Jerry Garcia Amphitheater set to reopen, hoping to draw larger shows to McLaren Park

Been to many Jerry Day shows there.  If they can attract other shows there, great. Like most SF neighborhoods, the Excelsior has become yuppified over the last several years.  

Jerry Garcia Amphitheater set to reopen, hoping to draw larger shows to McLaren Park

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/article/jerry-garcia-amphitheater-set-to-reopen-hoping-to-draw-larger-shows-to-mclaren-park/ar-AAO69Bb?ocid=msedgntp

That newly widened walkway, paved just the day before, soon will be populated with food trucks and vendor tents, after the free concert venue in John McLaren Park reopens after a $1.5 million upgrade. For now, it is just new infrastructure, widening and flattening a dirt road that’s set at an aggravating angle, and making it accessible to concert load-ins, vehicles for disabled people, and the all-important food trucks.

But this is just the start of an upgrade to the 50-year-old venue that will expand and terrace its seating and improve entry points in hopes of making the small hillside bowl into a regional attraction in the sunny southeast corner of the city.

Opening day, with a ribbon-cutting and Shakespeare performance, will be Sept. 18, albeit absent the vendors and food trucks for now in the interest of COVID-19 safety. That will pass and Safaí sees glory ahead for the underutilized venue.

“I’d like to see some larger programming similar to what they have at Stern Grove,” Safaí said. His goal is to turn the annual success of Jerry Day, which celebrates the birthday of the late Grateful Dead front man Jerry Garcia each August, into a seasonal schedule of productions.

“Jerry Day has been a phenomenal success for the community,” said Safaí, who represents District 11, which includes the Excelsior and Crocker-Amazon neighborhoods on the western side of McLaren Park. “We want to build on that.”

It will take more than building improvements to reach the level of Stern Grove, the busy outdoor venue which last month had its 84th season cut short by a major flood caused by a broken water main. When it reopens next summer, the Grove will continue on with a capacity of 10,000 on grassy terraces and picnic tables, and financial backing of the Goldman family, heirs to the Levi Straus fortune. Its entrance is on 19th Avenue, the main thoroughfare in the Sunset District.

Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, by comparison, has 750 seats on 16 rows of wooden benches, plus seating on dirt berms that can jam in as many as 2,000. To get there requires snaking up neighborhood streets from the Portola neighborhood to the east or down from the Excelsior to the west.

“You can’t drive by and say ‘oh, there’s a concert going,” said Linda Stark Litehiser, founder of a booster group called Friends of the Amp. “If you don’t know it’s here, you can’t find it.”

Experience in orienteering helps, because any approach requires an overland hike.

The Greek-style structure is a work of government-issue Brutalist architecture, which the Friends affectionately describe as “East Germany after World War II,” Litehiser said. The unifying fabric is aggregate mixed with cement, and the stage backdrop is built of concrete pillars that look like they were surplus from an irrigation canal. It takes a unique type of individual to love this humble setting, and Litehiser is one.

“It’s my happy place,” she said, after stopping by to admire the fresh paving. “When you want to define a hidden gem, this is it.”

In 2000, the hidden gem got its first renovation with restrooms. But there it sat, empty and lonely until a group called FACE — for Friends and Advocates of Crocker Amazon and the Excelsior — decided to activate it in the name of Garcia, who had grown up in the Excelsior and attended Monroe Elementary School, Denman Middle School and Balboa High School.

The first Jerry Day in the park, held in August, 2003, drew maybe 75 people. “It was not an overnight success,” Litehiser said. But the Deadheads will ultimately find their tribe, and a year later the crowd doubled. It increased exponentially until it hit capacity and stayed there.

FACE led to Friends of the Amp, and since 2014 it has produced a series of six weekend shows under the logo “Saturday in the Park.” Litehiser found it sad to see performers waiting in a dank bomb shelter of a Green Room beneath the stage, and vendors waiting for their tents to collapse on the sloping hillside.

“It was very haphazard. You reinvented the wheel every time you put on a show,” Litehiser said. “It wasn’t going to work for professional productions.”

The first company to enjoy the refurbished Green Room will be the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, which will present Episode 4, the 75-minute grand finale of “Pericles,” in a low-key opening with masks required of the audience.

“I went to Shakespeare concerts my whole life,” he joked, clearly mixing his genres to indicate that his mind was turning from plays to music — and in particular to Noise Pop, which has produced a Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco since 1993. In 2019, it was recruited by Safaí to put on a two-show Saturday series in Jerry Garcia Amphitheater. Momentum was lost in the two years of COVID-19 lockdown but Safaí said he already has funding to bring Noise Pop back in 2022.

Though funding to expand capacity is still a year or more away, some mature trees have been removed from the hillside to provide additional seating on the stumps.

“We’re never going to be Stern Grove,” Safaí admitted “But if we could do six or eight larger concerts a year it would really make this place special and put it on the map.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SamWhitingSF