Walk down San Bruno Avenue after dark and you'll see it: the Avenue Theater's neon blade sign, glowing red and gold above a storefront that sat empty for most of the last three decades. For the first time in more than 30 years, the theater's marquee and vertical neon are lit again, a detail the preservation group SF Beautiful called out when the restoration wrapped. If you moved to the Portola in the last few years, you might assume a developer or a city grant program quietly funded that. Neither did. The Portola Neighborhood Association traded for it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because once you see the pattern at the Avenue Theater, you start seeing it everywhere in this neighborhood. The Portola's best amenities, the ones that make it feel different from other corners of the city, weren't bought with a budget line. They were negotiated into existence, one deal at a time, by an all-volunteer neighborhood association working the phones with the city, Caltrans, and property owners. The calendar you're about to read isn't just a list of things to do. It's a running receipt of those deals.

The Trade Behind the Marquee

The Avenue Theater opened in 1927 and closed for good in the mid-1980s. It sat dark until the Portola Neighborhood Association secured a funding grant in early 2016 to start restoring the facade. That grant paid for paint and permits, not for the person who had to walk into the building owner's office and make a case for why a boarded-up storefront should get fixed.

That case turned into a trade. The PNA struck an agreement with the property owner: restore the historic facade and relight the neon, and in exchange, the owner would offer an unusually generous lease on the empty ground-floor retail space. The PNA's corridor manager, Luke Spray, spent six months coordinating electricians, painters, and neon benders to make the facade work happen. The retail space that lease created now holds an ice cream shop, the theater's first real tenant in a generation.

Nobody wrote a check large enough to force that outcome. Somebody negotiated it.

A Park Built From Land No One Else Wanted

The same logic built the Green Between, the greenway that runs along the back of the San Bruno Avenue corridor between US-101 and the businesses residents shop at every week. Before the PNA got involved, this was an overgrown Caltrans easement, a sliver of land too narrow and too adjacent to a freeway for the city or a developer to bother with.

The first phase, Burrows Pocket Park, took four years of planning and more than $200,000 in public and private fundraising before it opened in 2014. It's still maintained entirely by volunteers. A few years later, SITELAB Urban Studio partnered with the PNA and the Portola Urban Greening Steering Committee to extend the greenway south to Bacon Street, running community design workshops that drew roughly 200 residents in 2017 and 2018. Getting Caltrans to hand over even temporary access to the land required political leverage, which is where State Assemblyman Chiu's office came in to help broker the deal.

Here's what that pattern looks like laid out side by side:

None of these rows involved a developer breaking ground or the city cutting a standalone check. Each one required someone from the PNA to sit across the table from an agency or a property owner and find the terms that made the deal work.

The People Doing the Deal-Making

It's worth naming who actually does this. Luke Spray, the corridor manager who shepherded the Avenue Theater restoration, is also the person residents would have seen coordinating with the property owner over lease terms most neighborhoods never get to hear about. Jennifer Li, another PNA corridor manager, runs a different kind of trade: she hosts workshops teaching small business owners on San Bruno Avenue how to market themselves on Instagram and Facebook, held out of Sassy Foods inside Imperial Garden. That's not glamorous work, but it's the same instinct as the theater deal: find a resource a business doesn't have (marketing know-how, a functioning marquee) and broker access to it without waiting for someone else to fund it.

The PNA has also been showing up where the political leverage lives. Newly elected District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder has met with residents through the association to hear what matters most, and the PNA has pushed feedback on the ongoing McLaren Park Vision Plan through to Rec and Park. That's the same negotiating posture applied to city planning instead of a storefront lease.

The Calendar Is the Receipt

Once you know the mechanism, the neighborhood's event calendar reads differently. The Portola Autumn Moon Festival, held every September on San Bruno Avenue, didn't start as a generic street fair. Its first edition doubled as the Green Between's grand opening celebration, and it's grown since into an afternoon of mooncake, lantern, and mahjong workshops, a lion dance, and an art walk passport that sends residents into neighborhood storefronts to collect stickers for prizes from Baggu, Portola Grocery Outlet, and Hey Neighbor Cafe. Every one of those businesses is a corridor merchant the PNA has worked with directly.

Dim Sum and Cars, which the PNA runs with the Community Youth Center every spring, tells the same story from a different angle. Vintage cars and lowriders from the San Pancho Califas car club line the BMO parking lot and Burrows Pocket Park, LionDanceME (a 2023 World Lion Dance Championship competitor and the only team with female competitors) performs, and Imperial Garden Seafood Restaurant, a neighborhood fixture since 1995 and the only Chinese banquet hall in the city with a vegan dim sum menu, sells food on-site. The 2025 edition unveiled a new mural by local artist Arthur Koch in Burrows Pocket Park and a "Hillary Ronen Adventure Way" street sign honoring the former District 9 Supervisor who helped secure funding for the Green Between in the first place. The event literally names the person who made the deal.

Fall brings its own version. The Green Between turns into a lantern-lit walking installation for Halloween, built by Portola artists rather than a rented haunted house company, and Imperial Garden hosts a drag bingo night that benefits the PNA directly. Right now, if you head to McLaren Park, the free monthly concert series at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater is underway, typically running from late July through October with no ticket required.

One clarification worth making here, since it trips people up every fall: the electronic music festival called Portola, the one headlining Swedish House Mafia and Robyn at Pier 80 on September 26 and 27 this year, has nothing to do with this neighborhood. It shares a name and a general part of the city. That's it.

A Weekend That Uses All of It

If you want to see the pattern in person rather than read about it, a Saturday built around it looks something like this:

• Start with the Portola Garden Club's first-Saturday work party in the Green Between, where volunteers maintain the greenway the PNA spent a decade negotiating into existence.
• Walk the greenway itself from Burrows Pocket Park south toward Bacon Street, past the murals and the Hillary Ronen Adventure Way sign.
• Grab dim sum at Imperial Garden Seafood Restaurant on San Bruno Avenue, the same restaurant anchoring both Dim Sum and Cars and the Autumn Moon Festival.
• Swing past the Avenue Theater after dark to see the restored neon for yourself, then get ice cream from the shop occupying the space the lease deal created.
• If it's a Jerry Garcia Amphitheater weekend, close the day in McLaren Park for the free show.

None of this required a single new building. It required a neighborhood association willing to negotiate every inch of it.

That's the thing about the Portola that doesn't show up in a drive-by impression of the neighborhood. The changes you notice, the ones that make it feel like something is happening here, are the visible result of years of unglamorous deal-making by people whose names are on street signs and mural plaques if you know to look. It's a neighborhood that gets built by people asking for things, not by capital showing up on its own.

If you're a longtime Portola resident who's been meaning to make it to a Garden Club work party, or you're weighing what a home here is actually worth given everything the PNA has built without a dime of outside development money, Brendon Kearney knows this corridor block by block and can walk you through it.