The three-day food festival runs Friday, July 3, through Sunday, July 5, at the Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Drive, with the ticketed drone show scheduled for Saturday, July 4. General admission is $12 per day for advance tickets sold online through Eventbrite, with children under 5 admitted free. The festival features more than 250 food, drink and artisan vendors.
City officials said ahead of the 2025 show that the drone performance was visible only from inside the Rose Bowl event area, and urged residents without tickets not to travel to the surrounding neighborhood to watch.
The drone show replaces AmericaFest, the Independence Day fireworks spectacular that ran for nearly a century at the stadium and was long billed as the largest fireworks show on the West Coast. The last traditional AmericaFest, the event’s 96th edition, was held July 4, 2022, but a scaled-back version was staged in 2024.
Money ended it. The 2022 event lost more than $500,000, Rose Bowl Operating Company Chief Executive Officer and General Manager Jens Weiden said in June 2023.
“That just isn’t sustainable long term,” Weiden said at the time, adding the company would work with stakeholders in the Arroyo and the city on what the celebration would become.
Wescom Credit Union had been announced as AmericaFest’s sole presenting sponsor for a five-year term on June 13, 2022 — less than a month before what turned out to be the final full-scale traditional AmericaFest.
For two years, professional soccer filled the gap. Major League Soccer rivalry matches between the LA Galaxy and Los Angeles Football Club drew 82,110 fans on July 4, 2023 — a league single-game attendance record — and 70,076 fans on July 4, 2024.
The 2023 fireworks were held after the game on the adjacent Brookside Golf Course and were accessible only to ticket holders, ending decades of free viewing from the surrounding neighborhoods.
On July 4, 2024, a fireworks show followed the Galaxy-LAFC match at the stadium — an event the Rose Bowl’s own press release for the game described as featuring “the longest-running fireworks display on the West Coast.” It was the last time traditional fireworks of any kind were fired at the Rose Bowl on the Fourth of July.
The full break came in 2025, when the Rose Bowl for the first time in its history replaced its Fourth of July fireworks entirely with a drone show — approximately 750 synchronized drones — and brought in FoodieLand as the anchor event.
City officials cited fire risk and air quality: the South Coast Air Quality Management District has documented that July 4 and July 5 are the worst air quality days of the year, and the decision followed the Eaton Fire, which ignited Jan. 7, 2025.
The Rose Bowl itself was converted into a staging area for approximately 4,000 first responders during that fire, which caused approximately $2.4 million in financial impact to the Rose Bowl Operating Company’s Fiscal Year 2025 finances.
Other than the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, “this is the first time in many, many years — I’ve been here 23 years — and this is first year where we will have no fireworks at the Rose Bowl,” city spokesperson Lisa Derderian said at a June 18, 2025, press conference announcing the change.
Councilmember Tyron Hampton, whose District 1 includes the Arroyo Seco and the Rose Bowl, said in an interview last week that the change has reshaped the crowds that once filled the area each Fourth of July.
“We used to have a lot of folks that came to the area for watching fireworks,” Hampton said. “Just as that has changed to drones, it’s also changed the crowds that we used to receive, but some things are meant to change, I guess. As we are more conscientious of our environment, conscious of our air quality, some things do have to change, but the one thing that should always stay constant is us coming together and celebrating our freedoms.”
Hampton said the festival offers food from restaurants across Los Angeles County, Pasadena and the state.
“It’s going to be a great opportunity just to come out, hang out, and be with your neighbors,” he said.
Mayor Victor Gordo said in an interview that he considers the Rose Bowl event and the city’s neighborhood block parties, taken together, to be Pasadena’s citywide celebration, and he urged residents to attend. He also signaled interest in expanding the city’s official observance in future years.
“I would like to see a 4th of July parade or other events,” Gordo said. “I think that would be fun and people would enjoy it.”
The transition carries particular history for Councilmember Rick Cole of District 2, who as a young councilmember co-chaired the effort to save the annual fireworks show, which he described in written responses to Pasadena Now as “central to community pride as well as patriotic spirit.” Asked how the city’s relationship with the holiday has changed, Cole said residents have grown “more blasé about holidays as the opportunity for leisure, entertainment and flag waving.”
Meanwhile, the city has intensified enforcement of its fireworks ban, which prohibits all fireworks within city limits, including the “safe and sane” varieties legal in some other California cities.
At a June 23 press conference at Pasadena City Hall Chambers, city officials announced that Pasadena police, serving a search warrant in Los Angeles on June 19, 2026, seized approximately 10,000 pounds of illegal fireworks and explosives with an estimated street value of more than $120,000, resulting in four arrests.
Fire Chief Chad Augustin delivered a zero-tolerance message at Fire Station 38 ahead of the holiday. Violations of the city ordinance can carry up to six months in county jail, fines of $250 to $1,000 and liability for the cost of disposing of confiscated fireworks. More serious violations involving dangerous fireworks can trigger state penalties of up to one year in county jail and fines reaching $5,000.
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