Sat, Sept 26 · 10 AM–6 PM · 57 Chestnut St

Spacecat Oktoberfest, fifth year running.

Spacecat Brewing calls it their biggest party of the year, and the lineup backs it up: German-style beers brewed right there on Chestnut Street, food all day from Whistleville Grille, live music from Pimpanella and Dad Bod, a beer tap truck, and a Brat Toss and Steinholding competition with prizes.

$40 covers the food, your first beer, both bands, and the competitions. Buy during the presale through September 4 and you also get a swag bag from local businesses, a custom embroidered Spacecat glass, an Oktoberfest t-shirt, and your spot in one of the competitions. 21+ only. Raise a stein.

Puppetry is the rare art form that a four-year-old and a forty-year-old can watch at the same time and both come away happy. Sunday, Stepping Stones gives it a whole building. Puppet Fest runs 10 AM to 5 PM at 303 West Avenue — live performances through the day, workshops with working puppeteers, and hands-on stations where kids build something with a mouth that opens and take it home. It is included with museum admission, which means no separate ticket and no reason to overthink it. Go in the morning if you want the performances without the crowd, or go late and let them wear themselves out on the last free Sunday before homework exists again. Schedule and showtimes are on the museum’s page.

Schedule & showtimes →

SoNo Saturday Market

The last-Saturday market comes back to Washington Street for four hours: thirty-plus local vendors, fresh food, artisan goods, live music, and lawn games in the plaza. It is the version of SoNo that works best — the street doing what a street is for, with room to stand around and talk. Free to walk through, and close enough to everything else downtown that you can make an afternoon of it without moving the car.

Vendors & details →

314’s Book Swap

Bring a book, take a book. That is the entire mechanic, and it works. 314 Beer Garden runs an informal community swap Thursday evening at 314 Wilson Avenue — no sign-up, no fee, no one checking whether your paperback is a fair trade for theirs. Good week for it, too: everybody is clearing shelves for school anyway. Go through the pile you have been meaning to go through, walk in with four, walk out with four different ones.

Event details →

Sunday’s puppet festival happens on the grounds of a house that almost got bulldozed. The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion went up on West Avenue between 1864 and 1868 for LeGrand Lockwood, a Norwalk-born railroad and Wall Street financier — sixty-odd rooms of granite, stained glass, and inlaid wood, one of the earliest and largest Second Empire country houses in the country, finished a good twenty-five years before the Newport palaces it usually gets compared to. Lockwood lost most of his fortune in the 1869 gold panic and died in 1872. The Mathews family bought the place and lived there for decades; the city eventually took it over, and by the 1960s there was a live urban-renewal plan to knock it down. Neighbors organized and stopped it. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1971. The park around it is now Stepping Stones, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, a playground, and on Sunday, a lot of puppets.

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