A Brief History of the
Solano Avenue Stroll
By Allen Cain
The Solano Avenue Stroll was organized in 1974 as a ‘thank-you’
party for customers by the Thousand Oaks Merchant Association
led by Lisa Burnham and Ira Klein. The Stroll took place on the
very west end of Solano Avenue in Berkeley as a sidewalk sale on a
Friday evening. Perhaps about a hundred people came together in
the early days to create and eventually expand the sidewalk event,
including Carl Brodsky, Emmett Eiland, Sue Johnson and later,
Dolly Walker, Rosemary Burns and Kathy Lee. Membership dues
then: $35.00.
While the Avenue eventually closed to traffic by the 1980s, the
Solano Stroll was still a neighborhood event drawing small crowds,
now on a Sunday afternoon. The event had lost its direction. It
now featured beer, loud free rock bands and mostly closed shops.
The Stroll was about to be discontinued by the late 1980s when
new leadership emerged to take the Stroll in a different direction.
The Solano Avenue Association achieved its non-profit status in
1983.
Robert Cheasty is credited with leading the Solano Avenue
Stroll and the Association in this new direction, creating the
Association and the Stroll as we know them today. The year before
he took over as President of the Solano Avenue Association,
the Stroll drew about 15,000 people and only about half of the
Avenue was closed. Alcohol related disturbances and arrests were
not uncommon. Robert created a five-year plan to professionalize
the Association and write a new tone and direction for the
Stroll. An Executive Director was hired and major changes
were implemented to the Stroll: eliminating alcohol sales, vastly
improving the entertainment, encouraging artists’ participation,
greater engagement with the Cities of Berkeley and Albany, greater
merchant participation and the controversial step of bringing
in outside booths, vendors and community groups to the Stroll.
Over the five years the stroll grew to about almost 200,000. It has
continued to increase to its current size of about 300,000.
Within a couple of years, in 1989, Lisa Bullwinkel joined as
Executive Director (the third one in as many years). As an artist
and event producer herself, Lisa fully embraced and encouraged
the new direction. She skillfully directed the changes and
improvements and brought a greater awareness of the value of art
and performance to the events. She escalated the recruitment of
the highest quality performers and of artisans for the booths. Over
the next sixteen years Lisa also increased the SAA’s involvement
with other business associations, community organizations and
governmental entities to enhance communications and the
influence of SAA in the region.
This was a period of growth with expected growing pains.
The Stroll became increasingly more expensive to produce, and
not enough merchants participated. “It was still difficult to create
the feel of a street festival when there were dead pockets with no
activity up and down the Avenue” recalled Robert Cheasty. “We
had to push the merchants to participate, to keep their stores open
on the day of the Stroll. Eventually we convinced the Board to
allow outside vendor booths and organizations to fill the empty
spots.” With only about half of the merchants staying open on
Stroll day, the Association finally brought in outside vendors under
the condition that nothing would compete with the existing
merchant group and that they be vetted for quality.
This bolstered the income of the Stroll (offsetting the loss from
eliminating alcohol sales). Equally important, the outside vendors