Downtown Culver City Has Two Fall Calendars, Half a Mile Apart
Tuesday evening, 7 p.m., at The Culver Steps. Yoga mats are unrolling across the staircase terraces as the light goes gold over Culver Boulevard. A few blocks away on National Boulevard, Ivy Station's lawn is filling a different way: vendor tents, a beer line at Los Angeles Ale Works, a DJ setting up for a night market that has nothing to do with sun salutations.
Both of these are happening in Downtown Culver City. Both are free. Both are, in their own way, the neighborhood's version of a Tuesday night. Most people who live here follow one Instagram account and assume they're tracking "what's happening downtown." They're actually tracking half of it.
The Culver Steps sits at 9300 Culver Blvd, a mixed-use development owned by an affiliate of Hackman Capital Partners, built around a sweeping staircase that doubles as an outdoor amphitheater. CorePower Yoga is a tenant there, which is why the studio leads the plaza's signature Tuesday sessions rather than just renting space for them.
Ivy Station, at 8840 National Blvd, runs a different kind of roster. Its ground floor includes Butterfly, Carbon Health, Go Get Em Tiger, Health Nut, Los Angeles Ale Works, Milk + Honey, Solidcore, Starlight the Carwash, Sushi Nigiriba, Sweetfin, The Shay, and Upper Ivy Residences, with Warner Bros. occupying office space above. It sits directly at the Culver City stop of the Metro E Line, and its open lawn functions less like a wellness studio's front yard and more like a rotating street fair.
These aren't competing versions of the same idea. They're two separate calendars that happen to share a ZIP code.
Culver City's own 2026 strategic marketing plan for The Steps, filed with the city council, spells out exactly what's still ahead. Sunset Yoga on The Steps runs every Tuesday through September 29, with five sessions remaining as of this writing: September 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29. Recent listings for the series note that registration is now required, a shift from the mat-and-show-up format the sessions started with, so anyone planning to go should reserve a spot through CorePower Yoga's site rather than assuming a walk-up.
Movies at The Steps, the Friday-night outdoor screening series that ran family titles like Wonka, Smurfs, Elf, and Wicked on the plaza's big screen, appears to have wrapped its 2026 run. The last confirmed screening in the record is Wicked on July 31. No fall titles are listed.
What replaces the movie nights is Hispanic Heritage Month programming, which the city's plan marks as running September 15 through October 15. That's a two-week overlap with the tail end of Sunset Yoga, meaning for the back half of September, both series are live on the same plaza in the same week. The plan's own shorthand sorts every item on the calendar into one of three categories, and Hispanic Heritage Month is tagged "Social Content," the plan's term for programming built around a cultural moment rather than a ticketed draw.
Here's how the two plazas' fall lineups compare side by side:
| The Culver Steps | Ivy Station | |
|---|---|---|
| Fall program | Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15–Oct. 15 | Spooky Season Night Market, October |
| Recurring weekly draw | Sunset Yoga, Tuesdays through Sept. 29 | Weekly trivia at Los Angeles Ale Works |
| Next dated event | Final yoga session Sept. 29 | Holiday-edition Night Market, Nov. 10 |
| Transit access | Short walk to the Washington/National Expo line | Direct Metro E Line stop on-site |
Ivy Station's pattern runs on a monthly cadence rather than a weekly one. The most recently documented edition, a St. Patrick's-themed Night Market on March 13, 2026, drew more than 30 local vendors alongside food trucks, green beer from Los Angeles Ale Works, and a DJ set from someone the event page credited only as DJ Bennett. Parking was free in the on-site garage, with entrances off both Venice Boulevard and National Boulevard, and the market was explicitly framed as dog-friendly.
That same monthly format carries into fall with a Spooky Season Night Market: more than 30 vendors, food trucks, craft beer and wine from Los Angeles Ale Works, adoptable dogs on site, and complimentary tarot readings alongside DIY mini pumpkin decorating. A holiday-edition Night Market is already on the calendar for November 10, running 5 to 10 p.m.
Earlier in the year, Ivy Station's lawn also hosted World Cup watch parties on a large screen, which tells you something about the venue's actual center of gravity: it's built for gathering around a shared screen or a row of vendor tents, not for a mat and a sunset stretch.
If the two plazas' event calendars suggest a split personality for Downtown Culver City, the restaurant news backs it up. Ivy Station's own news page confirms that Nancy Silverton, the chef behind the Mozza restaurant group, is opening a fast-casual Italian concept called Pizzette this fall, her first new restaurant in six years. It's landing inside the still-under-construction Citizen Public Market food hall on Culver Boulevard, in the same stretch of downtown as Ivy Station rather than at The Steps.
Meanwhile, The Steps' most notable food news this year has been Pop's Bagels expanding its footprint there, a smaller, grab-and-go kind of addition compared to a chef-driven concept from someone with Silverton's résumé. Neither plaza is short on good food. They're just building toward different kinds of nights out, and that pattern extends from the event calendar straight into the tenant mix.
If you live within walking distance of either plaza, the practical version of all this comes down to a few details worth keeping straight:
None of this requires picking a side. The useful part is knowing both calendars exist in the first place, because if you've only been following one plaza's programming, you've been living in half of Downtown Culver City's actual fall.
For more on what else is changing in the neighborhood's business mix, our earlier look at what it's really like living in Culver City's creative core and our roundup of top shopping spots in Culver City cover some of the retail and restaurant texture behind both of these plazas. You can browse more of the neighborhood, including current listings, on our Culver City page.
Whether your Tuesday nights lean toward a yoga mat on The Steps or a vendor tent on Ivy Station's lawn, knowing the neighborhood this well is exactly the kind of local grounding that makes Culver City worth paying attention to, whether you're planning your weekend or your next move. If you'd like to talk through what's happening in the market alongside what's happening on the calendar, Debbie Weiss is always glad to connect.
Debbie is always available to talk about your real estate goals and help you get there. She loves what she does, connecting people and homes, so your call or text is always welcome.