Halloween in The Castro

Halloween In The Castro

The Halloween celebration held in The Castro district of San Francisco began in the 1940s as a neighborhood costume contest. By the late 1970s, it had shifted from a children's event to a gay celebration that continued to grow into a massive annual street party until 2006 when a shooting wounded nine people and prompted the city to call off the event.

San Francisco's gay Halloween celebration in the early 1960s originally centered around the early gay bars in the Tenderloin district. In the late 1960s, the celebration was centered on Grant Ave. in North Beach. From 1970 to 1978, the Halloween celebration was held on Polk Street in Polk Gulch. By 1979, the city's gay village had moved to the Castro and "gay Mardi Gras" followed. The event became known as the leading Halloween celebration in the U.S., where costumes ranged from "the outrageous to the spectacular." By 2002, Halloween crowds had grown to the hundreds of thousands and became difficult to control.