Picking up where we left off, at the end of June with last week’s paper, we find to no surprise that the first weekend in July 2025 was, as always, preoccupied with Independence Day celebrations, parades and fireworks. And so it was in 2025—our July 3 issue had a colorized postcard of a late-19th-century parade in the Plaza, plus details on the Duck Dash, Kid’s Parade and American Legion Fireworks show the next night.
Also covered was the newly named Mill Street Row, a business park in development across the avenue from the more high-profile Mill District. The businesses in the Row included Coyote Sonoma, Jane Dispensary, the Elephant in the Room and Parish Café, each a potential anchor tenant in their own right. It got better: the celebrated Condor & Quail bakery moved in later in the year, giving this historic mill works a solid impact on downtown identity.
The July 10 issue re-introduced the Harm Reduction Coalition, including two retired physicians David Anderson and Walter Maack, who embarked on wide distribution of Narcan. With the Police Department’s social worker Jeff McGee, the group distributed thousands of Narcan inhalers to counteract heroin and fentanyl overdoses, bringing the quick-acting antidote to at-risk populations, local stores and businesses.
Gay Wine Weekend, formerly a Sonoma Valley event, embraced its new home with the July 29 issue and SIP, Songwriters in Paradise, showed up for its third year in Healdsburg. Also celebrating its third year in town was the BloodRoot Ramble festival of alt-rock bands, held at the Community Center in early June. Such targeted social events helped focus Healdsburg’s identity as not just about wine, but as a community that has it all.
Too, Healdsburg continued to be seen as quite receptive to the Hispanic population and heritage found here—appropriately, as Healdsburg’s population has been almost one-third Latine for decades. The Oaxaqueño tradition of Guelaguetza came to the Plaza on July 27, introducing the deep Indigenous traditions of Southern Mexico to Plaza Park, the one-acre tree’d and green square in the heart of town. Dances, songs and prayers, and arts and crafts animated the heart of the town that Harmon Heald sketched out in 1856. That cultural receptivity included the Pachanga Arts Festival in September and the Dia de Muertos celebration in October, both held in the Plaza…