For more than 30 years, the Escondido Chamber of Commerce has hosted the Grand Avenue Fall Festival. It is one of the longest-running community events in North County.
A decade ago, downtown merchants and stakeholders first approached the City Council with a desire to revitalize Escondido’s historic street.
The Grand Avenue Vision Project was created after public input and concept plans were approved by the council in February 2018. Construction on the $15 million redevelopment begin in 2022 and was completed earlier this year.
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M.G. Perez Jonathan Ortega (left), his mother, Lucelena Estrada (center), and his daughter, Sophia (right), prepared food, Sunday, for the family’s pop up kitchen, Escondido, Calif., October 19, 2025.
The 2025 Grande Avenue Fall Festival was held Sunday across six blocks of the area. It included 200 vendors like Jonathan Ortega who helped his mother and daughter prepare food to sell from their pop up kitchen. They are from Los Angeles County, but travel to San Diego County often with their family business known as the “Sausage Master”.
Vendors hoped to make money despite this year’s economic uncertainty nationwide.
“Nevertheless, people are still eager to come out and get away from their TV screens to come shop. They’ll hang out and spend the day (making purchases) and talking to other neighbors,” Ortega said.
The festival provided an opportunity to showcase the Vision Project’s infrastructure upgrades.
The redevelopment includes wider sidewalks, added diagonal parking, dropping vehicular travel to one lane in each direction, shorter pedestrian crossings, more modern street lighting, and the construction three roundabouts to make traffic flow smoother.
“It’s now more pedestrian friendly, the lighting is so helpful at night,” said Mary Lou Gonzalez who grew up in Escondido and has owned a women’s clothing boutique near a corner of Juniper Street for five years. “It really gets people to come down and look at the small businesses that have pushed through the construction and now we’re still open,” she said from her Glitz N’ Grand boutique.
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M.G. Perez Mary Lou Gonzalez is owner of the Glitz N’ Grand boutique. She opened Sunday to invite people attending the festival to shop, October 19, 2025.
Grand Avenue Festival organizers expected more than 15,000 people to attend this year’s event. That would be the largest crowd in its history.
