Oakland’s First Fridays Is Canceled for the Rest of the Year. Organizers Say It’s Money, Not Crime.

OAKLAND — There will be no First Fridays on Telegraph Avenue for the rest of the year. Organizers canceled November and December, and they want one thing understood about why.

“We are NOT cancelling because of violence or crime,” they said in a statement Monday. The capital letters are theirs.

The reason is money. Corporate sponsorship came in about 30 percent under what the festival was counting on. Organizers already cut the main entertainment stage in June. Now the whole thing is dark until at least 2027.

What Oakland loses

First Fridays is free. It started with art collectives throwing open their doors and became an official monthly street festival in 2011. On a good night it draws up to 30,000 people to Telegraph for food, music and art, and it puts customers in front of small vendors who do not have a storefront.

First Fridays Festival Director Venessa McGhee has been part of it since 2015. This is the first time in her tenure, she has said, that a festival already on the calendar was called off.

So where did the money go?

Here is where crime comes into the story, even though it is not why the festival is canceled.

Three times in a little over a year, violence broke out near the festival area hours after First Fridays had packed up. In September 2025, shootings later that night killed two people, and the police officers’ union blamed the crowds the festival draws. In March, two people were killed near a bar. In May, a driver went up on a sidewalk and injured seven people after a street fight.

Each time, First Fridays ended up in the headline. Sponsors noticed. Sponsors left.

Is that fair?

The organizers say no, and they have the city and the police department partly on their side. After the September 2025 shootings, the Oakland Police Department said its initial investigation found no evidence tying them to the festival. The city’s own security plan calls First Fridays safe and says the trouble comes from separate incidents hours after it ends. The festival’s directors say they are being tied to late-night and nightlife crowds, and that those crowds are the city’s problem to manage.

There is another side. One analysis of police data found that late-night incidents near the Fox Theater ran about 44 percent higher on First Friday nights than on other Fridays, almost all of it after 9:30 p.m. That is a pattern. It is not proof the festival causes anything, and the most common reports were car break-ins and theft.

Put plainly: a free event that closes early is paying the bill for what happens downtown at midnight.

What the city has done

Mayor Barbara Lee’s administration put a safety plan in place in June, with more police, violence prevention teams and street closures, and Mayor Lee called it a pilot the city would keep adjusting to help the festival survive. Councilmember Carroll Fife held a town hall on the festival’s future that same week.

It was not enough to bring the sponsors back.

Can it come back?

It has before. First Fridays went quiet for several months in 2024 while organizers raised money, then returned. This time they say they are holding onto hope for 2027 if the funding is there.

First Fridays is a program of the KONO Community Benefit District, a nonprofit. Businesses that want to sponsor it and neighbors who want to give can do both at oaklandfirstfridays.org.