Three October 24 Anniversaries at Twin Pines Park
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Belmont turns 100 years old on October 29, 2026. The city is not waiting until then to celebrate. The public party lands five days earlier, on Saturday, October 24, because nobody plans a parade for a Thursday. The city's centennial page outlines its celebration, while two other groups are marking their own milestones that Saturday at the same park. If you show up for Belmont's 100th, you'll also be walking into a reunion for a skating rink that no longer exists and a tenth anniversary for the Silicon Valley Ice Skating Association.
That collision is worth understanding before you plan your day, because it changes what "Belmont's Centennial" actually looks like on the ground.
Belmont's Parks and Recreation Department laid out the plan for Centennial Fest at an April commission meeting: a parade, an afternoon event at Twin Pines Park, and, if enough sponsors come through, a nighttime drone show. As of that meeting, police were still working out the parade route and the city was actively soliciting sponsorships to lock in the drone show. If you want the exact route and a confirmed lineup, the city's centennial page is the place to check closer to the date, since those pieces were explicitly described as still in motion.
What is locked in: Las Pulgas Big Band will play a set of swing, Latin jazz, and big band standards at Twin Pines Park that afternoon, according to the band's own show listing. That's a small detail, but it tells you something about the tone the city is going for. This isn't a stage-and-fireworks spectacle. It's closer to a very large block party with a marching band component.
Also on October 24, the Belmont skating community is gathering at Twin Pines Manor to mark 60 years since Belmont Iceland, the rink that generations of local kids learned to skate at, and 10 years of the Silicon Valley Ice Skating Association. Three anniversaries, one address: 100 years of the city, 60 years of a rink that's part of local memory now rather than a current business, and 10 years of the group that grew out of that memory.
The reason this makes sense once you know Twin Pines Park's history is that the park has always been the place where Belmont's older institutions get preserved when the buildings themselves don't survive. The Manor House on the property was once part of the Twin Pines Sanitarium, a fixture of Belmont's early decades when the town was known for small schools and sanitariums rather than housing subdivisions. In 1972, the site was slated for potential rezoning into offices and apartments. A citizen campaign fought that off, and by 1973 both the park and the Manor House were designated city landmarks, according to a detailed history of Ralston Hall and Twin Pines Park. Fifty-plus years later, that same rescued building is where a skating community goes to remember a rink that's gone.
If you grew up skating at Belmont Iceland, or if your kids did, that reunion is arguably the more emotionally loaded event of the day. It just happens to be sharing a parking lot with the city's own party.
The October 24 gathering is the single biggest date, but it's not the only thing happening under the centennial banner this year. The city has layered smaller, low-key touches into daily life around town:
None of this is meant to be a single headline moment. It's meant to be background texture you notice over the course of the year if you're paying attention to your own street.
The most telling piece of the whole centennial framework is something the city calls "100 Celebrations." Instead of concentrating the milestone into one official spectacle, Belmont is asking residents to host their own small gatherings and count them toward a running tally of 100 community celebrations citywide. A dinner with neighbors, a group walk, a coffee or happy hour hosted by a few households counts, as long as you email the city to let them know. The city will supply a small party bag of cups, napkins, and stickers if you want to make it official, and it's tracking submissions toward that round number.
That structure tells you something about how the city is thinking about its own history. Belmont was named for Ralston Hall, the estate William Chapman Ralston built on what's now the campus of Notre Dame de Namur University, from the Italian phrase "belle monte," meaning beautiful mountain. The town spent its early decades as a cluster of sanitariums and small schools rather than a single dominant institution. A centennial built from a hundred small, resident-hosted gatherings rather than one massive city-run production fits a place whose identity has always been assembled from smaller pieces rather than one landmark.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things, the practical takeaway is simple. October 24 at Twin Pines Park gets you the parade, the band, and possibly the drone show. A skating reunion is also scheduled at Twin Pines Manor. And if you'd rather mark the year on your own terms, the "100 Celebrations" count is still open through the end of the year if you want your own gathering added to the tally. Either way, checking the city's centennial page before October 24 will save you from guessing at a parade route that, as of this spring, the city itself hadn't finalized.
If you've got a Belmont story worth adding to the city's Centennial Stories podcast, or you're weighing what a year like this means for a house you've been thinking about for a while, D & L Properties is a Burlingame-based, easy call away.
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