What the Claremont Farmers Market Has Quietly Funded Since 1996

Ask a longtime Village regular why the Sunday market runs the full length of Harvard Avenue instead of, say, the Packing House lot, and most people shrug. The honest answer traces back to a record store. More than 25 years ago, a handful of farmers set up folding tables in the parking lot behind Rhino Records, and what started as an informal Sunday gathering has grown into what Discover Claremont calls "the Inland Empire's largest weekly Farmers Market."

Here's the part most Sunday regulars don't know. The market isn't a business. It's a nonprofit program, dating back to 1996, run ever since by the Claremont Forum. The proceeds fund the Prison Library Project, a specific advocacy effort that has nothing to do with produce. Every basket of strawberries and every bundle of dahlias bought on Harvard Avenue on a Sunday morning is, in a small way, paying for something most shoppers never think about. That's not a marketing line. It's the actual funding structure, and it explains a few things about how the market feels different from a commercial farmers market: the rain-or-shine policy, a rotating cast of more than 35 artisans instead of a fixed roster, and the fact that it has run on the same three-block stretch for thirty years.

The site outlived the store

Rhino Records itself is gone. But its old address at 235 N. Yale Ave didn't sit empty. It's now home to La Popular, a Mexico City-style taqueria with a disco ball over the dining room and chefs making tortillas in an exhibition kitchen. The restaurant opened in November 2023 after an 18-month concept process by Eureka! Restaurant Group, the same company that's run Eureka! in the Village since 2011, and the build-out was partly funded by a $75,000 grant from the city's Community Development Block Grant program. At 4,215 square feet, it seats 185 people indoors and out, which is a very different number than a folding-table record shop ever pulled in.

So the record store's footprint split in two. The parking lot became a 30-year nonprofit institution. The storefront became a 185-seat restaurant. Neither one looks anything like Rhino Records did, and neither one would exist in its current form without it.

A new neighbor on the market's own route

Earlier this year, in spring 2026, the market picked up a next-door neighbor. The Claremont Forum opened The Commons, a new gallery and creative space, at 107 Harvard Ave, right along the same stretch vendors have used for years. It's a small addition, but it's the kind of thing you only notice if you already walk that block every Sunday. If you haven't been inside yet, it's worth the two extra minutes before you hit the produce tables.

What reopens this Saturday

As of this week, the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art is still closed for an installation, but that changes on August 15, when it reopens with a new exhibition, "Samella! Black as Lacquer and Iron." From July through September, admission is pay-what-you-wish, so there's no real reason to keep putting off a visit once the doors are back open. The museum sits inside the historic Claremont Depot at 200 W. First St, and its regular hours already build around the Village's own calendar: Thursday 12 to 4, Friday 12 to 7 (extended to 9 during the Friday Nights Live concert series), Saturday 12 to 4 except on Art Walk Saturdays, when it stays open until 8, and Sunday 10 to 4.

Two different Friday nights, same few blocks

Friday Nights Live keeps the museum lit until 9pm with live concerts on the museum's own schedule. A few blocks over on Yale Avenue, Espiau's runs live music on its patio Friday and Saturday nights, all weather, full bar, the kind of place with more than twenty flat-screen TVs for game days and a happy hour that runs 3 to 6 on weekdays. These aren't competing for the same crowd. One is drawing people who came for the exhibition and want a reason to linger. The other is drawing people who were never planning to look at art that night. Both keep the sidewalks busy on the same evening without ever really overlapping.

Here's the Village's working weekly and monthly schedule, condensed:

First Saturday, one week later

The next First Saturday Art Walk lands on September 5, and even the organizers can't quite agree on when it starts. Some listings say 5 to 8pm, others say 6 to 9. Either way, it's free, and it's the one night a month when a dozen small businesses turn their front rooms into galleries at the same time. Past Art Walks have featured Bunny Gunner at 230 W. Bonita Ave showing local drawing and glasswork, Claremont Heritage at 840 N. Indian Hill Blvd running rotating history exhibitions out of the Garner House, Studio C at 260 W. Bonita Ave hosting group shows with twenty or more local artists at once, and Village Dance Arts at 149 W. First St pairing its gallery walls with live performance. Gallery SOHO, home to the Pomona Valley Art Association, has its September 5 lineup already set: featured artist Georga Garside.

If you've never done a full lap on a First Saturday, September is a reasonable month to start. The museum's already extending its hours for the occasion, and the pay-what-you-wish window means you can walk through both the Art Walk and the exhibition in the same evening without planning around a ticket price.

The other clock in the Village

There's a second calendar running underneath all of this, and it has nothing to do with markets or galleries. The Claremont Colleges reset for fall over the back half of August. Pomona College's new students move in on August 22, with returning students following on August 29. Scripps College's new-student move-in is August 25. Claremont McKenna's returning students arrive August 29 and 30, and fall classes across the consortium begin August 31. None of that touches the Sunday market or the Art Walk directly, but it does shift who's parking where and which patios fill up first, especially once the semester actually starts and the sidewalks pick up their September density.

Why the storefronts change and the Village doesn't

None of the businesses named above are what actually hold this neighborhood together. Businesses come and go. Rhino Records gave way to a 185-seat taqueria. The old Heroes and Legends Bar and Grill space on Yale Avenue became two new tenants: Sancho's Tacos, which opened there in July 2023, and a relocated, larger Nosy Neighbors Coffee and Donuts, which moved in next door in January 2024. What doesn't change is the small set of institutions running underneath them: a nonprofit market that's operated on the same corridor since 1996, a museum inside a century-old rail depot that keeps reopening under new names and new hours, and a monthly art coalition that's outlasted whichever gallery happened to anchor it that year. If you've lived in Claremont long enough to notice the Village always feels the same even as the tenants keep changing, this is why.

If you're weighing a move within the Claremont area, or thinking about what a home near this kind of walkable, institution-anchored district is actually worth on paper, Lisa Warshaw can walk you through what's selling nearby and what buyers are paying attention to right now. Schedule a free concierge consultation and get a straight answer instead of a market report.