Old Torrance's Fourth Sunday Is Two Events Wearing One Hat

Walk down Sartori Avenue on the fourth Sunday of the month and you'll find two hundred vendor tables stacked with vintage furniture, records, and the occasional Labubu doll, spilling across three streets and a parking lot. Four blocks away, at the same hour, a docent is standing in front of a 1936 Spanish Revival building explaining why the city's original architect got fired. Almost nobody in Old Torrance treats these as the same morning. They are.

The Torrance Antique Street Faire and the Torrance Historical Society's free walking tour land on the identical fourth Sunday, in the identical eight or so blocks of Old Torrance, and have for years. One draws thousands of shoppers. The other draws a much smaller crowd of people willing to walk ninety minutes for local history. Most residents pick a lane. The people who've figured out that both events start from parking within a block of each other are quietly getting the better Sunday.

A Faire That Outgrew Its Street

The Faire started in October 1998 on a single block. It now spans Sartori, El Prado, and Marcelina Avenues, plus a parking lot, and has grown from roughly 25 original vendors to more than 200 sellers setting up shop every month, rain or shine, drawing thousands of people downtown on a single Sunday. It's free to enter, pet-friendly, and open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., with a $3 antique appraisal booth for anyone hauling in a mystery item from a garage, and DJ Ozzie running the soundtrack.

The event has become enough of a fixture that it's a repeat winner in the Daily Breeze's Reader's Choice polls, and in 2014 the city gave its founders, Miguel Salazar and Julie Randall, the Torrance Advantage Award as a "Quality of Life Community Investor." Salazar and Randall still run the year-round anchor for the whole operation: Street Faire Antiques, a vintage furniture and collectibles shop on Sartori Avenue that doubles as the Faire's office the rest of the month.

The restaurant count tells its own small story. The Faire's own event listings counted 20 restaurants open for the day back in February 2026. By May, that number had ticked up to 21. It's a minor detail, but it tracks with how fast the blocks around Sartori keep filling in.

The Tour Nobody Told You Runs the Same Morning

Here's the part that gets missed. The Torrance Historical Society runs a free, docent-led walking tour of Old Torrance on the same fourth Sunday, from May through October, starting at 10:30 a.m. at the Torrance Historical Museum, 1345 Post Avenue. The tour covers about eight blocks in roughly ninety minutes, no reservation required, and the museum itself is worth the stop on its own: a 1936 Spanish Revival building that houses the city's Legends Hall of Fame, including a section on Louis Zamperini, the Torrance-born Olympian and WWII veteran.

The tour script isn't a dry recitation of dates. Docents point out why Irving Gill, the architect behind the Pacific Electric Railway's El Prado Bridge and the old Torrance Depot, was fired from the project. They explain the explosion that put the city on the map, why Torrance has never had a cemetery within its borders, and which streets got their names from the landscape architecture firm of Olmsted & Sons, hired to lay out the city's original street grid. There's even a stop tied to where scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer were filmed.

The 2026 season is nearly done. After the August 23 tour, only two dates remain on the calendar: September 27 and October 25, the last walking tour of the year.

One Parking Lot, Two Front Doors

The overlap isn't just timing. It's geography. The Faire's own recommended parking includes the Cravens public parking lot, next to the Torrance Credit Union, sitting a block from Post Avenue. The Historical Museum's address is 1345 Post Avenue, at Cravens. Park once, and you're standing between both front doors.

Here's what that actually looks like on a fourth Sunday between May and October:

• Park at the Cravens lot or the Sartori parking structure before 10:30 a.m.
• Walk to the museum for the docent-led tour, back by roughly noon.
• Loop into the Faire on Sartori, El Prado, and Marcelina, still running until 3 p.m.
• Get a $3 appraisal on whatever you picked up, then eat at one of the 20-plus restaurants the Faire lists as open for the day.

Neither event is designed around the other. Nobody at the museum is coordinating with Street Faire Antiques on scheduling. It's simply how the fourth Sunday has settled into place over two decades, and most people who live here only ever show up for one half of it.

The Detail That Actually Connects Them

The clearest sign that these two institutions aren't strangers to each other came this year, tied to the FIFA World Cup. Torrance is the birthplace of AYSO, American Youth Soccer, and in recognition of that history the Torrance Historical Society invited Salazar and Randall, the same pair who founded the Antique Street Faire, to share their private soccer memorabilia collection with the museum.

That's not a coincidence dressed up as a story. The people running the monthly flea market and the people running the history museum are the same small circle of Old Torrance residents who've spent years building both. The Faire sells the objects. The museum explains the buildings those objects sit in front of. Neither one makes complete sense without the other, and the calendar happens to put them four blocks apart on the same Sunday morning.

What This Says About Living Here

Old Torrance is a compact grid, built out from a city that Jared Sidney Torrance and the Olmsted firm planned as a balanced industrial and residential community more than a century ago. It's not a place where history sits behind glass while commerce happens somewhere else. The flea market vendors set up on streets the museum's docents are actively narrating. The antique dealer who might appraise your find on Sunday afternoon is the same person the museum tapped to help tell the city's soccer history.

If you've lived here for years and only ever done the Faire, the walking tour is free, ends before the vendor tables get too crowded to browse comfortably, and only has two dates left this year. If you've only ever done the tour, the Faire runs every fourth Sunday of the year, long after the walking season ends in October.

Either way, you're standing in the same eight blocks. You might as well see both halves of the morning.

For more on what makes Torrance neighborhoods tick beyond the calendar, the team at Randazzo Real Estate keeps a close eye on the South Bay's daily rhythms, not just its market data. If you're already living here and curious what your corner of Torrance is worth, or just want a local's read on the neighborhood, reach out any time. Request Your Free Home Valuation.