For a city that measures roughly two and a half square miles, Berkley punches above its footprint every summer. Most of what makes June through August feel like Berkley happens on a single spine: Twelve Mile Road running east to west, and Coolidge cutting across it. Walk that intersection on a Thursday evening in July and you already know half the people in line for tacos.
This year, the spine has a new anchor. And that changes how the rest of the summer strings together.
The Coolidge anchor, finally
The building at 3180 Coolidge sat empty for years as a shabby former auto parts shop. In early 2026, it opened as The Beverly, a 105-seat New American room with a long bar, a 52-seat patio pending warm weather, and a kitchen run by chef Norman Valenti of Bar Pigalle in Detroit's Brush Park. Owner Travis Fourmont has lived in Berkley for around thirteen years, and the pitch he gave Hour Detroit was simple: keep the downtown polish, drop the downtown formality.
What matters for anyone already living here is less the menu and more the geography. The Beverly puts a lunch, happy hour, and dinner room on Coolidge that pulls a different crowd than what Twelve Mile has traditionally offered. Fourmont has been public about who he plans to lean on:
- Bread from Crispelli's, two blocks south on Woodward
- Specialty cheeses from Monger's Provisions in Detroit
- A collaboration in the works with Bombshell Treat Bar, the ice cream shop his daughter favors
- An informal exchange with Casa Amado Taqueria, the James Beard–honored spot around the corner where Valenti has occasionally worked a shift for his friend, chef Amado Lopez
Read that list again as a resident, not a diner. It means the Coolidge stretch is starting to behave like a small food district that references itself. A dessert at Bombshell after dinner at The Beverly isn't a suggestion from a tourism board. It's a supply chain.
Thursdays belong to Oxford Park
The second thing to know about a Berkley summer is that Thursday nights have a default answer. Berkley Parks and Recreation runs its Berkley Beats concert series on select Thursdays at 7 p.m., and the 2026 schedule keeps most of the season at Oxford Park at 2100 Bacon:
- June 25 — Harmonic Swell & The Bridge of Reverberation
- July 9 — The Groove Suns
- July 30 — Weekend Comeback
The concerts are free, hosted by Parks and Rec, and folded into the broader Berkley SummerFest programming that runs alongside the CruiseFest Classic Car Parade and WinterFest as the city's three tentpole events. Full details and any weather-related venue moves to the Berkley Community Center on Robina are worth checking on the city's events page or the Oakland County Moms roundup.
The practical read on those dates: Oxford Park sits about a five-minute walk south of Twelve Mile off Coolidge. If you're already going to dinner on the Coolidge stretch, the concert isn't a separate trip. It's the after.
Berkley's summer isn't a calendar of unrelated events. It's a single walkable loop with three moods: eat, listen, look at old cars.
June 13: Art Bash takes Twelve Mile
Before the concert cadence starts, the Berkley Art Bash turns Twelve Mile into a closed street party on Saturday, June 13, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Presented by the Berkley Area Chamber of Commerce and running since 2001, the fair draws crowds of more than 10,000 for around 180 artists and makers, live music, and street food from the downtown restaurants themselves.
Two things distinguish Art Bash from a generic craft fair. First, it's actually curated around handmade work, not resale booths. Second, because the shops and restaurants on Twelve Mile stay open through the closure, it doubles as the one day a year you can walk the whole downtown without checking for cars. If you've been meaning to try a place three doors down that you always drive past, that Saturday is the day.
August 14: the night Twelve Mile closes
The single loudest evening of the Berkley summer is Friday, August 14, at 6:30 p.m., when the CruiseFest Classic Car Parade rolls westbound down Twelve Mile from Woodward to Ellwood. The city's CruiseFest page lays out the mechanics, but two details matter if you live inside the closure zone.
First, only cars from 1979 or older can enter the parade itself, which is why the sound and the paint jobs skew toward chrome-bumper Detroit iron rather than modern muscle. Registrations run through Parks and Rec at 248-658-3470.
Second, the road closures are longer than the parade. Twelve Mile shuts down between Woodward and Greenfield at 6 p.m., along with Coolidge at Twelve Mile. The parade wraps around 8 p.m., at which point Twelve Mile from Woodward to Coolidge reopens. The stretch from Coolidge to Buckingham, plus all side streets between them at Twelve Mile, stays closed until roughly midnight for the after-parade festivities.
If you live on one of those side streets between Coolidge and Buckingham, plan to park elsewhere by late afternoon. If you live outside the closure but want to watch, the smart move is to walk in from the north or south rather than trying to loop around by car. The event has been running for more than 25 years, and the traffic pattern is by now a Berkley civic ritual.
Stringing the summer together
Take those pieces and lay them on a map and a calendar, and the shape of a Berkley summer becomes something you can actually plan against instead of react to.
A workable Thursday looks like an early dinner at The Beverly or tacos at Casa Amado, then the ten-minute walk to Oxford Park for Berkley Beats at 7. A workable Saturday in June is coffee somewhere on Twelve Mile before 10, then a slow lap through Art Bash, then something cold from Bombshell Treat Bar on the way home. A workable mid-August Friday is dinner early enough to be out of your car by 6, folding chairs on Twelve Mile by 6:30, and Coolidge closed to traffic behind you as the parade passes.
The point isn't that any one of these is new. Cruise nights have been a Berkley fixture since the late 1990s, and the concerts have moved between Bacon Park's pavilion and the Community Center for years. The point is that 2026 is the first summer where the Coolidge stretch has a full-service, sit-down restaurant working actively with the shops around it. That's a small change with an outsized effect on how a Thursday plays out.
A note on why any of this matters
Berkley's identity has always been walkability plus a set of small, owner-operated storefronts. What tends to happen in inner-ring suburbs when a place like The Beverly opens is one of two things. Either the new arrival ignores its neighbors and imports a downtown crowd for a year before fading, or it does the harder work of tying itself to the block. Fourmont's public commitments to Crispelli's, Monger's, Casa Amado, and Bombshell suggest the second path. The summer calendar is the test.
If you've lived here long enough to remember what the Coolidge corner looked like with a crooked "for sale" sign on the old auto parts shop, this is the summer to walk it.
If you're weighing what your home might be worth as Berkley's downtown gets denser, or thinking about the small streets between Coolidge and Buckingham for your next move, I'd welcome the conversation. Deborah Gannes has spent 35-plus years helping buyers and sellers across Birmingham and the inner-ring Oakland County suburbs make careful, well-timed decisions. Schedule a free consultation to talk through your options at your pace.
