Solano Stroll

The Solano Avenue Stroll, also known as the Solano Stroll, is an annual street fair held on the second Sunday of September on the Solano Avenue shopping district of Albany and Berkeley, California. Stretching close to 2 miles long and bringing between 250,000 and 300,000 attendees in a single day, it has been called the oldest and largest street festival in the San Francisco Bay Area and the "world's biggest block party". In 2001, The Library of Congress's American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. designated the festival as a "National Local Legacy".

The Solano Stroll began in 1974 by the Thousand Oaks Merchant Association, a small business guild started by Ira Klein and co-headed by Lisa Burnham. Klein owned and managed "The Iris", a Solano clothing and jewelry store formerly based on Shattuck Avenue that sold dress goods made primarily by local fashion designers, among the earliest including Laurel Burch. Lisa Burnham (née Liesel Hirsch), an Austrian national and Holocaust survivor, owned "Northumbrian Antiques", an interior design business on Solano from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Klein conceived the festival as both a "thank you party" to customers and to promote the avenue's family-owned business community. According to a Patch.com interview with son Gabe Klein, the elder Klein's three creative influences included his childhood in New York City, the culture of Telegraph Avenue while he attended UC Berkeley in the 1960s, and his maternal cousin, George Schindler, a noted magician and film actor. Klein had been involved with the fair's planning, promotion and organizing until closing his business in 1998. Event organizer Lisa Bullwinkel directed the event for 16 years, from 1989-2005. Burnham died in 2001 in Berkeley, and Klein in 2007 in Springfield, Oregon. Current Citizens for East Shore Parks president and former Albany mayor Robert Cheasty, a civil attorney who runs a law firm on the avenue, is a ranking organizer of the Solano Stroll, being involved with the festival since 1984 and having served as the Solano Avenue Association's (SAA) president from 1989 to 1991.

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