"Highlands Oktoberfest keeps growing because our neighbors and their friends and their families keep showing up for it."
That's Ellie Hixenbaugh, the event director behind Highlands Oktoberfest, talking about the September 12 festival that just wrapped its third year on West 32nd Avenue. She's right that people showed up. Last year's event pulled an estimated 30,000 people onto four blocks of 32nd between Irving and Perry streets, and this year's edition added something new: the inaugural Highlands Bierfest, a ticketed tasting session running from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. with Oktoberfest-style brews from New Terrain Brewing Co., Cerebral Brewing, and 4 Noses Brewing Co., plus drinks from TooSteppin Hard Ginger Beer, Idlewild Spirits, Drink Fabric, and Bravazzi Hard Italian Soda. Stein hoisting, keg bowling, a wiener dog race sponsored by Sploot Veterinary Care, a costume contest at the Lowell stage. The kind of Saturday that gets photographed and shared.
It's also one day.
Walk the same stretch of 32nd Avenue any Sunday between May and late October, and you'll find a version of the neighborhood that never made the press release. The Highlands Farmers Market has been running every Sunday since May 10, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the intersection of 32nd and Lowell, and it doesn't stop until October 25. Count the Sundays on that calendar and you get twenty-five separate mornings of the same routine: produce tables, a few food trucks, live music, people walking dogs through the crowd because pets are welcome. Compare that to Oktoberfest's single Saturday and the arithmetic tells you something about how this neighborhood actually spends its fall. The festival is the headline. The market is the habit.
Two Brunch Spots, Forty Feet Apart
The market and the festival bookend the season, but the strip itself changed shape in between. In March, Paperboy opened at 3940 W. 32nd Ave., its first location outside Texas after building a following in Austin for Texas hash, migas, brown-butter pancakes, and seasonal Pop-Tarts. It moved into a 3,000-square-foot space with a patio, serving breakfast, lunch, coffee, and cocktails.
Thirteen doors down at 3927 W. 32nd Ave., Sassafras American Eatery has been doing its own version of the same job for years: fried green tomato Benedicts, pimento chicken biscuits, shrimp and grits, po'boys, and a reputation solid enough to rack up more than 1,300 Yelp reviews and consistent weekend waits. Sassafras runs breakfast and lunch daily with dinner service Thursday through Saturday.
Put those two addresses next to each other and you get a small, specific data point about this corridor: two brunch concepts, one brand new and one long established, sitting on the same block of the same street. That's not a coincidence of leasing availability. It's a signal about what kind of foot traffic 32nd Avenue reliably produces on a Saturday or Sunday morning, strong enough that a Texas chain picked this exact block for its first expansion outside its home state.
A few blocks over on Tennyson Street, technically Berkeley but a five-minute walk from the Highlands corridor, American Lore opened earlier this year as a saloon-style whiskey bar. Four-dollar beer in frosty mugs, free bar snacks, no-frills cocktails, and an in-house hat shop from Hats by Parker Thomas built into the space. It's the rare new opening on this side of town that leans old-school instead of polished, which makes it worth the short walk if you're already up on 32nd for the market or a meal.
The Market's Neighbors, One Street Over
The pattern of a loud one-day draw sitting next to a quieter recurring one shows up again just off the main strip. On September 19, the Highlands Masonic Center at 3550 Federal Blvd. hosted the Fall Horseshoe Market, a seasonal indie craft and vintage market running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It's a single Saturday event, the same shape as Oktoberfest, just smaller and further from the center of the action on 32nd.
That's worth noticing because it means the neighborhood's fall calendar isn't one big thing surrounded by empty weeks. It's a layered schedule where a handful of annual one-day markets and festivals sit on top of the Sunday farmers market's twenty-five-week run, each one pulling people to a slightly different corner of the neighborhood at a slightly different time.
What's Left on the Calendar
The market keeps going through October 25. After that, the Highlands Merchants Association typically closes out the corridor's outdoor season with a Halloween-weekend gathering on 32nd Avenue, a trick-or-treat event that brings families up and down the street to visit the same businesses that host the Sunday market and, a few weeks earlier, hosted Oktoberfest. It's the same physical footprint doing a third kind of job: not a beer festival, not a produce market, but a neighborhood-wide open house timed to the holiday.
Three different events, three different formats, one shared four-block stretch of pavement. That's the actual texture of fall in the Highlands. Not a single weekend to circle on the calendar, but a strip of street that keeps getting reused for a new purpose every few weeks, with the Sunday market running underneath all of it as the one constant that doesn't take a week off between May and late October.
Why the Distinction Matters
If you already live here, the practical takeaway is simple. The festival requires planning: a specific Saturday, a specific four blocks, a schedule to check in advance. The market doesn't. It's just there, every Sunday, whether or not you remember it's happening. The new restaurants are the same way. Paperboy and American Lore aren't events. They're additions to the rotation of places you can walk to on an ordinary Tuesday, the kind of thing that changes what a normal week here actually looks like long after the Bierfest tents come down.
That's the part a one-time visitor to Highlands Oktoberfest never sees. They get the loud Saturday. The people who live within walking distance of 32nd and Lowell get the twenty-five Sundays, the new brunch spot down the block from the old one, and the whiskey bar with the hat shop in the back. The festival brought 30,000 people to the neighborhood for a day. The market, the two brunch spots, and the saloon on Tennyson are what those same blocks look like on every other day of the season.
If you're watching what's changing on 32nd Avenue and want that same level of attention paid to a move in or around the Highlands, Trish Kelly is happy to talk through it. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
