Why the Manhattan Beach Open Closes Your Street for Ten Days, Not Four

If you've lived through more than one August in Manhattan Beach, you already have an opinion about the Open. Everyone does. But ask a downtown resident exactly how long their block stays closed and most will guess wrong, because the number they remember is the tournament schedule, not the construction schedule.

Those are two different numbers. One is four days. The other is ten. And the gap between them is the difference between a minor inconvenience and a real change to how you get around downtown for a stretch of August that starts this Monday.

Ten Days, Not Four

The AVP Manhattan Beach Open runs its Walk of Fame ceremony on August 13 and matches from August 14 through August 16, with play going from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the first two competition days and wrapping by 5 p.m. on the 16th, according to the city's official tournament page. That's the event most people circle on a calendar. Four days.

The street closures tell a longer story, because grandstands don't build or come down in an afternoon.

That first line is the one nobody reads past the headline for. The blocks of Manhattan Beach Boulevard closest to the sand go dark for a full ten days starting this coming Monday, not just the three days when volleyball is actually being played. If your daily route to the beach or downtown runs through that stretch, you're rerouting for over a week before the first serve.

"There is no dedicated event parking available."

That's the tournament's own parking guidance, straight from AVP's event page. General admission is free, seating is first come first served, and the city is telling people to walk, bike, or rideshare rather than hunt for a spot that won't materialize.

What's Actually Unaffected

Here's the part that gets lost in the closure panic: most of Manhattan Beach isn't touched by any of this.

Concerts in the Park at Polliwog runs every Sunday through Labor Day weekend, and its location on Manhattan Beach Boulevard sits well east of the section that closes for the Open. The remaining 2026 lineup:

• August 9 — Cobra Cowboy
• August 16 — Gypsy Dreams
• August 23 — The Police Academy
• August 30 — Stone Soul
• September 6 — ABBA LA, closing the season

Admission is free, the shows run 5 to 7 p.m., and none of them require you to cross a single closed block near the pier.

The Sepulveda corridor is even further removed. Manhattan Village, where Saint & Second opened its first South Bay location on July 21 at 3160 N Sepulveda Blvd, sits entirely outside the AVP footprint. If downtown feels like a circus during the tournament, that stretch of the city is running on its normal August schedule.

Where to Eat Once You've Rerouted

The timing of the tournament happens to line up with the biggest wave of restaurant openings downtown has seen in a while, which means there's more reason than usual to figure out how to get around the closures instead of just avoiding downtown for two weeks.

Bread Head sits at 1129 Manhattan Avenue, close enough to the pier that it's inside the affected zone during match days, but it's worth the walk. The shop is the Manhattan Beach outpost of the Santa Monica original, built around a focaccia-style bread that critics have singled out, including one review calling it among the standout sandwich shops in Los Angeles. It's a grab-and-go option that actually makes sense if you're already on foot because you had to park three blocks out.

Great White, the Venice-born all-day café, is moving into the former Pitfire Pizza space in the Metlox courtyard, a location that stays clear of the Ocean Drive and Manhattan Beach Boulevard closures entirely. It's a daytime option a few blocks inland, away from the pier crush, for anyone who wants the beach cafe format without the beach crowd.

And Saint & Second, the new Manhattan Village arrival from Hofman Hospitality Group, is the cleanest answer to "where do I go if I don't want to deal with any of this." The restaurant, which also has locations in Long Beach and Topanga, describes its own approach simply: it offers a "come-as-you-are experience rooted in creativity, community, and California flavor," according to a statement given to Patch. It's open seven days a week with a weekday social hour from 3 to 6 p.m., which happens to overlap nicely with the tournament's afternoon match blocks if you'd rather watch highlights later than fight for parking now.

A French bistro concept is also expected to take over the former Nando Trattoria space on Manhattan Avenue, which would put a fourth new option inside the closure zone once it opens. That one's still pending, so treat it as a name to watch rather than a place to plan around this month.

The Bookend

The Open wraps August 16. A week later, the Catalina Classic Paddleboard Race finishes its 49th run at the Manhattan Beach Pier on August 23, the same day The Police Academy plays Polliwog. The race began in 1955 and covers 32 miles of open ocean from Catalina Island's Isthmus Cove to the pier, a distance that hasn't changed even as everything else downtown has.

That overlap is the actual shape of a Manhattan Beach August: a loud, closure-heavy week bracketed by things that don't move, don't close streets, and don't ask you to rideshare anywhere. The volleyball crowd clears out, the paddlers come in from the water at the same pier, and the Sunday concerts keep running through it all like nothing happened.

How Locals Actually Plan These Three Weeks

1. Mark August 10 on your calendar, not August 13. That's when Manhattan Beach Boulevard west of Ocean Drive actually goes dark.
2. If you're headed downtown between August 14 and 16, plan to walk, bike, or rideshare. There's no event parking, and street parking near the pier will be gone.
3. Keep Sunday nights at Polliwog on the schedule regardless. The concerts aren't affected by anything happening near the water.
4. If downtown feels impossible during match days, Manhattan Village and the Sepulveda corridor are functioning on a normal Tuesday.
5. Give the closure zone until August 19 before assuming Manhattan Beach Boulevard is back to normal. The teardown takes as long as the setup did.

The version of this month most people carry around is "volleyball weekend, then it's over." The version that actually plays out on the ground is longer, more uneven across the city, and easier to work around once you know which blocks are closed and for how long.

Manhattan Beach doesn't stop being itself for these three weeks. It just splits into two versions of itself running at the same time, and knowing which one you're standing in makes the whole month easier.

Jenny Morant Group lives in this stretch of the South Bay and tracks it block by block, from pier closures to pier openings. Get Your Instant Home Valuation whenever you're curious what your Manhattan Beach home is worth in today's market.