rothschild's adding a DJ to its own happy-hour setup
• A welcome table with event maps, a balloon display, and a dog selfie station near the Corona del Mar Library

The event is grassroots enough that over 70 local businesses coordinate with Visit Newport Beach, the Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce, and Greet Corona del Mar Magazine to run it. That is why the July 16 window tends to feel less like a promotion and more like a neighborhood turning its own lights on.

Sherman at sixty, mid-renovation, still worth the walk

The Gardens are having an unusual year, and residents who have not been in a few months should recalibrate before they go.

2026 is Sherman Library & Gardens' 60th anniversary year, and a large portion of the garden is currently fenced off for a reimagining, with the entrance door moved to the corner of Dahlia. Your visit will not include the full grounds you remember. What you get instead is a specific summer program built around what is still open.

The centerpiece is a new art show. Beginning May 15, Sherman transitioned to seasonal admission pricing in conjunction with the debut of its summer art exhibition, Dog Days of Sherman.

The bigger change residents should plan around is the food. Regular on-site dining is not currently available, and Sherman has announced a new restaurant partner for a fully reimagined farm-to-table concept opening in fall 2027. Until then, several Hazeltine's Afternoon Tea experiences are scheduled through 2026, which is the closest analog to the 608 Dahlia lunch that people used to fold into a garden visit.

The June encore worth planning around

The Baroque Music Festival is the least advertised piece of the Village's summer, and the most specific. Its 2026 run compresses the calendar into a single week:

• Sunday, June 21 at 4:00 p.m. at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, "Parisian Pleasures," featuring Leclair, Rebel's Les Élémens, and suites by Marais and Rameau
• Monday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Michael & All Angels Church in Corona del Mar, a program of Bach violin and harpsichord sonatas plus works by Johann Caspar Kerll
• Wednesday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Sherman Library & Gardens, "Concerti d'Italia in the Gardens," with Italian chamber concertos for recorder and strings by Vivaldi, Durante, and Sammartini
• Sunday, June 28 at 4:00 p.m. at St. Mark Presbyterian Church, the Festival Finale featuring Handel's Ode for St. Cecilia's Day and the Chandos Anthem O Come, Let Us Sing

The Wednesday concert is the one to prioritize if you have not been. The Sherman evening takes place in the semi-outdoor central patio room, with music spilling onto the central lawn beyond. Access to the Gardens is included. Doors open 45 minutes before concert start at Sherman on June 24, and 30 minutes early at the churches on the other dates.

The Festival is also grieving this year. Cofounder and Artistic Director Emeritus Dr. Burton Karson died on March 26, 2025, at the age of 90. That context colors the June 28 finale in a way most write-ups will not mention.

A dinner reservation strategy for the season

The Village's PCH restaurant row does not need another list. What it does need, if you already live here, is a mental map of which room fits which occasion when the summer crowd is pressing on capacity.

A few worth holding in memory:

• Foretti's CDM for the wood-fired pizza pipeline. Under new ownership by Thaddeus Foret, the kitchen still turns out Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana-certified pies from a 900-degree oven, alongside house-made pastas.
• CDM Restaurant when a guest wants a room with a story. The concept comes from Hollywood producer McG and restaurateur Jordan Otterbein, and there is a speakeasy operating directly below with no password or reservations required.
• SideDoor at Five Crowns for the after-3rd-Thursday nightcap. Refurbished by three generations of the Frank family in 2009 as Corona del Mar's first English-style gastropub, it operates as a separate room within Five Crowns.
• Bandera for the reliable Tuesday. Rotisserie chickens slow-roasted over hardwood in a custom stone oven, in a room built around the kitchen in the round.
• Rothschild's when you want to be recognized by name. A cornerstone of Corona del Mar for over 40 years, family-owned since inception.

Zinc Cafe, Rendez Vous, Gelato Del Mar, and Kit Coffee round out the daylight hours. None of them need explaining to someone who lives here.

What to circle for the back half of the year

The Village calendar has two more dates worth putting on the fridge now, before summer momentum makes you forget them.

October 15 is the fall 3rd Thursday, which historically feels quieter than July and better for actually talking to shop owners. And the Corona del Mar Christmas Walk returns Sunday, December 6, 2026 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you host family in December, that is the day to design the afternoon around.

The one already behind us for the year is the Scenic 5K, which ran Saturday, June 6, 2026, starting on the bluffs above Corona del Mar State Beach at 3001 Ocean Blvd. Worth mentioning only because it is the fixed spring anchor to build next year's calendar around.

The takeaway for residents

A Corona del Mar summer read from the outside looks like traffic, sunscreen, and a fight for parking. From the inside, it is a short series of specific evenings on a two-block stretch of PCH: a Wednesday in the Gardens with Vivaldi, a Thursday under the Clock Tower with Pinch Me!, a Saturday tea at Sherman standing in for a lunch that will not return until 2027, and a handful of dinner rooms that behave differently once the day trippers have cleared out.

The Village earns its reputation on days like these, not on the front-page ones.

At Valia Properties, our work is rooted in the same streets, storefronts, and evenings we write about. If you would like to talk about the Village, or about a home within it, we would welcome the conversation. Let's Connect.