Fire Island Summer Season Opening 2026

The Fire Island Summer Season Opening weekend — Memorial Day weekend in late May — marks the official start of the Fire Island gay summer. The communities of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, which have been essentially unpopulated since Labor Day the previous September, come back to life over Memorial Day weekend as homeowners open their houses, share house groups arrive for their first weekend, and the ferries from Bay Shore begin running on the summer schedule. The Ice Palace at Cherry Grove and the Pines Pavilion both run circuit-style opening parties that draw thousands of visitors from the New York area. The Opening Weekend has a specific atmosphere unlike any other weekend of the summer: the combination of reunion (regulars encountering each other after nine months), first-timer excitement, and the particular pleasure of returning to a beloved place after a long absence creates an energy that the height-of-summer weekends, for all their density, do not quite replicate.