Scroll through what looks like McLean's fall lineup and it reads like five separate calendars stitched together: a school kickoff party, a harvest festival, a road race, a juried art show, a Friday farmers market that refuses to end. Different flyers, different logos, different Instagram accounts sharing the news. It looks like a lot to track.
It isn't. Nearly every one of those events is organized, hosted, or funded by the same two buildings and the same nonprofit foundation. Once you see that pattern, the fall season stops looking like a scattered list and starts looking like what it actually is: a compact, repeatable civic rhythm that a resident can plan around in about five minutes.
Two Addresses Doing Most Of The Work
The McLean Community Center on Ingleside Avenue and the Old Firehouse Center on Chain Bridge Road are the two venues behind nearly every named event this fall. The Community Center runs Harvest Happenings and co-produces McLean Artfest, the juried art show long known as MPAartfest, with the McLean Project for the Arts. The Old Firehouse handles the season's kickoff party and serves as packet pickup for the McLean 5K. Layered underneath both is the McLean Community Foundation, the nonprofit that has funded local projects from playgrounds to fire trucks for more than 40 years and collects the proceeds from the 5K itself.
That is the whole structure. Two buildings, one foundation, and a run of Saturdays between late August and early October that a resident doesn't need five apps to follow.
August 29: The Old Firehouse Opens The Season
The first Saturday belongs to the Old Firehouse Center at 1440 Chain Bridge Road. OFC Ignite's Back to School Kickoff & Tailgate Party runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on August 29, a free family event built around ping pong, board games, arcade games, food, music, and refreshments, timed to send kids into the new school year with something to look forward to rather than dread. It's part of the Community Center's regular monthly Ignite series at the Old Firehouse, so if this Saturday works for your family's rhythm, it's worth knowing the format repeats.
The Fall Calendar At A Glance
| Date | Event | Location | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 29 | Back to School Kickoff & Tailgate Party | Old Firehouse Center, 1440 Chain Bridge Rd | Free |
| Sept. 26 | Harvest Happenings | McLean Community Center, 1234 Ingleside Ave | Free |
| Oct. 4 | McLean Artfest (formerly MPAartfest) | McLean Central Park | Free |
| Oct. 10* | McLean 5K | Start/finish at McLean Square Shopping Center | $50 by race day |
| Fridays through Nov. | McLean Farmers Market | Lewinsville Park | Free to attend |
*See note below on the 5K date before you register.
September 26: Harvest Happenings Fills The Community Center
Four weeks later, the calendar moves indoors and out at the Community Center itself. Harvest Happenings runs from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, September 26, and it's free. The format is built for families with younger kids: live entertainment, hands-on crafts, interactive games, and visits with animals, all inside the same building where fall class registration happens every year. If you've never been inside the Community Center beyond a class pickup, this is the low-stakes way to see what the building actually does.
October 4: Artfest Closes A Loop
A little over a week later, the pattern closes on itself. McLean Artfest, the juried show most longtime residents still know as MPAartfest, runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 4, at McLean Central Park, and it's the one event on this list produced jointly by both anchor organizations: the McLean Community Center and the McLean Project for the Arts. More than 30 local and regional artists exhibit across painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media, with live music and food vendors running through the day. It's free to attend, and it functions as a kind of bridge between the Community Center's own programming and the arts organization that shares its park.
The Race Date Everyone Gets Wrong
Less than a week after Artfest, the calendar hits its one genuine logistics puzzle. Search for the McLean 5K online and you'll find real conflicting answers. Third-party race aggregators list the 2026 event on October 7, October 10, and October 25, and at least one repeats the outdated "first Saturday in October" description while pointing to a date that isn't a Saturday at all. The McLean Community Foundation's own site, which organizes the race alongside the Community Center, lists October 10, 2026 with an 8 a.m. start. That's the number to trust, but given how much this listing has moved around across sources, confirm the date directly at mcfonline.org before you build a Saturday around it.
What doesn't move is the structure underneath it. The course starts and finishes at the McLean Square Shopping Center on Old Dominion Drive, and packet pickup has historically run out of the Old Firehouse Center, the same building that opened the season with the tailgate party in August. Registration fees climb in tiers as the date approaches, and every dollar of proceeds goes to the McLean Community Foundation, the same organization funding neighborhood projects the other 51 weeks of the year. It isn't a commercial road race that happens to pass through McLean. It's a fundraiser wearing running shoes.
The Friday Constant
Threaded through all of it is the one event that doesn't take a Saturday off. The McLean Farmers Market runs Fridays from May through November at Lewinsville Park, which sits along the same Chain Bridge Road corridor as the Old Firehouse Center. It isn't a headline event with a flyer and a countdown, but it's the connective tissue between the Saturdays above. If you're building a fall weekend around any of the events on this list, a Friday market run beforehand is the easiest way to make it a two-day stretch instead of a single afternoon.
Marking The Calendar
The honest version of "what's happening in McLean this fall" isn't a scroll through five unrelated event pages. It's four Saturdays and one recurring Friday, run almost entirely by the Community Center, the Old Firehouse, the McLean Project for the Arts, and the Foundation that funds all three. Once you know that, planning the season takes less time than reading about it used to.
For a longer look at how the neighborhood's dining and cultural scene has filled in this year, our earlier post on McLean's quiet late-summer calendar picks up where June and July left off. And if you're the kind of McLean resident who ends up fielding real estate questions from friends who visit for one of these Saturdays and don't want to leave, that's the conversation Maria Park has most often. Work With Maria when you're ready to have it.
