The grandstand rises on a Monday. The finals are the following Sunday. And the barricades on Manhattan Beach Boulevard west of Ocean Drive stay up until Wednesday, August 19, three full days after the last ball drops.
That gap is the part almost no guide to the Manhattan Beach Open mentions, and it is the part that matters if you live within walking distance of the pier. The tournament is a weekend. Its footprint on your street, your errands, and your parking meter is a week and a half. This year that footprint lands on top of a brand-new price structure that took effect on August 1, which means the arithmetic of a routine Tuesday morning in August 2026 is different from what it was in July.
What actually closes, and for how long
The city's closure schedule separates the long shutdown from the short ones. Worth reading as two distinct events rather than one blur.
| Closure | Dates |
|---|---|
| Manhattan Beach Blvd, west of Ocean Drive to the pier | August 10 through August 19 |
| Manhattan Beach Blvd, west of Manhattan Avenue to the pier | August 14 through August 16 |
| Ocean Drive between 11th Street and 12th Street | August 14 through August 16 |
The ten-day closure covers build and strike for a temporary stadium on the south side of the pier. The three-day closures are the tournament itself. If your mental model is "avoid downtown that weekend," you have solved for the wrong window. The stretch that changes your walk to the sand, your trash pickup route, and your guest drop-off point is already in effect Monday.
Competition runs Friday, August 14 and Saturday, August 15 from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with Sunday's finals from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. General admission is free and first come, first served. AVP opens the box office at 7:00 AM each day and does not permit beach chairs, umbrellas, or coolers inside ticketed areas or the general admission grandstands, which is the single most common reason a local family gets turned around at the entrance carrying exactly what they carry to this beach every other day of the year.
There is no dedicated event parking. The AVP says so plainly on its event page, and the city says the same in stronger language, encouraging everyone to walk, bike, or rideshare.
The price of a normal August errand changed on August 1
Manhattan Beach moved to seasonal parking rates this month. The increases are modest in isolation and meaningful in combination, particularly during the one weekend a year when an estimated 60,000-plus people come to watch volleyball on the sand.
Downtown curbside parking went from $2.50 an hour to $4 an hour for May through August, then settles at $3.50 from September through April. The Upper and Lower Pier lots, El Porto, and Bruce's Beach moved from $3.50 to $4 for the summer. North Manhattan Beach street meters and Lot 4 went to $3. The downtown lots and garages, meaning Metlox, the Civic Center, the Marriott garage, and Lots 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7, are $3 an hour this summer and drop to $2 in the off-season, as Westside Current reported when the schedule was adopted. Citations for expired meters, street sweeping, red zones, and blocked driveways rose from $59 to $65.
Two of those numbers, set beside each other, produce the actual local insight. Curbside downtown is $4 this month. The Metlox structure is $3. Under the previous flat schedule the street and the garage cost the same, so this is the first summer the covered garage a block off the boulevard is the cheaper option rather than the equal one. On MBO weekend, when curb space near the pier is gone anyway, the price signal and the availability signal finally point in the same direction.
The pier beach lots are enforced 24 hours a day. Every other metered space downtown is enforced from 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM. That single distinction is the one worth committing to memory before Friday.
Lot 10, the Lower Pier lot, has 68 meters with a five-hour limit. Lot 11, the Upper Pier lot, has 50 meters, also five hours, and stays open around the clock. Both fill before the first serve on Saturday. The free option that survives the weekend is Lot 14, Civic Center Upper, which carries a two-hour limit and no charge, and Lot 15, Civic Center Lower, which opens to the public after 5:00 PM and on weekends.
None of this is an accident of a busy summer. The city's own parking study, adopted 5-0 this spring and covered by Easy Reader, found that peak demand hours have stretched from 1:00 to 5:00 PM in 2008 to 1:00 to 7:00 PM today, that more than half of metered downtown spaces had cars parked past the two-hour limit, and that enforcement still runs on manual tire chalking. The study's own projections, by its authors' admission, do not address peak summer weekends. MBO weekend is the definition of a peak summer weekend. The city is pricing for a problem it has not yet modeled.
Three ways to reach the sand without feeding a meter
- Wave Rider. The city's on-demand electric microtransit program launched June 4 and reached full service June 9, booked through the Circuit app. It was built to connect neighborhoods and the Metro K Line to downtown, which is precisely the trip that breaks down when Manhattan Beach Boulevard is barricaded.
- Bikes. More than 40 new racks have gone in across the city, with room for 20-plus additional bikes downtown. The Downtown Manhattan Beach association publishes a rack map, and this is the weekend it earns its keep.
- The Civic Center walk. Two blocks uphill, free for two hours, open to the public after 5:00 PM. For the Thursday ceremony and Sunday evening, it works.
Thursday belongs to the neighborhood
The best hour of MBO week is not on Saturday. It is Thursday, August 13, at 3:30 PM, when the Volleyball Walk of Fame red carpet ceremony takes place on the pier to honor last year's champions: Chase Budinger, Miles Evans, Taryn Brasher, and Kristen Nuss. Winners are set into the pier in bronze, volleyball-shaped plaques that run its length, a tradition now 66 years deep in a tournament that began in 1960.
It is free, it is short, and it happens before the crowd arrives. Treat Thursday as the ceremony and the weekend as the spectacle.
Where the town keeps working while the pier is booked
Downtown does not shut down. It reroutes. More than 50 restaurants sit within a few blocks of the closure line, and the ones a block inland have their best three days of the year.
Metlox has a new daytime anchor. Great White, the Aussie cafe from Venice, opened at 3515 Highland Avenue in the former Pitfire Pizza space in time for the 6-Man crowds at the end of July, as MB News noted. The Metlox courtyard also hosts free live music every Sunday from 2:00 to 4:00 PM through August 30, presented by the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professional Association.
Inland, Polliwog Park runs its own counterprogramming. Concerts in the Park plays Sundays from 5:00 to 7:00 PM at the amphitheater at 1601 Manhattan Beach Boulevard, free, with Gypsy Dreams on August 16, The Police Academy on August 23, Stone Soul on August 30, and ABBA LA closing the season on September 6. Accessible parking is at the Begg Pool lot and rideshare drop-off is on Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Low-backed chairs, no pets. On finals Sunday, the smartest move in town is to skip the last match, drive east, and be on the lawn by five.
And then the weekend after
August does not release the pier when the volleyball ends. On Sunday, August 23, the Catalina Classic Paddleboard Race finishes at the Manhattan Beach Pier in its 49th year, a 32-mile open-ocean crossing that begins at Catalina Island's Isthmus Cove. It draws a fraction of the MBO crowd and, for many longtime residents, more feeling.
Then comes September, when the City Council reviews final development proposals for the former Lot 3 structure site and the parcel next to Vons. Replacing Lot 3's 145 spaces has been sketched at roughly $10.2 million above ground or $21 million subterranean, and this summer's higher meter rates are projected to generate an additional $916,447 in fiscal 2027 toward operating costs, infrastructure, and future debt service. The parking math you are living through in August is a preview of a decision the city has not made yet.
Understanding how a beach town's calendar, its closures, and its parking economics move together is the same skill set that tells you when to list, when to hold, and what a block two streets off the boulevard is genuinely worth. If you would like a candid read on your property or your search along this coastline, Barbra Stover welcomes the conversation. Let's Connect.
