Happy Halloween Friends.
This year Castro Halloween party was declared DOA by SF Chronicle. It used to be a great party and I have been there a few times in last few years during Halloween. Hundreds of thousands of people would come down to Castro in various different innovative and ready made costumes. It was fun to watch. It was more fun to go dressed up as someone. It is a time when you get creative and figure out what you would go to the party as. I have been a 70s Disco man with Afro, a Kung-fu master with Ming dynasty hat, Dumbledore (Stuthi was an Egyptian princess), Caesar (Stuthi was Cleopatra), a Rastafarian, and Zorro(Stuthi was a bat girl). You can see some of my pics here.
No matter how much fun it was, many a times in these last few years, it did get out of hand. It was too difficult for the police to control such a big crowd of drunken revelers. People started avoiding it for fear of getting groped by few bad apples. The ruckus that outsiders created was too much to handle for the people living there.
However, the businesses, hotel chains, restaurants, pizza corners, bars, and costume shops must have made a killing while the party lasted. The city must have benefited from the real life user traffic. I can't help but draw a parallel to the online world. If the traffic increases, it is now considered good for the business. Since Google has figured out a way to monetize traffic, the rush to get the online traffic has increased again. There are many businesses who are going through a crazy growth period and many businesses are helping them scale. I guess there was no Amazon Web Services in the real life which could help San Francisco scale its operation so that it could benefit from the increased foot traffic. Can you imagine how much drunk people can spend on cold night in San Francisco when they are thirsty and hungry? Over and above the parking fees and public transport/taxi fees they could be collecting.
Oh well, for now, some of the castro citizens who were unhappy with the clean-up got the quiet halloween they had hoped for and deserved.
For now, the site is closed due to heavy traffic.
