HOLLYWOOD — The folding tables will stay up through Halloween.
City recreation officials confirmed this week that the Cahuenga night market, a weekend pilot that opened in April on a permit good for ninety days, has been cleared to run through the end of October. The decision had been in doubt since May, when a run of noise complaints from the apartments above Selma Avenue landed in the council office and, briefly, in the pilot’s file as a reason to let it lapse.
The market takes over a closed block of Cahuenga Boulevard on Friday and Saturday evenings, between Selma and De Longpre. On a strong night it draws close to fifty sellers — tamale carts, a jarred-kimchi table, two agua fresca stands that each insist they were there first, a bookseller working out of milk crates, and a fourteen-year-old named Sol who moved from friendship bracelets into phone chargers when he saw where the money was.
“In April I made forty dollars on a Saturday. Last week I made four hundred,” said Rosa Villalobos, who sells tamales her mother taught her to fold. She has already applied for spots at three other markets on the strength of the Cahuenga numbers.
The complaints were real, if smaller than the rumor of them. Gregory Aoki, who has a third-floor unit facing the street, said the amplified cumbia from a corner stand ran past ten most Saturdays and rattled a window he had only recently replaced. “I like the market. I did not like the bass,” he said.
Organizers responded in June with a sound cap — eighty-five decibels measured at the curb — and moved the loudest speakers to the Sunset end, away from the residential block. The council office says complaints fell from about thirty in May to six in June. Aoki confirms he has not called since.
The city’s interest is partly a matter of counters and receipts. A recreation department tally put average Saturday attendance above three thousand, and organizers say vendor sales-tax filings have climbed each month. The Copper Kettle, the diner on the corner, reported its Friday dinner covers up by roughly a third on market nights, which its owner attributes entirely to people who came for tamales and stayed for pie.
Not everyone is sold. A hardware store two doors down says the closure sends its evening customers hunting for parking they never find, and it has asked to be left outside the barricades. Organizers say they are working on it.
The extension runs through October 31 and comes with a scheduling wrinkle. As the sunsets slide earlier, the market will open at five instead of six, ending the pilot’s longtime problem of vendors setting up in daylight to a street that stayed empty until dark.
Villalobos is already thinking past Halloween. She has asked the organizers whether anyone has applied for a winter permit, and whether tamales, in December, might finally be seasonal.