San Francisco will hold its first Diwali celebration on Friday in conjunction with the city's Bhangra and Beast Night Market season finale. It's part of an effort to attract more people to the downtown area.
As workers and visitors slowly start returning, the city continues to seek new ways to reactivate downtown.
"Bringing people back downtown remembering that this is an area of the city that they can play that's a real aspect, and I think its important to have something different than office activities," said Katy Birnbaum, CEO and founder of Into the Streets.
Bhangra and Beast have already drawn thousands of people, and it is just one of several events the city hopes will finally revitalize downtown.
"These events showcase downtown as a place for people to go make it a little bit more approachable," said Andy Chun of Schroeder's Restaurant. "it was wonderful to see so many people come downtown, and compared to what we would normally do, those days it was just tremendous."
The next steps would be to add more so-called entertainment zones and create a new permit process to reduce red tape for event hosts.
"So far, having events on Front Street as part of the entertainment zone has just vastly exceeded expectations; for Oktoberfest, we had 8300 people. We had 3,000-4000 for Nightmare on Front Street, and Glow on Front is going to be our next one as part of Let's Glow SF," said Robbie Silver, president and CEO of the Downtown SF Partnership.
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