How Goldenvoice’s Portola Transformed A Working San Francisco Pier Into A Banging Dance Party With ’90s Headliners

San Francisco’s Pier 80 is one of two piers in the California city with the ability to unload cargo materials from ships to railroad cars. According to an SF Port report on Pier 80, around 100,000 automobiles are exported from the 60-acre pier annually. Pier 80 is written into FEMA’s emergency response plan as a place to stage and move debris caused by a disaster, and houses oil spill response equipment.

For the past four years, Pier 80 has also served as festival grounds for Portola, Goldenvoice’s two-day bombastic dance music festival. This year’s multigenerational lineup, overseen by AEG SVP Danny Bell, included a slew of headliners aimed squarely at Gen X and those who hit dance floors hard in the ’90s that included Underworld, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Moby as well as that era’s pop icon Christina Aguilera. But there was something for everyone, including millennial aughts fare like LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, Caribou and Blood Orange as well as a slew of rising Gen-Z/Alpha stars Dom Dolla, Mau P, Peggy Gou, Rico Nasty, Ravyn Lenae and a weekend-long tent dedicated to Despacio, LCD frontman James Murphy’s and 2ManyDJ’s powerful and analog sound system.

According to NPU Live, which pitched Goldenvoice on the event idea after throwing “Facebook’s ultimate holiday party” on the pier, “It is a working industrial site, not an event venue. Turning it into Portola, a festival that draws tens of thousands of fans every September, requires more than imagination. It takes navigating port regulations, maritime schedules, noise ordinances, and public safety requirements.”

The industrial equipment and storage facilities on the festival grounds make for a kind of Brutalist art. During Portola, one of Pier 80’s massive warehouses becomes the Warehouse stage, where genre-bending DJs such as Anti-Up (UK producers Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo), Japan’s Yousuke Yukimatsu, and Belgium’s 2ManyDJs (who partner with Murphy on Despacio) let loose. 

There’s also the Crane stage, which has an actual container crane as a backdrop; the Ship stage, a tent behind a huge cargo ship; and the Pier stage, where Aguilera, 44, used her 40-minute set of hits to market her recent deal with dating app Grindr. For the week of Sept. 15-22, Grindr’s notification alert sound was changed to Aguilera singing, “Come on over, baby” (from her 2000 hit of the same name). There was also an unannounced “Dirrty Barr” on site that played her hits and served Xtina-themed cocktails from San Francisco bar The Felix.

In 2024, KTVU reported that Portola (which sold out that year) received 224 noise complaints. While it was still loud onsite, this reporter didn’t have to dig for her earplugs this year.

The 2025 edition didn’t quite sell out, and was noticeably more crowded on the first day than the second. A 25% discount offered by Waymo, which is Google parent company Alphabet Inc’s self-driving rideshare service, angered ticketholders who paid full price for GA and VIP wristbands. However, customer service was helpful in at least one case: a friend who purchased a four-pack of GA tickets who complained after hearing about the Waymo discount received a complimentary VIP upgrade.

Will Portola return in 2026? Goldenvoice isn’t saying at the moment, though an insider was confident it would return. Portola’s website now reads, “That’s all, folks” and “Thank you San Francisco.” Meanwhile, sites for the company’s Southern California festivals Cruel World and Just Like Heaven read, “Until next time” and “See you next time,” respectively.