Summer will sing its swan song as communities celebrate Labor Day weekend.

Those long, warm days are waning. Vacations are winding down, and it won’t be long before South Bay youngsters will be carrying schoolbooks instead of beach towels.

As summer ends, several cities are planning to give it a good send-off over the Labor Day weekend with everything from a teen dance and a community picnic to an enormous art fair at the beach.

“This is the last chance to sit around and relax before you go back to school,” said Nancie Silver, director of Hesse Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, who is coordinating the city’s first-ever free Labor Day community picnic. It will be held Monday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the park, 29301 Hawthorne Blvd.

“This will be family-oriented, and we hope people will come out with children,” Silver said. “There’ll be ‘50s and ‘60s music, not hard rock.” Other attractions include volleyball, relay races, face painting and a pie-eating contest.

She’s expecting the Tiger Bounce to be one of the big draws of the day. It’s a large inflated device that looks like a tiger and is a kind of enclosed trampoline. “Kids go in and bounce around,” Silver said. It will cost $1.

As it has every Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend for 14 years, the Fiesta de las Artes will take over downtown Hermosa Beach Saturday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The celebration is centered at Pier and Hermosa avenues, but it spills out over a five-block area.

More than 400 booths will be devoted to work by artists and crafts people from as far away as New Mexico, Idaho and Washington state. A 32-booth food pavilion will serve concoctions from around the world.

“This has a real holiday feeling,” said B. J. Conte, fiesta coordinator for the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce. She said police estimated the last Memorial Day crowd at 200,000, adding, “The city was maxed out.”

At the fiesta, people on foot or pushing baby strollers and bicycles wander from booth to booth, taking in the ceramics, jewelry, leather and wood work, hand-painted clothing, blown glass, photographs, molded paper sculpture, and oil and acrylic paintings the various artists have to offer.

Many artists will have Christmas items, and Conte said prices will range from $1 for knickknacks to several thousand dollars for fine art. The show frequently reflects new art trends, and Conte said this year it seems to be bonsai plants--”People are going for these”--and waterfalls made of volcanic rocks. “You plug it in and it makes a nice soothing sound,” she said.

Mingling with the artists will be such entertainers as Sparkles the clown, the Zydeco Party Band playing Louisiana Cajun tunes, along with flute and electric fiddle players and puppets.

Said Conte, “We decided not to get into rock and roll jamming music because it’s not conducive to shopping.”

The crowds make driving, not to mention parking, difficult for blocks around the fiesta. That’s why the chamber is urging people to part with $3 and park at Mira Costa High School at Artesia Boulevard and Peck Avenue in Manhattan Beach. There’s a free shuttle between the school and the festival.

Music by local bands will be on tap at Carson’s Scott Park, 23410 Catskill Ave., on Sunday. Los Siglos Seis will perform Top 40 tunes from 2 to 4 p.m., and the reggae band Second Thoughts will take over from 5 to 7 p.m. Park Director James Foisia said the free event is intended to be a family afternoon with picnicking and music.

Also in Carson, Mills Park, 1340 E. Dimondale Drive, will hold a teen “back to school” dance with a live band on Saturday from 8 p.m. to midnight. Admission is $1.

The 45-member Palos Verdes Symphonic Band and a small brass contingent called the Snitzelnotes will be featured at the annual free family picnic on Monday from 4 p.m. to dusk at the South Coast Botanic Garden, 26300 Crenshaw Blvd. on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“People come and picnic and listen to the music,” said Norma Cantafio, executive director of the garden’s foundation support group. “It’s a place for them to come that’s local. They can enjoy the holiday without having to hit the freeway.”

“Hollywood Bowl on the Hill” is the the way band director Richard Schwalbe describes the program of light classics and marches he has planned. “The band goes from about 5 until we run out of tunes or run out of lip,” he said.

Said Cantafio: “The kids can romp and the parents can listen. It’s very casual.”

In one of the most spectacular events of the weekend, tall ships will sail into Marina del Rey on Monday at about 9:45 a.m., complete with an escort of small craft and fireboats spraying water. “They’ll be coming from north and south to rendezvous at the marina, and their large sails will make them visible along the coast,” said Jim Cole, special services chief for the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors.

Two of the six ships--copies of 19th-Century vessels--will remain at the marina’s Fisherman’s Village until Sept. 8 for public tours that begin at 1 p.m. on Monday. One of them, the Pilgrim, is a replica of the merchant ship that carried writer Richard Henry Dana and inspired his classic work, “Two Years Before the Mast.”

Organizers of some Labor Day weekend events say the South Bay is a perfect place to bid summer farewell. Said the Hermosa Beach chamber’s Conte, “I don’t know another place where you can have fun, people-watch and enjoy the good weather for the last days of summer.”