9th and 9th Street Festival: Street Closures and Local Stops

If you're the kind of person who plans a Saturday morning around a specific cup of coffee, you already know the drill. Bedlam Coffee sets up outside The Stockist most weekends, usually starting around 9 a.m., and the whole appeal is that it's small and a little unpredictable. Pete Souvall rotates the roast, the brown butter cookies sell out fast, and half the fun is not knowing exactly what you'll get until you're standing there with a cup in hand.

The neighborhood's biggest annual event, the 9th & 9th Street Festival, was scheduled for September 19, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The announced footprint extended beyond the intersection: the planned closure ran the length of 900 South from 800 East to Lincoln Street, and up 900 East from 800 South to Belmont. It included residential blocks surrounding the corner as festival space for the day.

The Festival Footprint Beyond the Shops

The commercial core of 9th & 9th is small by design. Four corners, a cluster of restaurants, a bakery, a bookstore, a movie house. You could walk the whole thing in ten minutes. So it's easy to assume the annual street festival just shuts down that same small footprint and calls it a day.

According to the festival's own planning page, the closure extended several blocks beyond the commercial strip in every direction. The festival is a neighborhood association event organized by the East Liberty Park Community Organization. Its planned footprint included streets beyond the four commercial corners for booths, music, and festivalgoers. The four corners are the anchor, while the festival footprint also includes surrounding streets.

Bedlam Coffee and Getting Around the Festival Footprint

The pop-up is at 875 East 900 South, inside the festival's announced closure boundary, and its usual hours overlapped the festival's scheduled 10 a.m. opening.

The GreenBike station is at the northwest corner of 900 East and 900 South, a useful point of reference for getting around this stretch of the east bench.

What the 2026 Festival Schedule Said About Kids' Activities

The festival's materials said the children's art and activity area was scheduled to return in 2026 after being scaled back in recent seasons, and that booths would host face painting and similar kid-focused activities throughout the day.

The festival's schedule also said the broader kids' zone would be on hiatus, with the exception of the bike rodeo on the west side of the event. Its published plans described a lighter kids' footprint than in the festival's bigger years: art and face-painting activities were listed, but not a larger dedicated kids' area.

The published schedule pointed families to the bike rodeo and scattered booth activities rather than a single large designated kids' zone.

Food and Drink Around the Festival Footprint

The neighborhood has several food and drink stops near the festival footprint that can make up a walking loop. A few options are:

• Pizza Nono for a slice of the Beehive pie, the honey, jalapeño, and salt combination that's become the default order for a reason.
• Tulie Bakery for French pastry, though anyone who's tried to get on their Thanksgiving pie list already knows how popular this bakery is with the neighborhood.
• Mazza, which has been serving Middle Eastern and Lebanese food at this corner for more than a decade, long enough to count as a fixture rather than a newcomer.
• Pie Fight, the walk-up window next to the antique store, for a hand pie you can eat while you keep moving.
• La Barba for another coffee stop near the festival footprint, since they roast in-house and keep a full pour-over program running.

For a quieter stop, the Tour Theatre is an option a few doors down. It's a single-screen, Art Deco theater from 1928, run by the Salt Lake Film Society, and it's the kind of place where an afternoon matinee can feel like a reset button.

The Actual Takeaway

The festival's announced footprint extended the neighborhood's everyday walkable pattern for one Saturday. The same four corners that make 9th & 9th easy to live in without a car also anchor the festival, whose planned closure extended beyond them.

For residents, the announced plan underscored that 9th & 9th is more than its commercial intersection.

If you're weighing what it's like to actually live inside a neighborhood like this, day to day and not just on festival Saturdays, Jazmin Adamson can walk you through what else is worth knowing about 9th & 9th and the surrounding east side. Let's Connect.