A fatal one-car crash this weekend at the border of the Portola and Bayview neighborhoods took the life of the driver who was in his 30s, while a dog who was in the car with him suffered serious injuries.

The driver of a white Dodge Challenger flipped his car and was killed in the crash shortly before noon Saturday, according to the Chronicle. The accident was just off Highway 101, right at the border of the Portola and Bayview districts at Mansell Street and San Bruno Avenue, and a dog traveling with the man in the vehicle also suffered serious injuries.

According to SF Fire Department investigators, the vehicle was traveling southbound on 101, but turned off on the Paul Avenue exit and lost control, causing the vehicle to flip. The driver was already dead by the time first responders arrived at the scene.

That driver has not been identified, with Fire Department officials only identifying him as a man in his 30s.

California Highway Patrol officers arrived on the scene, and closed the Paul Avenue exit for a few hours Saturday. It was reopened by late Saturday afternoon.

The dog survived the crash, but was described as being seriously injured. That dog was taken in for medical attention by SF Animal Care and Control on Saturday. The dog’s current medical condition is unknown.

Related: Jackknifed Big Rig, Spilled Fuel Closes Three Lanes of Southbound 101 Near SFO [SFist]

Image: Firefighters looking into a rolled over car window after a car accident at night. (Getty Images)

The Portola Music Festival announced its coming back in late September, though not in a splashy social media announcement, but instead in a letter to Alameda residents who’ve been up in arms about the festival’s noise.

The Chronicle has the news today that the electronica/dance music-focused Portala Music Festival intends to return for a third year on September 28 and 29, which would again put it on Folsom Street Fair weekend. But there are no announcements of such on the Portola Festival’s website or its social media channels, nor any performers announced.

Instead, the announcement comes in the form of a letter to Alameda residents whose local government has been threatening to shut down the event over the volume of noise it creates. And the Chronicle’s report notes that Portola Festival organizer Goldenvoice is promising those residents they won’t be so loud this year.

"Portola is a two-day festival with special lineups each day," says the letter to residents from concert promoter Goldenvoice, who also organize Coachella. “This event is scheduled on Saturday, September 28th 1:00PM – 11:00PM and Sunday September 29th 1:00PM – 11:00PM, with all outdoor music on Sunday ending by 10:45PM.”

So that all sounds like they are quite confident this festival will happen.

"Understanding that sound was a factor that had an impact on the community, we will continue focusing a significant amount of energy and resources in creating better solutions this year," the letter continues. "We welcome and encourage feedback from the community as it helps us understand the positive and negative impacts from last year, which will allow us to continue doing what worked and develop solutions for what didn’t."

Goldenvoice is promising those Alameda residents a hotline to call with noise complaints, reduced volume, and altered stage placement that will hopefully lessen the amount of noise that cruises across the Bay. They’re also cutting off the outdoor music at 10:45 pm on Sunday, though that’s only 15 minutes earlier than previous years.

Yet it is not written in stone that the Portola Music Festival will happen on those dates this year. The festival has not yet been granted a permit from the SF Entertainment Commission, though the hearing for that permit is scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, April 16 at 5:30 pm, and will be broadcast on the SFGovTV website.  

Related: City of Alameda Now Wants Portola Music Festival Shut Down Forever After Second Year of Noise Complaints [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

Members of the LGBTQ+ and fetish communities who are also fans of electronic music will be thrilled to know that the second annual Portola Festival is happening the weekend after Folsom Street Fair weekend.

Last year's first outing for the Portola Fest was not without its problems, though for some in the LGBT community in particular it made for a series of Sophie's choices, with all the pre-Folsom Sunday parties happening that weekend, and Folsom Street Fair itself. That won't be an issue this year — although Castro Street Fair will be conflict this time.

The Portola Fest Instagram account came back alive a couple days ago with a weird teaser post. And on Wednesday, promoter Goldenvoice announced this year's dates: September 30 and October 1, and the fest will apparently be returning to Pier 80.

Almost immediately, one commenter, local DJ Bradley Portnoy, asked the organizers, "What are you doing to improve the experience? Last year you literally ran out of food in the VIP areas, had atrocious crowd management, and no plan for ingress or egress to the festival to speak of."

Goldenvoice has not yet responded.

For the first year of Portola Fest, things did, indeed, feel a bit disorganized, and one stage inside the airplane-hangar-sized warehouse on the pier was a particular choke point for crowd management. At one point on Saturday, a potentially dangerous stampede occurred at the one designated entry door after security staff were oddly trying to hold the door before one popular act went on, Charli XCX.

That turned out to be an isolated incident, and no one was injured, and most of the weekend went more smoothly — though there were also some reported issues with the line at the entrance, and the above-mentioned food shortage in VIP. (Also, the sound inside that warehouse was ridiculously bad.)

And though there were no major incidents, that didn't stop plenty of online chatter from occurring that made the entire festival sound like a shitshow, which it was not. In fact, the fanbase of the acts booked skewed a little older and wiser than your average day at Outside Lands, and people were generally pretty well behaved.

We still don't know what the lineup will be for the second attempt in 2023 — and it's unclear if Goldenvoice intends to do early-bird tickets before announcing the lineup, a la Outside Lands, or maybe both the regular ticket sale and the lineup announcement will just happen together next week. For a new fest like this, the latter probably makes more sense.

Follow Portola Fest on Instagram for the next update.

This past weekend's inaugural Portola Music Festival — which was not in the Portola neighborhood but over on Pier 80 — was a well attended debut with a ton of great EDM acts, crowd-control issues notwithstanding.

The headlines after Saturday's Day One of the festival were all about a single, not especially dramatic incident of gate-storming at one of the festival's four stages. It was the only stage that was enclosed in a building, and organizers' plan for crowd management and capacity limiting seemed to be all about utilizing a single entry point and just a couple of exits in what was a massive, airplane-hangar-sized space that could have accommodated many more points of ingress and egress.

There was some pushing, and some people stuck in the middle of the herd at the main entrance likely got pretty uncomfortable for a minute, but no one was injured in the incident. Others were hopping barricades to go in the other out doors, rather than fight the huge crowd at the main door. And as SFist earlier reported, once inside the warehouse, festival-goers found a huge amount of empty space and plenty of room to gather to watch Charli XCX, leading them to question why security personnel had been holding the main door in the first place. The zig-zag maze to enter was also probably not the wisest thing given how many people were wanting to get in at once — and hopefully organizers rethink this entire Warehouse Stage setup before this festival happens again.

Organizers addressed the issue in a statement to Billboard saying, "There was a minimal, isolated issue with a festival stage entrance yesterday. This occurred within the confines of the grounds and was quickly addressed and corrected. There were no reported injuries and the festival continued for another six hours without incident.”

On Day Two, the setup remained as-is, but the crowds for acts like Kelly Lee Owens and Lane 8 were clearly not as impatient or massive as those for Fred Again and Charli XCX the day before.

Other acts like James Blake and Toro y Moi sounded great on the outdoor Pier Stage after the sun went down, and the legendary Bay Area native DJ Shadow brought the house down in a late-afternoon set. Chicago-based duo DRAMA did a terrific and bouncy set in the Ship Tent. The Blessed Madonna and Peggy Gou had rollicking DJ sets at the Crane Tent before Four Tet and Floating Points closed things out.

And many attendees were there for the Chemical Brothers, who put on an amazing set with stunning visuals on the Pier Stage.

There was a bit more bad press before the weekend was out, with KRON4 and others reporting on noise complaints on the island of Alameda, which sits directly across the Bay from the festival pier.

"I kept thinking it was cars going by with music booming in their car then I would open the window and then it would go away and then I closed the window and I thought, was it the TV? Then, I’d turn the TV off and I would hear it again," says Alameda resident Mary Lou Krauland, speaking to KRON4.

The festival went on until 11 p.m. both nights, which meant some late boom-booming for some residents who wanted to turn in before then.

"Eventually I fell asleep," Krauland told the station.

We haven't yet had word from the organizers about how many attendees were at the Portola Festival, but it was likely a significant number — bigger than the Treasure Island Music Festival of yore, but likely not as big as Outside Lands, which sees about 80,000 attendees in a single day, though it might have come close.

Previously: Photos: Portola Festival Debuts With Spectacular Shows, But Very Messy Crowd Management

Long lines and some highly ineffective crowd management strategies led to mayhem, chaos, and bum-rushing at Saturday’s Day 1 of the Portola Festival, overshadowing terrific performances from Flume, Charli XCX, and Fatboy Slim.

It is never a good thing when the headline news out of the first day of your inaugural new big-budget music festival is not the performances on stage, but instead some poorly mishandled crowd management incidents. But so it is for the first-ever Portola Music Festival, put on by the producers of Coachella, which had its first day marked by a few chaotic incidents Saturday, and continues Sunday at Pier 80.

TMZ is kind of exaggerating things in their report that describes Saturday’s Portola scene as “Mayhem at Concert” and “Shades Of Astroworld.” (Eight people died at Astroworld, this seems an inappropriate comparison.) But SFist was smack-dab in the middle of the very scene TMZ is describing, and you can see the bum-rush for yourself below.

The people in this video are not crashing the gate or trying to get into a concert for free. The people in this video are already inside the festival, having paid $200 for a single-day ticket or $300 for the weekend. They simply were not being allowed in to see one of the stages they’d paid good money to see, so they took matters into their own hands. The above video is from exactly 10 minutes before Charli XCX was scheduled to perform at the Warehouse Stage, which is indoors. This line had not moved in 20 minutes, people were chanting “Let us in! Let us in!,” and upon realizing they were unlikely to see Charli come on, people said ‘Fuck it’ and barreled their way in.

And all of this seemed unnecessary. For whatever reason, organizers chose to utilize fewer than half of the entrances to the Warehouse Stage building. As you see above, many of the entrances are shut closed with aluminum doors. That meant fewer entrances, all of which were lined with the cattle-line maze of pedestrian barriers.

But the crowds were so massive that many people did not even realize there were barriers, and there was no signage and very little direction for people to understand the Warehouse Stage's highly counterintuitive entrance structure. Chaos ensued, but it wasn’t exactly Woodstock ‘99. The crowd remained friendly and in good spirits; there was no hostility or violence, just exasperated security trying to manage an ill thought-out structure.

And as we see above, it was not even that crowded inside the warehouse stage area.

Sure, maybe they were given a capacity limit they had to mind. But this did not feel anywhere near capacity, and either way, it was clearly a miscalculation to put one of the main stages with some of the biggest acts indoors.

The mayhem described above was for Charli XCX, who was terrific on that indoor stage. But the consensus among attendees was that the sound was absolutely awful on that same stage. Charli’s attitude (and that of her electrifying background dancers) still had the audience eating out of her hand. But if you’re going Sunday night to watch Lane 8 or Ben Böhmer on that Warehouse Stage, do not bring high expectations that you will hear quality sound.

But we should note the sound was excellent at the outdoor stages, like Pier Stage. Kaytranada had crowd sing-alongs going throughout a lovely set highlighted by his remix of The Weeknd’s “Out of Time,” creating a blissful and happy scene that was a far cry from the chaos that preceded Charli XCX.

And boy did the old fogies have fun at Fatboy Slim! The sound was also very crisp and good at the Crane Tent, where Fatboy Slim took us back to those first early radio-friendly EDM hits of the late 1990s, back when we called the genre “techno” or “electronica.”  

His set was not so much a collection of songs, just one raging dance set into which he sampled his own riffs and hits of “Right here/Right now” and “It's a wonderful night/Come on and break it on down.”

But Day 1 of the Portola Festival will probably be remembered more for its rookie operational mistakes than for any of the otherwise very good performances. The excuse that “This is their first time doing it” doesn’t really wash. This festival is run by Goldenvoice, who also operate Coachella, and throwing large festivals is what they do. They are not new at this.

Saturday’s cock-ups seemed more thanks to poor planning, corners possibly being cut, and perhaps attempts to operate things on the cheap. But when even the VIPs are complaining about arduously long restroom lines, that is probably not a sign that your festival iterated well.

And if people are summing up their experience at your concert using January 6 memes, that’s not a great sign either. We’ll see if the Portola Music Festival can make a quick course correction on some of these issues Sunday.

Related: Gigantic Weekend of Events Is Upon Us, With Street Closures Galore [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist

A new two-day festival in the vein of the defunct Treasure Island Music Festival is headed to SF this fall, just seven weeks after Outside Lands wraps up — and it's mostly EDM acts, with headliners Flume and The Chemical Brothers.

It's called the Portola Music Festival or just Portola, but it's not in Portola, as Hoodline explained the other day. It will be held instead near Dogpatch, on Pier 80. Promoters Goldenvoice say that the name is a nod to Portola Fest 1909, which was held as a kind of rebirth event for the city as it rebuilt from the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. And just like then, San Francisco is still trying to pick up the pieces and come alive again after a pandemic.

The dates are September 24 and 25, a.k.a. Folsom Street Fair weekend. And tickets go on sale tomorrow (Friday) at 10 a.m. Single-day passes are $200, and two-day passes are $300, with two-day VIP passes priced at $775.

Other well-known acts on the bill include MIA, Gorgon City, Kaytranada, DRAMA, Fatboy Slim, Charli XCX, Jamie xx, Caroline Polachek, and James Blake.

As Billboard notes, "While San Francisco and the Bay Area have long been a hotbed of electronic music culture, the city has few large-scale festivals dedicated entirely to the genre."  The closest thing currently is Audiotistic at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, which is happening in July.

Treasure Island Music Festival (RIP), as most of us remember, typically had one day devoted to EDM and hip-hop, and one day that was more alt-rock.

It's not clear yet how many stages will be featured at Portola, and all we know is that it's being produced locally by Non Plus Ultra — which produces events at SVN West, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Old Mint — along with Goldenvoice.

And as Hoodline pointed out, the company that owns Goldenvoice, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), is owned by a Republican billionaire who has given to anti-LGBTQ organizations and supported Donald Trump. But Coachella's co-founder Paul Tollett, who is not a Trump supporter, has tried to distance himself from AEG, and he retains half-ownership of the Coachella festival itself.

Politics have not dampened the appeal of Coachella for the hundreds of thousands who attend every year, and AEG's Republican associations are unlikely to thwart the success of Portola, but there will certainly be tweets about it.

Photo: Port of San Francisco

Though robberies are down 28 percent compared to this time last year, the slow return of gatherings and semi-normalcy may bring back both petty and violent theft.

This weekend’s uptick in crowd sizes at parks (and subsequent tsk-tsk’ing on social media) tells us that, for better or worse, San Franciscans are beginning to more than dip their toes back in to going places, getting together, and going about a modified version of normal life again. But our increased participation in outdoor society may also increase thieves' participation in society, too, as the Examiner brings us the news of a 72-year-old man who was punched out and robbed  his camera, one of several violent weekend robberies.

The camera robbery clearly sounds coordinated, and no spur of the moment thing. Per the Examiner, the victim was at the corner of Drumm and Washington Streets (seen above) just before 5:30 Sunday afternoon. Two suspects approached him and one punched him in the head, and the duo immediately hopped into a waiting SUV that drove off. The victim’s name has not been released, and police say he is is injured but expected to be fine.

A number of other violent robberies occurred Sunday, and Saturday saw some petty theft too. No arrests have been made in any of these cases, as of press time.

• In Portola, another likely planned job saw two male suspects knock down a pair of women, steal their backpacks and flee in a waiting sedan near Felton and Goettingten Streets.  
• At Third and Bayview Streets Sunday afternoon, an argument between two women “turned violent,” with one of the women stealing the other’s cellphone and purse.
• And on Saturday, in a more garden-variety tourist district petty crime, a group of deplorable teens snatched the cellphone of a woman taking a photo in Fisherman’s Wharf.

The Examiner notes that reported robberies are down in 2021, with 554 of them this year compared to 770 as of March 28, 2020. But there’s no comparison between this year and last. In March 2020, we’d been going about our lives as usual up until the March 17 shelter-in-place order brough everything to a halt. In contrast, most of 2021 has been cooped up indoors with the ‘Purple’ and ‘Red’ tier blues. We are slowly beginning to return outdoors, and this may mean sharpening our sense of awareness, as thieves are in mid-season form as we’re trying to figure out how to socialize again.

Anyone with information on the above incidents, is encouraged to call the SFPD tipline at 415-575-4444, ot text TIP411 (847411) to send an anonymous text.

Related: Brazen Highway Robbery Caught on Camera in SoMa [SFist]

Image: Google Street View

Sure, it looks empty above; but wait ‘til the aging bridge decks near the site of the Alemany Farmers Market get their steel and concrete beams replaced next summer.

Not many people go to the Portola neighborhood, but a lot of people go through the Portola neighborhood. The Chronicle estimates that 244,000 cars traverse a stretch of U.S. Route 101 above Portola on a daily basis. The Chronicle also estimates that these drivers will endure a horrible July and possibly also August in the summer of 2020, as a bridge deck repair project with the innocent name 101 Deck Replacement project at Alemany Circle in San Francisco has been given the derisive nickname “Carmageddon”. Caltrans officials predict “the project will cause backups for 6 miles” on a stretch that already does not move particularly smoothly.  

“I would agree with you that whole entire area is completely congested with no work going on,“ Caltrans Bay Area Director Tony Tavares said at a Caltans meeting Tuesday. “It’s going to get even worse during this period of time.”    

As far as Caltrans videos go, the Alemany Deck Replacement Project video above is informative, has some cool historical shots of the 1950s-era deck structure, and also some lovely computer animation to explain how Caltrans plans to bust up 25 spans of steel-reinforced concrete, replace the steel, and put in new concrete.

But if you live anywhere near the Alemany Boulevard exit, seen as little star on the Caltrans map above, you will see 101 highway traffic routed onto your neighborhood streets. Northbound traffic will be forced to exit at Alemany Boulevard and get back on to the 101 a quarter mile ahead. Southbound travelers will be forced to use the new northbound lanes while that span has its work done. Both directions will have their work performed at separate times, and each direction’s repairs are projected to last nine days (ha!).

It’s only 800 feet of deck area being reconstructed, but it will have congestion ripple effects for miles. Motorists are encouraged to consider alternate routes, use public transit, or simply spend their time in bumper-to-bumper traffic contemplating how this is at least better than having concrete chunks fall on your car.

Related: MacArthur Maze Rebuild Portends Massive Traffic Snarl [SFist]

Image: Caltrans YouTube channel

When a tagger gets caught in San Francisco, the miscreant is typically released on his or her own recognizance as they await trial, even if they face a massive number of charges. Not so for alleged vandal John Schenone of San Francisco, however, who stands accused of only one felony...but it's a doozy.

Schenone, a 62-year-old San Franciscan, was arrested last Tuesday after the words “NO MORE CHINESE” were spray painted in at least six locations in San Francisco. According to the San Francisco Police Department, investigators from the Special Investigations Division Hate Crime Unit "were immediately able to identify a vehicle and person of interest," and after a bulletin with the suspect details was circulated throughout the department, officers from Bayview Station spotted and detained Schenone, saying he's the one who did the deed.

Appearing in court on Friday, Bay City News reports that Schenone pled not guilty to one felony and at least two misdemeanor offenses, a far cry from the 19 charges an alleged tagger like Cryst faced earlier this year. But while Cryst was released after his initial arrest, Schenone will remain behind bars, as Judge Edward Torpoco said that he believes that Schenone "poses a public safety threat."

Prosecutors concurred with Torpoco's assessment, saying that when police searched Schenone's home, they found four guns, and they they believe he could easily get more.

Public defender Yali Corea-Levi, who took on the case after Schenone told Torpoco he couldn't afford an attorney (maybe he spent all his money on guns?), argued that Schenone legally owns the guns, and that "there are no allegations his client possessed any guns during the alleged spray-painting."

Given the nature of the crime, Torpoco was unswayed...but only to a point, as Schenone's bail was set at $155,000. A call to the San Francisco Sheriff's Department to see if the alleged tagger had posted that bond and been released was not returned as on Monday morning.

Previously: 62-Year-Old Man Arrested For Spray-Painting 'NO MORE CHINESE' All Over Bayview

A 23-year-old woman walking home around 12:15 a.m. this morning at Felton and Harvard Streets near McLaren Park in the Portola neighborhood was attacked by four suspects who choked her and robbed her of her belongings. According to Bay City News, the four suspects took the woman's purse and book bag before fleeing the scene.

The suspects are all described as men in their early/mid-20s, riding in a grey or green Honda or Toyota sedan. Although she was attacked from behind, the victim only suffered a few scrapes that didn't require a trip to the hospital.

Anyone with info about the mugging or the Japanese sedan should call SFPD's anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444 or via text to TIP411.

[BCN/Appeal]

Authorities are offering a $25,000 reward for info leading to the arrest of the person(s) who set fire to a two-story Portola apartment building. The fire injured six firefighters, with two sent to the hospital, on Feb. 6. Former SF Mayor Willie Brown verbally ripped the chaps who did this a new hole today at a press conference today. "We have to find the culprit," Brown vented. "San Francisco's finest has been threatened." But the good news in all this is that if any of you know the culprits, call the Arson Task Force's anonymous tip line at 415-575-4444. (Of course, to collect, you might want to give them your name.)

Two of the xix SF firefighters that were injured in an early morning fire in the Portola District yesterday remain in the hospital this morning. According to SF Fire Lt. Mindy Talmadge, "Lieutenant James App, an 8 year veteran of the Department, suffered 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree burns as a roof collapsed shortly after crews arrived on the scene", but is in good spirits and is receiving excellent care from the staff at the Bothin Burn Center at St. Francis Hospital. Firefighter and paramedic Christopher Posey, an 11 year veteran of the Department, was the one who suffered life-threatening injuries to his respiratory system during the blaze. "He remains in the Intensive Care Unit at San Francisco General Hospital."

Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White emotes, “We are so moved by the outpouring of support that we are receiving from the public for our injured members. This kind of response means so much to their immediate families and to our Fire Department family ... Chris and Jim are very dedicated Firefighters and they are loved and respected by the members of this Department. We ask that you continue to keep them in your thoughts and prayers. This is a difficult time for all of us.”

Still no word yet as to the cause of yesterday's early morning blaze.

Image: Sam Spade SF