Portola's Halloween Happens in a Garden the Freeway Left Behind

On Saturday, October 31, the Portola Neighborhood Association will light up the Green Between for its free Spooky Garden Reverie. The event runs 6 to 10 p.m. at Burrows Pocket Park, where Burrows Street dead-ends at San Bruno Avenue. The listing promises Halloween lights along the garden paths, music from DJ Antitdope, seasonal treats around every corner, and an open invitation to come "in costume or come as you are."

The ground under those lights belongs to the state. It is a strip of Caltrans easement between US-101 and the backs of the San Bruno Avenue storefronts. For decades it collected trash and overgrowth, and almost every plant, path and mural on it now got there through a neighbor's grant application or a Saturday shift with a shovel. The Halloween party is the night the neighborhood enjoys that work. The first Saturday of November is the day it starts again.

Saturday night at 2 Burrows Street

The basics for this year:

• When: Saturday, October 31, 2026, 6 to 10 p.m. PDT
• Where: Burrows Pocket Park, 2 Burrows St., at San Bruno Avenue
• Cost: Free, with donations encouraged to fund future community events
• Who's hosting: The Portola Neighborhood Association, in partnership with Family Connection Centers
• Registration: Requested through the event page on the PNA site

The PNA's own event page has the details, and that is the place to register. The 2026 window runs an hour later than last year. The San Francisco Chronicle's 2025 Halloween guide listed the 2025 Reverie as ending at 9 p.m. It described the garden as a lantern-lit "haunted garden habitat" with glowing sculptures and fanciful illusions.

This year Halloween falls on a Saturday, and the 10 p.m. close keeps the garden open well after the usual trick-or-treat hour.

A dead end that used to be someone's backyard

The reason a Halloween party can happen behind San Bruno Avenue goes back to the 1950s. The PNA's history of the Green Between explains that the fully divided Bayshore Freeway ignored the city's street grid. It left awkward triangles of state land between the roadway and private lots, and those triangles had once been the back gardens of San Bruno Avenue residents. Some buildings were razed or moved through eminent domain. The ones that survived on the east side of the avenue lost their backyards. Those slivers then sat for decades, hard to reach for maintenance, collecting debris.

The turnaround began with a dead-end street. In 2013, the Portola Garden Tour, The Greenhouse Project and the PNA started a pilot project on the blighted dead ends along San Bruno Avenue. Burrows Pocket Park opened in 2014, after four years of planning and more than $200,000 in public and private fundraising. It became the first green space along the Caltrans easement. The PNA credits neighbor Ruth Wallace with leading the project. She turned a barren concrete dumping ground into a garden with Mediterranean-inspired plants, brick-paver walks, decorative seating and a mural by Jason Jagel.

According to the PNA, volunteers maintain that park entirely. It also drew a neighbor to invest in opening a café next door. That café is Hey Neighbor Cafe at 2 Burrows St. The PNA's merchant profile says its manager had lived in the Portola for more than a decade and helped tie the café's outdoor seating into the garden. In January 2025, Mission Local covered the café as a stop on a District 9 neighborhood tour.

What the lights will be shining on

Once Burrows was finished, the work moved south. The Green Between's first two blocks run along the soundwall from Burrows Pocket Park toward Bacon Street, and the PNA records their ribbon cutting in summer 2023. Most of what Halloween visitors will walk past was made by hand, and much of it was made by name:

• The gate. Artist Dana Albany built the gothic gate at the entrance over six months, using tools and hardware such as knives, faucets, hammer peens, glass rosettes, trowels and shovels. The SF Standard's November 2023 story called it 16 feet tall in the headline and 18 feet in the body.
• The walls. Gabion retaining cages hold the slope, and some are faced with vintage license plates. Redwood saplings line the path.
• The murals. Charles Dabo painted "Mother Nature and Her Gardners" nearby. The Standard also photographed a fence covered in birdhouses and a tiger mural painted by a young artist.
• The planting. When the Chronicle visited in 2022, it found a decomposed-granite walkway, brick patios, timber seating and stairs, roughly 200 plants and trees, and a half-buried 1969 Dodge Coronet serving as a planter.
• The freeway art beyond the garden. The same Chronicle piece described Cory Ferris's butterfly-and-snake mural on a freeway pillar. It also covered the Porto-Loteria project by Kate Connell and Oscar Melara, which inspired 48 murals along a Caltrans fence.

Spooky lights will be strung along that path on the 31st.

The garden, grant by grant

The PNA posts the Green Between's funding history in public. Read in order, it shows the garden growing in small installments, each one applied for by neighbors:

Two things in that table connect directly to Halloween night. First, Family Connection Centers paid for Block 1's hardscape, plantings and murals in 2021, and it is now the PNA's co-presenter for the Reverie. The partner that helped build the garden is helping throw the party in it.

Second, scale. The construction estimate for the next two blocks is $750,000. That is more than the six earlier awards in the table combined, which add up to $544,076. The PNA lists that money as unsecured. Caltrans encroachment permits for Blocks 3 and 4 carry an undetermined budget, and a soundwall item for those blocks is penciled in for somewhere between 2025 and 2035. The PNA's longer goal is a four-block path from Thornton Avenue to Woolsey Street, with possible pocket parks at Wayland and Woolsey. Planning for Blocks 3 and 4 started in spring 2024. None of the public sources reviewed for this piece confirm that construction has begun.

The Saturday after Halloween

The ongoing costs are where the volunteer model matters most. The PNA lists a Green Plan Manager position at $75,000 a year and an operating budget of $20,000 a year for its green spaces. It marks both as unsecured "in perpetuity." Until that changes, the garden is kept up by people with gloves.

The next chance to join them comes one week after the Reverie. The PNA calendar lists a Green Between Garden Work Day on Saturday, November 7, starting at 10 a.m. at Burrows Pocket Park, organized by PNA board member Mike Kopicko. It is the regular first-Saturday session. The Portola Garden Club, the PNA's volunteer group, meets monthly at 2 Burrows St. for watering, planting, mulching, weeding and path maintenance. The club says there are tasks for all ages and skill levels and asks volunteers to bring work clothes and a full water bottle.

The listed hours differ between sources. The PNA's Green Between page gives 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The District 9 supervisor's May 2026 newsletter gives 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., meeting at the GreenBetween gates at Burrows and San Bruno. That newsletter called the greenway "one of D9's neighborhood's most cherished shared spaces." It said what makes the space special is "the people who show up month after month to help care for it." Arriving at 10 a.m. works under either schedule.

Those workdays have a track record. In 2022, Knee Deep Times reported that they drew as many as 40 people. The November 7 crew will be working on the same paths the Reverie lights up a week earlier.

If you want to see the Green Between in daylight before Halloween, or you're thinking about the Portola Garden Club, Paige Gienger has worked across San Francisco's neighborhoods for more than 23 years and is glad to share what she knows about the Portola and the volunteers behind places like Burrows Pocket Park. Let's Connect through On The Right Paige.