On a Saturday evening in October, Mick Glenn was walking his small dog, Choco, when music pulled them toward Market Street. At the Hibernia, a cabaret band played outside the former bank’s granite columns. Farther along, Glenn passed a massive mechanical insect and found salsa dancers performing outside a restaurant, with the crowd reaching toward the street.
“I love seeing so many cultures getting to perform live in the street,” he told the San Francisco Standard.
The scene was part of San Francisco’s first Market Street Arts & Theater Festival, a one-night event held Oct. 17. The Standard reported activity at 35 locations across six blocks, with some spillover into Civic Center. The organizer described the goal as linking independent venues, homegrown artists and landmark theaters in a walkable program.
The Standard described the event’s outdoor opening at United Nations Plaza. The official schedule listed the opening as free, with circus-theater acrobatics from Dear San Francisco followed by vertical dance from BANDALOOP. The same schedule listed “Skywatchers,” a cross-cultural, intergenerational and mixed-ability arts collaboration, at The Strand lobby. At Fulton Plaza, it advertised a free, family-friendly program from 4 to 7 p.m., with games, face painting, pumpkins and treats.
The whole festival was not an all-ages program. The schedule marked The Function as 21-plus, and some larger performances required separate tickets. Jessie Ware at The Warfield and Sara Bareilles at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium were among those headlining shows. The listed free plaza offerings and separately ticketed venues gave the night several different ways to take part, with the audience choosing how far to wander.
Some partnerships brought performances into places people already used for other reasons. At Saluhall and the nearby IKEA building, DJs and ballet dancers shared space with diners and shoppers. A three-person artist collective opened a gallery near IKEA’s escalators. The schedule designated Saluhall as a festival hub with a map pickup point, and set out performances at different locations from late afternoon into the night.
The official lineup also listed a free video installation at TNT Art Lab and an employee art show at Blick Art Materials. At Saluhall, it scheduled an embroidery workshop where artist NehaXStitch would help visitors make luggage tags, an example of programming that invited people to participate instead of only watch.
The Hotsy Totsy Cable Car, carrying performer D’Arcy Drollinger, traveled along Market Street during the festival, the Standard reported. Separately, the newspaper described music shifting from DJ sets to salsa and cabaret as the evening went on. People moved between blocks, stopped to watch and recorded performances as they came upon them.
The format asked venues that normally operate separately to share a program for one night. Organizers framed the event as a meeting point for independent venues, homegrown artists and landmark theaters. The Standard called it an ambitious but somewhat disjointed pilot of what Mid-Market might become as an arts district. After the outdoor opening, some visitors dispersed indoors, where the activity was less visible from the street.
That early limitation matters because a festival is a start, not proof that a neighborhood has recovered. Mid-Market has long had theaters and music venues, but many have struggled to regain their footing after the pandemic. Fernando Pujals, executive director of the Mid-Market Business Association & Foundation, said, “We think that all the bones are here,” pointing to the venues already in the corridor.
Pujals also pointed to below-market workspaces at Warfield Commons as one kind of support artists need to remain in the neighborhood. The festival put artists and venues on the same route for an evening; affordable places to work are part of the longer effort to keep that creative community present after the audience goes home.
One night cannot establish whether Market Street’s theater district is on a lasting path to revival. It can show what a shared arts program looks like on the ground: a cabaret outside the Hibernia, dancers in an IKEA atrium and a scheduled family program in a public plaza. For Glenn, the evening’s appeal was seeing different cultures perform in the street, one block at a time.
Reader responses