Lakewood's October 3rd Has Two Festivals, And Most Residents Only Know About One

Heritage Lakewood Belmar Park and The Plaza at Belmar sit about a mile apart, close enough that you can hear one crowd from the other if the wind is right. On Saturday, October 3, both are running at full capacity at the same time. Cider Days, the city's 50-year-old harvest festival, opens its landmark anniversary weekend at Heritage Lakewood. A few blocks north, the Romanian Festival takes over The Plaza at Belmar. Neither event moved to avoid the other. They just happen to land on the same day, and unless someone tells you, you'd have no reason to know both exist.

That's the thing about Lakewood's fall calendar. It isn't one long party season that builds toward a single peak weekend. It's three distinct crowds, stacked into a three-week window, each one built for a different mood. Get the sequence wrong and you spend a Saturday standing in the wrong line. Get it right and you've covered more of the season than most people realize is even on offer.

The Dog Saturday Comes First

Before any of the harvest programming starts, Belmar hands its plaza over to dogs. Barktember Fest returns to The Plaza at Belmar on Saturday, September 19. This is its fourth year running, and the marquee draw is the Wiener Dog Race, which in past editions has been sponsored by Sploot Veterinary Care with proceeds benefiting Foothills Animal Shelter. If your dachshund has ever looked like it wanted to prove something, this is the venue.

Barktember is free, dog-friendly by design, and built around vendor booths rather than food stages or live music sets. It's a two-to-three-hour event, not an all-day plan. Treat it as exactly that: a Saturday morning outing, not the centerpiece of your weekend.

The Saturday That Splits In Two

Two and a half weeks later, the calendar gets more complicated. Here's what's actually happening on October 3 and the days around it.

Cider Days is the one most Lakewood residents already have circled. It's the city's largest and longest-running public event, and this year marks its 50th run, timed to also acknowledge Colorado's 150th year of statehood and the nation's 250th anniversary. The festival runs 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at Heritage Lakewood Belmar Park, with timed-entry tickets priced at $12 for adults if purchased by September 21, rising to $17 after that, and $10 for kids ages 3 to 12. Because organizers expect a sellout for the anniversary edition, the city has built out four free shuttle stops, at Belmar Shopping Center, Downtown Lakewood, the Lakewood Cultural Center, and the Lakewood Police Department, plus a free bike valet at the Heritage Lakewood Visitor Center.

The music side of Cider Days has its own texture worth knowing before you go. Alameda Connects, which has partnered with Heritage Lakewood on the festival stage for four consecutive years, built Saturday around a bluegrass showcase led off by hometown act Saint Colfax. Sunday opens differently, with longtime Lakewood flautist Dennis Velasquez performing Native American flute before the lineup shifts to bands fronted by women: Ms. Amy and The Jet Set in their first Cider Days appearance, followed by returning favorite Pennies on the Track, with Slopeside closing out the day. None of that overlaps with the Romanian Festival's programming, which runs the same Saturday but is built around its own cultural performances and food rather than a bluegrass stage or an apple press.

What this means practically: if you only have one day, Cider Days is the harder ticket to get right, because of the timed entry and the parking restrictions around Heritage Lakewood. If you're weighing whether to split your Saturday between both, the geography actually helps you. Heritage Lakewood and The Plaza at Belmar are close enough that a resident on foot or bike could realistically catch a slice of both, arriving at Cider Days for the morning bluegrass set and walking over to the Romanian Festival in the afternoon, rather than treating the day as an either-or choice.

Where To Eat Between The Two

Wadsworth Boulevard has a new stop worth building into either day. Metro Pie Pizza opened at 890 Wadsworth Boulevard this spring, serving Hong Kong-inspired pies cooked fast over real fire, and it's close enough to both festival sites to work as a lunch stop between the morning and afternoon legs of an October 3 plan. It's a small addition to the neighborhood's food scene, but it's the kind of thing that only shows up if you're actually tracking what's opened in Lakewood recently rather than relying on a list of the same handful of Colfax standbys.

If you'd rather eat at the festival itself, Cider Days runs its own food vendors alongside the apple theme: apple cider braised pork tacos, apple cider donuts, and a beer garden presented by Foothills Credit Union pouring local craft beer and hard cider. The Romanian Festival, being a different kind of event, runs its own separate food vendors reflecting its own program, which is part of why splitting the day between the two doesn't mean eating the same thing twice.

The Rest Of The Month, If You Want More

Cider Days and the Romanian Festival aren't the end of the fall calendar, just its most complicated Saturday. Later in October, BOOMar takes over The Plaza at Belmar on both October 24 and October 31, shifting the plaza into Halloween-season programming once the harvest festivals wrap. It's a lower-stakes, lower-planning event than the October 3 collision: no timed tickets, no shuttle logistics, just a straightforward street event on two consecutive Saturdays.

The pattern across all of this is worth naming directly. Lakewood's fall isn't a single festival season that peaks once and fades. It's three separate audiences using the same few blocks of the city on different weekends, sometimes on the same day. Barktember belongs to dog owners. Cider Days belongs to families tracking a 50-year tradition and to anyone who wants to hear Saint Colfax or Dennis Velasquez perform live. The Romanian Festival belongs to a different community entirely, running in parallel a few streets over. None of them are competing for the same person's Saturday so much as they're all claiming the same three-week stretch of the calendar, which is exactly why it's easy to miss one if you've only ever gone to the other.

If you've lived in Lakewood long enough to have a standing Cider Days tradition, this is the year to walk the extra few blocks and see what's happening at The Plaza at Belmar on the same afternoon. If you've never made it to Heritage Lakewood at all, the 50th anniversary is as good a reason as any to start.

Curious what's changing in your corner of Lakewood beyond the festival calendar, whether that's a new listing on your block or what your home might be worth in today's market? THE LIST tracks this neighborhood block by block. Let's Connect, and start with a free home valuation.