Friday Night Lights

How First Fridays brings Redding Together…

For five years now, the First Fridays of every month in downtown Redding have filled the streets with vibrant community. Dozens of participating locations, from eateries to art galleries, stay open up to two hours after normal hours for families to come and sip and shop and support local businesses. To attract and hold the crowd, vendors offer special sales, raffles, sometimes fun activities for the kids.

For example, start with THE first Fridays — that’s Fridays Vintage Clothing, at 1401 Market St. There, Dylan Mosshart invites you to his buy one, get one 30 percent off sale. Similarly, Cinders offers a discount on a second pizza. Nearby, the new SpencerJames Confectioners will hand out samples from their full spectrum of gourmet chocolates.

Also new is the renovated Shasta Historical Society building, featuring a fresh  museum exhibit for every First Friday. Hear that music? Look across the street to the Whistle Stop Park stage where one recent First Friday, performer Damilola unified a lawn full of young folks in dance for IJOYA, demonstrating the nonprofit’s focus on cross-cultural festivity. 

Across from the new Redding Public Market stands the core of First Fridays, the historic IOOF Building, now headquarters for Viva Downtown!, the nonprofit that pulled all these festivities together. Though First Fridays started as a way for downtown businesses to recover from the pandemic and major reconstruction, Program Coordinator Blake Fisher credits the downtown community response for keeping it going.

“In our wildest dreams, it was not meant to grow this big,” he recalls. “I would say it’s been three years of reorganizing, then in 2025 we partnered with the Arts Council to create an organized format. That’s when it blew up.” He says Racheal Newman, events coordinator at Shasta County Arts Council, set up an online participant application and emailed its link to everyone on the Viva Downtown! business list.

Newman took on publicizing First Fridays as a personal mission.

“There is so much in downtown. We have shops. We have art galleries. We have restaurants. We have an escape room,” she says. “I started making graphics for Facebook. I was releasing them on the Arts Council page and the Cultural District page, and Blake was like, ‘Hey, do you want to partner up?’ So we sat down and we came up with a really good system.”

Newman’s office is also in a historic building, the Old City Hall, a block north of 1401 Market, what you might call an outlier from the cluster of First Friday participants in the central business district. Newman makes sure a new art exhibit opens each month, with a reception for the artist(s) on First Fridays.

From there, it’s one block to Pipeline Craft Taps and Kitchen, which shares the corner courtyard with nonprofit Shasta Bike Depot. Executive Director Anne Thomas invites you to grab a beer and bring it into her place. She might even invite you to climb on an eBike and join her on a tour of our new system of protected bicycle paths that loop five miles, from downtown, across the Diestelhorst Bridge, to Turtle Bay and back again.

Walking one more block west takes you to Woody’s Brewing Company on Oregon Street, where you can sip and sup and sip again, particularly this January, when First Fridays falls on the day after New Year’s. Owner Bart Hauptman says it will also be the day after his company’s 11th anniversary, when they plan to honor the passing of their 10th year and welcome the 11th with their tiramisu stout and chocolate cherry stout. He’s confident these two brews will hold out for First Fridays guests arriving January 2. 

Across the street you can visit a picturesque shop signed Just Cuz Marketplace, owned by actual cousins Jessica and Angela, who specialize in gifts for every occasion, delivered in baskets built to your specifications. On the return to central Market Street, take a look around the corner on Tehama and check out Cask & Cleaver Charcuterie, where owner Kaitlyn Rodney will show you cheeses you can’t find anywhere else this far north in California. 

Not all First Friday outliers lie north of the Market business core. South to Placer, you may already know where to go for a Dam Burger, but did you know co-owner Julie Malik delights in offering “First Friesday,” a free order of large fries with the purchase of two burgers? And did you know that you just passed Shasta Fabric Boutique, where Jan Kearns is teaching a makers’ workshop?

As the Arts Council Events Coordinator Newman says, there’s so much in downtown. 

And there’s yet more to take in. Walk the block west to California and around the corner to the upscale drinkery Black Diamond Lounge, which draws its atmosphere from Redding’s history, the Black Diamond Saloon of the early 1900s. For more modern tastes, cross California to The Dip for drinks, games and live music.

From there it’s only a couple of blocks further to where two very different venues stand. On California and Gold you will find an unique cafe called Plantable, where you may experience “A Night at the Nursery,” where owner Kirkwood Hale promises to connect people listening to soft music, among plants. Or across the creek, you can eat and drink at Pourboys Tapyard, a brewery owned by Austin Carter, who considers craft beer to be the universal language of the world.

Returning north on California you’ll find Fratelli’s Pizza, where owner Brandon Smith also offers beer and live music, with works from local artists decking the walls. Looking for a place to eat with outdoor entertainment? Step outside and you stand only one block from The Park, a community hub built by Todd Franklin, who chose furniture designed to seat folks closely as they savor selections from any of a line of food trucks.

And from The Park, it’s only two blocks back to the IOOF Building, where after all that walking you might want to relax at The Art Hunger art gallery and artists social hub, where curator Karlo Henry likely has a new exhibit set up for the new month.

But first, note one more business, a shop normally closed by the time The Park fills with live band music, but not on First Fridays. Carousel, a women’s clothing boutique, figures heavily on why there are so many people bustling around you this evening. For its owner, Suzanne Russell, was the one who brought the idea for First Fridays to Blake Fisher five years ago.

”We partnered with Enjoy the Store on a flyer, and we started knocking on doors, going around to every business,” she says. “And it was just like, come downtown. Come and park, get out of your car and walk to several places. Get out and walk around, see what’s down here. Go somewhere you haven’t been before.”

All the businesses highlighted do not cover the total number of Viva Downtown!’s list of active participants in 2025. Many more are waiting for you to discover. Come and see! •