For most of the past decade, the first two weekends of October in Shaw have felt like two separate holidays. One weekend belonged to the Missouri Botanical Garden and its Best of Missouri Market crowd. The next belonged to the Historic Shaw Art Fair, four blocks east on Flora Place. If you lived here, you learned to pace yourself. You picked a weekend. You accepted that the other one would happen without you.
That is not the plan this year. In 2026 the two events land on the same Saturday and Sunday, and the alignment is deliberate. The 2026 Shaw Art Fair moved to the second weekend of October, October 10 and 11, because the Missouri Botanical Garden's Best of Missouri Market was shifted to accommodate removal of a special exhibition the weekend prior. For residents, that is the whole story. One weekend, two of the largest gatherings the neighborhood produces all year, both inside a fifteen-minute walk of Sasha's on Shaw.
The Overlap, In Hours
Here is what actually shares the sidewalk this October:
| Event | Location | Friday Oct 9 | Saturday Oct 10 | Sunday Oct 11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best of Missouri Market | Missouri Botanical Garden, 4344 Shaw Blvd | 9a–5p | 9a–5p (members 8–9a) | 9a–5p |
| Historic Shaw Art Fair | 4100 & 4200 Flora Place | — | 9a–5p | 10a–5p |
The Best of Missouri Market brings more than 150 of the region's finest artisans, crafters, and food and beverage producers, plus live music, family programming, and a two-acre Kid's Corner adjacent to the Children's Garden. General admission is $18, with $9 tickets for children ages 3 to 12 and for Garden members, and free entry for Festival-level members and their kids.
Four blocks east, on the grass median of Flora Place, the Art Fair is a different animal. The 34th season features 120 artists, with $8 weekend passes in advance or $10 at the gate, and a $1 discount at the gate for a canned food donation to the local food pantry. The 4100 and 4200 blocks of Flora Place are closed to vehicles both days, which turns the parkway between the eastbound and westbound lanes into a wide pedestrian promenade. The concurrent scheduling with Best of Missouri Market means the two events sit directly across Tower Grove Avenue from each other.
The practical upshot: if you park once, on a side street near Shaw Boulevard, you can hit both without moving your car. That has never really been true before.
Build The Saturday Around Fiddlehead Fern
The Tower Grove Farmers' Market keeps running through all of it. Saturdays are 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., April 4 through November 7, with roughly 120 vendors set up in Tower Grove Park. If you want the full trifecta, the sequence works like this:
- 7:30–8:30 a.m. Coffee at Fiddlehead Fern Cafe, 4066 Russell. Get in before the neighborhood does.
- 8:30–10 a.m. Farmers' market in Tower Grove Park. This is a good time to load up on anything you plan to cook that night, because you will not be cooking Sunday.
- 10 a.m.–1 p.m. Cross Tower Grove Avenue and walk Flora Place. The Art Fair opens at nine on Saturday.
- 1–3 p.m. Lunch break. Well Met Café at 4100 Shenandoah is the most obvious hand-off. The café is owned by three familiar local restaurateurs, Brian Schmitz and Jonathan Schoen along with beverage director Travis Hebrank, whose Be Polite Hospitality also runs Polite Society, The Bellwether, and two kitchens at City Foundry.
- 3–5 p.m. Back across for Best of Missouri Market at the Garden. This is a good order because the Garden's crowd thins in the late afternoon while the Art Fair peaks.
That is one park, two festivals, and a legitimate breakfast, all inside a half-mile square.
Sunday Uses The Rest Of The Neighborhood
By Sunday morning most residents have had enough of festival crowds. Good. Sunday is the day the rest of Shaw earns its keep.
Wild Olive Provisions at 2201 S. 39th and Tee Rak Thai next door at 2203 S. 39th sit on the same short block as the SNIA office, which means the entire block is on foot from Flora Place. Wild Olive is a wine and artisan food shop. Tee Rak Thai is Shaw's newer Thai restaurant, and it has drawn a steady stream of local press since opening. Two doors up, Ices Plain & Fancy at 2256 S. 39th has been doing made-to-order nitro ice cream since 2014 and is still one of the few in the country doing it that way at retail.
If you want to stay closer to Shenandoah, Gallery Pub on Thurman at 4069 Shenandoah, Sasha's on Shaw at 4069 Shaw Boulevard, and Damn Fine Handpies at 4000 Shaw form the other loop. That is a hand pie, a glass of wine, and a walk home, without ever crossing Tower Grove Avenue.
The Art Fair closes at five on Sunday. If you time it right, you can catch the last hour on Flora Place, walk to Well Met for an early dinner, and be home before the streetlights come on.
A Vacant Filling Station At Russell And Thurman
The other thing worth knowing before this weekend, even if it does not affect the weekend itself: the empty gas station on the northeast corner of Russell and Thurman is being converted into a taqueria.
St. Louis restaurateur Jordan Goodman is converting 4065 Russell Boulevard into a taqueria with indoor seating, a four-seasons patio, and a walk-up window. The tight menu leans on tacos like al pastor, carnitas, and barbacoa, plus a walk-up window and a separate bar area, with about 44 seats inside and roughly 24 more on the patio, dinner service on weeknights and lunch and dinner on weekends. The two small buildings on the site total about 2,000 square feet, with the kitchen and covered patio in one structure and the bar in the other. No opening date has been announced.
If you have lived in Shaw for more than a couple of years, that corner has been part of the neighborhood's mental map as "the empty gas station" for so long that it is a small shock to imagine anything else there. Placed on the map, it changes the Russell corridor. Fiddlehead Fern sits one block west at 4066 Russell. Cornerstone Center for Early Learning is at 3901 Russell. The new taqueria drops squarely between them, on a corner that has generated zero foot traffic for years. Whatever else it does, it fills a hole that was starting to look permanent.
The Argument, If You Live Here
Shaw has spent the last few years quietly turning into a neighborhood you no longer have to leave. The signal is not any single opening. It is that Well Met, Tee Rak Thai, Wild Olive Provisions, and now a taqueria at Russell and Thurman have all appeared inside a stretch of blocks that was under-restauranted a decade ago. The Art Fair and Best of Missouri Market lining up on the same weekend is the punctuation on that, not the argument for it.
For a resident, the practical read is straightforward: this is the year to invite friends who live in other zip codes. They can park once. They can eat at Well Met, drink at Gallery Pub, cross the street for Best of Missouri Market, cross back for the Art Fair, and pick up ice cream at Ices Plain & Fancy on the walk to the car. You can point at a filling station and tell them what it is about to become. You can point at Flora Place and tell them about the 1897 boulevard under their feet. That is the version of the neighborhood tour that only works if you already live here.
And if this weekend is the one that convinces you Shaw is the neighborhood you want to plant in for a while longer, or the one you want to help a friend find their way into, Bethany DeMaggio and DeMaggio Partners know the block-by-block texture of Shaw well enough to talk through what buying, selling, or holding here looks like on the other side of the festival tents. Book a consultation or a home valuation when you are ready to talk.
