If you've lived near Arthur Avenue long enough, you've probably made this mistake once. You tell out-of-town family that Ferragosto is always the first weekend after Labor Day, you pencil in a date, and you show up to find the street running like any other Sunday. The Belmont Business Improvement District doesn't fix the festival to a calendar slot the way some neighborhoods lock a street fair to a specific weekend every year. Look back through the BID's own event announcements and Ferragosto has landed on September 7, September 10, September 11, September 12, and now September 13. Five different years, five different Sundays. The one constant is the stretch of Arthur Avenue itself, from East 187th Street down to Crescent Avenue, which has hosted this thing for more than 25 years running.
This year it's confirmed for Sunday, September 13, from noon to 6pm, rain or shine, along Arthur Avenue at East 187th Street. That's worth writing down somewhere more permanent than a group chat, because the odds are decent the BID moves it again next year, and a neighbor who assumes it always falls on the same weekend as last year is the neighbor who ends up standing on a normal, unclosed street wondering where everyone went.
What Actually Happens at Noon on the 13th
Ferragosto traces back to an ancient Roman harvest festival that dates to 18 B.C., created to honor Caesar Augustus. The Belmont version has run for more than two and a half decades, built by the merchants of Arthur Avenue and East 187th Street rather than imported wholesale by a city agency or a tourism board. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, and it's the thread running through most of what makes this day different from a generic street fair.
The 2026 program opens at noon with remarks from Alyssa Tucker, the BID's executive director, followed by dual national anthems: the Italian anthem performed by Jessa V Salerno, the American anthem performed by Nick Vero. Vero is a Bronx native who has served as master of ceremonies for twelve Ferragosto festivals, which means he's been doing this job since before some of the newer restaurants on the block opened their doors. From 12:15 to 12:45 he takes the stage solo, then Department of Fools performs along the festival route from 12:45 to 4:45, with Jessa V Salerno's own set running 1:10 to 2:25. RockSteady, a seven-piece band with members who trace their own family roots through Ellis Island to Arthur Avenue, and Bob Bisaccia round out the day's programming.
The event is free to attend and open to the public, with food, drinks, and merchandise available for purchase from the businesses lining the route. This year's sponsor list includes Fordham University, the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo, SBH Health System, and ConEdison, which tells you something about how the neighborhood's larger institutions have folded themselves into what started as a merchants' celebration.
The Counter You Buy From Every Week Is the Table You'll Sit At That Day
Here's the part that separates Ferragosto from a lot of other one-day street festivals in this city. The vendors aren't a traveling circuit of festival concessionaires who show up wherever there's a permit and a crowd. Past years' participant lists read like a normal Tuesday shopping trip on Arthur Avenue: Artuso Pastry Shop, Calabria Pork Store, Cerini Coffee & Gifts, DUA Gourmet Market, Enzo's of Arthur Avenue, La Casa Grande Cigars, Marie's Fresh Roasted Coffee & Gifts, Mario's Restaurant, Pasquale's Rigoletto Restaurant, Teitel Brothers, and Zero Otto Nove, among others. If you already buy your prosciutto at Teitel Brothers or grab an espresso at Cerini on an ordinary Wednesday, Ferragosto just moves that same counter onto the sidewalk for one day and adds live music.
That continuity is also why the festival hasn't needed to reinvent itself to stay relevant. The same families who've run these storefronts for generations are the ones setting up the tables, which is a different proposition than a festival that leans on outside vendors to fill out a route. It's part of why the BID can credibly claim more than 25 years of consecutive programming without the event drifting into something unrecognizable from what it started as.
Getting There Without Losing an Hour to Parking
Ferragosto draws a genuinely large crowd, and Arthur Avenue's own streets are narrow enough on a normal day. The BID publishes a specific parking plan every year rather than leaving people to guess, and this year's options are:
- Fordham University's lot at 685 East Fordham Road, $10 for the day, with a free shuttle running to and from the festival between 11am and 7pm
- The Belmont Municipal Parking Field at 2365 Hoffman Street
- SBH Health System's lot at 4422 Third Avenue, entering from Quarry Road
- Fordham Plaza Garage at 450 East 189th Street
- Street parking, for anyone willing to circle a few extra blocks
If you live within walking distance, the honest advice is to skip all of it. The shuttle and the paid lots exist for the thousands of people traveling in from outside the neighborhood. Anyone already living inside the closure zone gets the better end of that deal simply by walking.
What's Still Running the Sunday After
Ferragosto is the loud, once-a-year version of Arthur Avenue. The quieter version, the one residents actually lean on most weekends, is Piazza di Belmont, the BID's recurring weekend outdoor dining setup that closes the avenue to traffic between roughly East 186th and East 188th Streets down to Crescent Avenue. It started in 2020 as a pandemic-era open streets initiative designed with input from former NYC Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz, and the neighborhood has kept running it every year since, typically from spring into the back half of September. In at least one recent year the season stretched through the last Sunday of September before wrapping for the year. The Belmont BID hasn't yet posted this year's exact closing date, which is itself a small, useful piece of information: don't assume Piazza di Belmont automatically ends the same weekend as Ferragosto, and don't assume it runs a full month past it either. Check before you plan around it.
While the sidewalks are full, it's also worth knowing that the New York Botanical Garden, one of this year's Ferragosto sponsors, runs a fall program offering complimentary tickets to Bronx residents, timed to when the dahlias and asters come in and the Native Plant Garden starts turning. It's a small perk that only exists because NYBG treats itself as a neighbor here rather than a separate attraction, which fits the same pattern as everything else this September: the same institutions, the same few blocks, showing up for each other on a schedule that shifts slightly every year but never actually skips one.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like Belmont looks like day to day, beyond one loud Sunday in September, that's really the through line. The businesses that sponsor the block party are the same ones open the other 364 days of the year, and the institutions backing it are the ones already embedded in daily life here, not visitors passing through for a photo.
For anyone thinking about buying, selling, or simply understanding what a property near Arthur Avenue is actually worth in a neighborhood like this, Thomas Caliendo and the team at Tide Realty Group know these blocks the way the vendors know their own counters. Rise With Us.
