For decades, Halloween in San Francisco's Castro District was one of the biggest Halloween parties in the country. It started as a children's parade run by a neighborhood variety store and ended after a shooting in 2006. Here's the history.

A kids' parade and a papier-mache dinosaur

Cliff's Variety, the store at 479 Castro St., started the tradition in the 1940s with a children's parade, SFGATE reported. The store's general manager, Terry Asten Bennett, told SFGATE her great-grandfather built an enormous papier-mache dinosaur named Stanislaus that someone climbed inside to lead the parade, followed by a pie-eating contest in front of the store. In a 2007 NPR interview, owner Martha Asten described the dinosaur as about 15 feet tall.

The family party ended after a drunk man smashed a pie in the face of the store's patriarch, who had just had cataract surgery. NPR dates that to 1979; Bennett told SFGATE it was 1980.

From Polk Street to the Castro

San Francisco's gay Halloween celebrations had earlier centered on the Tenderloin, Grant Avenue in North Beach and then Polk Street. In the late 1970s, revelers on Polk Street faced homophobic violence, and the celebration moved to the Castro, which was becoming the center of gay life in the city, SFGATE and Wikipedia recount.

The Sisters era and a growing crowd

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took over running the street party. In 1989, two weeks after the Loma Prieta earthquake, they collected thousands of dollars for the city's Earthquake Relief Fund from the crowd. By 1994 about 300,000 people came, and violence grew; police made more than 50 arrests that year, SFGATE reported. The Sisters stopped managing the event in 1995, but the party kept growing on its own.

500,000 people and the end in 2006

An estimated 500,000 people packed the Castro in 2002, SFGATE reported, and the city's Entertainment Commission took over the event the next year. On Oct. 31, 2006, with another crowd of about half a million, gunfire broke out around 11 p.m. near Market and Sanchez streets and nine people were shot. The next year the city ran a “Home for Halloween” campaign telling people to stay away, NPR reported, and SFGATE says 600 police were deployed to keep the party from happening. The giant street party never returned.

This year: San Francisco Halloween weekend 2026 street closures and Muni reroutes.