San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
City dwellers ready to ‘Boo!’ as sales boom
It may well have been the most beautiful day of the year — sunny, warm, not a cloud in the sky. At night, there was a half moon, clear and luminous. It was only last Saturday. The clouds rolled in on Sunday, and rain with it. Dinner at the River’s End restaurant on the Sonoma coast was spectacular: a red sunset mixed with a rain shower, as if the curtain was coming down on a stage play.
It doesn’t take a climate scientist to see the seasons change in this part of the world. Already it is dark as the inside of an owl these late October mornings, and soon it will be dark by 5:00 in the afternoon. Enough daylight has been saved and it will be back to standard time and the rainy season. If you look carefully, you can see it already. The first good rain is producing shoots of green grass in backyards all over the region.
There may be a small reprise of good autumn weather in the weeks ahead. There often is.
But the party’s just starting in the cities by the bay. You can feel it in the air, even now. Halloween used to be celebrated on Oct. 31, the eve of All Hallows’ Day. A one-night event. But now it’s a season.
With Halloween still a week away, the stores are full of tricks and treats, the supermarkets are bursting with pumpkins, and there are holiday lights in lots of windows, like an orange Christmas. Halloween has become the start of the holiday season, a phenomenon called the Christmas Creep. The Hallmark Channel started its Countdown to Christmas string of Christmas movies on Oct. 22.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to Halloween, which has a curious history in San Francisco. Your grandparents will remember when it was a holiday for kids, trick or treat. Terry Asten Bennett, general manager of Cliff ’s Variety, told Andrew Chamings of SFGATE last year how his great grandfather used to organize kids’ parades through the heart of the Castro district, led by a papiermache dinosaur named Stanislaus.
By the mid-’90s, Halloween street parties, fueled by fun and other spirits, were growing larger and larger — drawing crowds of 300,000. By 2002, there were said to be half a million. On Halloween 2006, nine people were shot in the Castro during one of the street parties — and that was the end of that.
In 2007, there was an organized campaign to keep people in the Castro safe on Halloween. It’s been quiet since.
This year, it seems like it’s party time again.
“People have been cooped up for a year and a half, and they want to catch up,” said Marty Van Der Vert, who owns the One Stop Party Shop on Church Street in Noe Valley. The store’s Halloween items — masks, costumes, jack-o’-lanterns and all the rest — have been flying off the shelves for weeks. Van Der Vert was surprised by the Halloween boom. “It’s bigger than I expected,” she said. “I’ve been here for going on 35 years, and it looks like this will be my biggest year. People just want to party.”
It’s not kid stuff, either. Seventy-five percent of her Halloween sales are to adults.
A more adult event is a ticketed pub crawl called Crawloween on Halloween weekend in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch. Promoters have signed 20 bars and some shuttle buses. There was a similar event last year. Promoters say 7,000 people showed up.
And even more adult scary stuff is on tap at the Old Mint at Fifth and Mission streets. For years there were plans to turn the 1874 mint, once one of the most important federal buildings on the West Coast, into a history museum. But those plans never worked out. So it sits, mostly empty. For the Halloween season, a show called “The Immortal Reckoning” is playing at the Old Mint.
It’s an immersive experience, with vampires, ghosts and other creatures. On Halloween Eve, Oct. 30, there will be a Terror Ball, hosted by Peaches Christ, the noted drag star.
A national historic landmark turned into a house of horrors? Only in San Francisco.