Alethia Tanner Park is 2.5 acres, dedicated in June 2020, sitting just north of the New York Avenue bridge where the Metropolitan Branch Trail meets Harry Thomas Way NE. That's not a large footprint for a neighborhood BID to build a season around. But look at what NoMa's Business Improvement District has actually scheduled there this fall: a mural festival closing party ten days ago, a farmers market that's been running every Thursday since April and keeps going through the end of October, and a pumpkin patch landing in four weeks. Three separate programs, one park, six consecutive weeks.
That's worth noticing if you live here, because it means you don't need three separate trips to catch NoMa's fall. You need one.
What Landed on September 18
Color Jam, the closing party for this year's NoMa in Color mural festival, ran from 4 to 9 p.m. at Alethia Tanner Park on September 18. The festival itself added 16 new murals this year, bringing the neighborhood's standing collection to 73 pieces, according to reporting from Hoodline. That number sits oddly next to another figure from the same reporting: NoMa in Color has produced more than 200 murals since the festival launched over a decade ago. The gap between 200 produced and 73 standing isn't a contradiction. A NoMa BID mural map from a few years back notes that some earlier murals have been painted over as new buildings went up around them. NoMa's outdoor art collection doesn't just grow. It turns over, the same way any built environment does when construction keeps pace with public art.
The bulk of this year's new work went up along a 900-foot stretch of concrete retaining wall at WMATA's Brentwood Rail Yard, just north of the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro station on the Metropolitan Branch Trail. That wall has been the festival's anchor site since the NoMa BID and WMATA's Art in Transit program started collaborating there in 2016. Artists this year were chosen through a competitive open call restricted to creators living in the DMV region, per East City Art's coverage. Sponsorship for 2026 included Events DC, micromobility partner Lime, Union Market Ace Hardware, and The Morrow Hotel, which built a custom NoMa in Color guest suite around the local artwork.
If you walked the trail before September 18, you saw work in progress. If you've walked it since, the paint has dried and the wall is finished for the year. Either way, the murals aren't going anywhere until next fall's festival starts painting over sections again.
The Market That Outlasts the Murals
While the mural festival runs its once-a-year cycle, the NoMa Farmers Market has been quietly running every single Thursday since April 30, from 4 to 8 p.m., at Armature Plaza on the 1200 block of 3rd Street NE, right where 3rd meets N Street. That's a few blocks south of Alethia Tanner Park along the same trail corridor, close enough to Union Market and the Trader Joe's on Florida Avenue that it's an easy add-on to a grocery run rather than a separate errand.
The market is scheduled to run through October 29, one day after PumpkinPalooza. That means the same week you're picking a pumpkin at Alethia Tanner Park, you can still catch the market's final Thursday of the season a few blocks south. Two of the three fall anchors overlap by exactly one day.
The Date Everyone Keeps Getting Wrong
Here's where it gets useful if you're actually planning around this. PumpkinPalooza is NoMa's annual fall festival at Alethia Tanner Park, and if you search for it, the most-shared news coverage still online reports it happening on October 24. That's accurate. It's just accurate for 2024.
This year, the NoMa BID has the event scheduled for October 28. A regional pumpkin-patch guide updated in late September confirms the 2026 date and flags Alethia Tanner Park as the only pumpkin patch inside the District with an organizational backer behind it, one block from the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro stop. The same guide notes the event ran 4 to 8 p.m. last year and suggests confirming hours directly with the BID before building an evening around it, since the schedule has shifted from year to year.
What's stayed consistent across editions is the format: the park transforms into a pick-your-own pumpkin patch with free pumpkins, a costume contest, seasonal treats, and live music, per the BID's own park page. Past years have brought in extras like baby alpacas and a pop-up beer garden, though those specifics aren't guaranteed to repeat exactly the same way each fall.
The point isn't the alpacas. It's that if you're working off a two-year-old news clip, you'll show up on the wrong Thursday.
One Park, Reclaimed Twice
Before it was a park, this site was a fenced-off vacant lot, part of an industrial rail yard contaminated enough that the cleanup required soil replacement and phytoremediation using mustard plants, according to the Cultural Landscape Foundation. The park's working name during planning was "Pepco Park," after the utility that owned the adjacent substation. The name that stuck came from a public vote: Alethia "Lethe" Tanner, an enslaved woman who purchased her own freedom in 1810 with money she earned selling vegetables near the White House, and who went on to fund Washington's first school for free Black children.
A park built on reclaimed industrial land, named after a woman who bought her own freedom, is now the site where a business improvement district throws its biggest annual party. That's not a coincidence worth explaining away. It's just where NoMa's civic center of gravity ended up, six years after the park opened.
The NoMa BID's own event copy claims its programming now draws more than 50,000 people a year to the neighborhood, up from the 25,000-plus figure the organization cited for 2023. Whatever the precise count, the direction is consistent with what's visible on the ground: more murals, a market that runs seven months a year instead of a few weekends, and a pumpkin patch that keeps needing new hours to accommodate the crowd.
The Same Half-Mile
None of this requires a car or a special trip. The Metropolitan Branch Trail, once complete, will run 8.5 miles from Silver Spring to Union Station, and the stretch that matters here is the short piece already finished: south from Rhode Island Avenue, past a concentration of murals, into Alethia Tanner Park, which itself has a playground, a dog park, plaza space, and gardens. Keep walking south past the New York Avenue underpass and you're in NoMa proper, a few blocks from the farmers market and Union Market's restaurant row.
The murals are already up for the season. The market runs one more month. The pumpkin patch is on October 28, not October 24. All three sit on the same trail, walkable in one afternoon if you time it right.
If you're weighing what NoMa looks like day to day, not just what a listing says about it, Brenda Gail Brown has spent years watching neighborhoods like this one shift block by block. Let's Connect if you want a read on what's actually happening here beyond the calendar.
