Drive Jericho Turnpike through Westbury this week and you will pass a banner for a fall festival. Drive Audrey Avenue in Oyster Bay next month and you will pass a different one. Neither event is coordinating with the other, and neither one is coordinating with Merrick Avenue, or with Franklin Square, or with the fairgrounds at Old Bethpage. Nassau County does not have a fall festival season so much as it has five towns running five separate traditions that happen to overlap on a calendar.
That distinction matters if you are the kind of resident who treats "let's do a fall thing this weekend" as a single decision. It is not. The garden center festival in Westbury, the waterfront heritage festival in Oyster Bay, the German biergarten's new food event in Franklin Square, and the street fair on Merrick Avenue are four different kinds of Saturday, run by four different organizations, with four different reasons to show up. Waiting for "the" fall festival weekend means missing most of them, because there isn't one. There are several, and they were never going to line up.
The Garden Center, the Harbor, and the Biergarten Are Not the Same Kind of Day
Start with Hicks Nurseries in Westbury, because it has the longest runway and the most forgiving schedule. The garden center is running its 51st annual Fall Festival from September 12 through November 1, which gives it more flexibility than anything else on this list. What's actually new this year is the Skeleton Estate, an indoor garden built inside one of the greenhouses that blends fall plantings with Halloween decor, alongside the returning Otto the Ghost walkthrough and the giant pumpkin growing contest, judged on October 4. A wristband for weekend activities runs about $30 per person, though the walkthrough experience and the lawn games are free with parking, which makes Hicks the easiest one to fit into a weekday afternoon rather than a planned weekend trip.
Oyster Bay's version of fall is a different animal entirely. The Oyster Fest returns October 17 and 18 to Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park and Beach and Audrey Avenue, and it is not a garden center event scaled up. It is one of the largest waterfront festivals on the East Coast, drawing more than 150,000 visitors across the weekend according to the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Chamber of Commerce, which runs it in partnership with the Town of Oyster Bay. The oyster shucking and eating contests are the headline, but the Oyster Bay Brewing Company beer garden and the Saturday fireworks display are what make it a full evening rather than an afternoon stop. This is the one to treat as an actual outing, not a drive-by.
Franklin Square's contribution comes from Plattduetsche Park, and it has the deepest backstory of anything on this list. The Plattduetsche Volksfest Vereen, a society of German immigrants, was founded in Brooklyn in 1883. When Brooklyn's early-1900s real estate boom pushed beer gardens out of the borough, the society moved to Franklin Square and built what is now an eight-acre park. That history is why Plattduetsche's fall calendar looks different from the others. It's built around Ompahfest as the traditional kickoff to Oktoberfest season, and this year the park added something new: a food festival built entirely around apples, its first run. Unlike Hicks or the Oyster Fest, Plattduetsche's events happen inside a working restaurant and biergarten with cover charges in the $8 to $12 range, which makes it better suited to an evening out than a family afternoon.
Merrick's Version Is a Street Fair, Not a Festival
Merrick Avenue runs its own tradition, and it looks nothing like the other three. The Merrick Fall Festival and Street Fair, organized by the Merrick Chamber of Commerce, is scheduled for October 23 through 25 this year, spanning the Chamber of Commerce parking lot adjacent to the LIRR station and the length of Merrick Avenue itself. Carnival rides come from Newton Shows, the same operator behind several other Long Island fairs, and the fair itself functions more like a vendor market than a themed festival. There's no ticketed centerpiece experience the way Hicks has its pumpkin contest or Oyster Bay has its shucking contest. It's food trucks, craft vendors, and a flatbed stage for live bands, free to walk through, which makes it the most low-commitment stop on the list if you're bringing kids who want rides more than programming.
The Weekends Don't Wait for You
Here's where the scattered-calendar problem becomes a planning problem. If you're mapping out fall weekends in Nassau County, the sequence looks like this:
- Already passed: Bellmore's family street festival ran September 17 through 20, so if that was on your list, it's done for the year.
- This coming weekend: The Long Island Fair returns to Old Bethpage Village Restoration September 25 through 27, an old-fashioned country fair built around the historic village setting rather than a modern carnival midway.
- Ongoing through early November: Hicks Nurseries' Fall Festival in Westbury, with the pumpkin contest landing October 4 and the run continuing to November 1.
- Mid-October: The Oyster Fest takes over Oyster Bay's waterfront October 17 and 18.
- Late October: The Merrick Fall Festival and Street Fair closes out the season October 23 through 25, and Plattduetsche Park's new apple festival runs sometime in the same general window, alongside its Oktoberfest programming.
Laid out this way, the six-week stretch from late September through late October is less a "season" and more a relay, with each town handing off to the next. Nobody planned it that way. The Bellmore fair and the Old Bethpage fair are civic and county events. The Oyster Fest is a chamber and town partnership. Hicks and Plattduetsche are private businesses running their own calendars. They just happen to sit next to each other on Long Island, in towns close enough that a Nassau resident could plausibly hit three or four of them without leaving the county.
What This Actually Means for How You Spend a Saturday
The practical upshot is that "fall festival" isn't a single box to check off. If you want something free and low-effort, Merrick's street fair or the walkthrough portions of Hicks cost nothing beyond parking. If you want an actual event with a beginning, middle, and end, the Oyster Fest is built for that, and it's the one where showing up without a plan means missing the fireworks or the good food vendors. If you want something with a real story behind it, Plattduetsche's apple festival and the Old Bethpage Village Restoration fair both carry a century-plus of continuity that the newer street fairs don't have.
None of this requires picking a favorite town. Part of what makes living in Nassau County work the way it does is that Westbury, Oyster Bay, Franklin Square, Merrick, and Old Bethpage are all close enough to treat as one weekend's options rather than a choice between separate trips. The festivals themselves never coordinated, but the geography did that work for you.
If you're weighing a move within Nassau County and want to know which town's calendar, commute, or price point actually fits how you want to spend your weekends, the Elevated Experience Team works these towns every day and can walk you through what a specific block or school zone actually looks like beyond the listing photos. Get your free home valuation and let's talk about what fits.
