Downtown First Thursdays (DFT) celebrated a full 12 months of monthly parties on Thursday night with Mayor Daniel Lurie and around 18,000 people in attendance.

"It’s brought people downtown, which was the point of it," says organizer Manny Yekutiel, the executive director of the Civic Joy Fund, speaking to SFGate. "It’s the only event that has been able to bring consistent amounts of people downtown at a time where everyone’s talking about how downtown is empty."

The Civic Joy Fund first launched Downtown First Thursdays as a three-month trial last spring, and it has now gone on for a full 12 months. At last night's event, Yekutiel and Mayor Daniel Lurie, who co-founded the Civic Joy Fund, announced that the event is now funded through December 2025.

Funders of DFT include Michael Moritz, Bob and Randi Fisher, Chris Larsen, Levi Strauss & Co., Salesforce, and JPMorgan Chase.

As KTVU reports, Lurie also used the press conference opportunity on Thursday to tout the city's crackdown on drug-dealing and open-air drug use on SF's streets.

"We will continue to go after those who deal drugs on our streets every single day," Lurie said. "There's a great working relationship between SFPD and the District Attorney's Office."

Lurie and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins noted that nine arrests were made the previous night, on Wednesday, in various parts of the city, for drug dealing.

"My office has filed charges against all nine of those individuals for drug dealing and one for solicitation of a minor to engage in drug dealing," Jenkins said, per KTVU.

Lurie and Jenkins may have wanted to call attention to these nine latest cases after it made headlines last week that a mass-arrest that occurred at Van Ness and Market on March 19 yielded no charges filed at all. And criticism has continued of the drug crackdown as the police presence in places like Sixth Street and 16th and Mission has served primarily to just shift drug activity elsewhere.

But Downtown First Thursdays seems like a bright spot in the city's post-pandemic recovery narrative!

While the last two months saw slightly lesser attendance at the monthly event on Second Street, Thursday's event was noticeably crowded — similar to the massive numbers who showed up for January's DFT when Toro y Moi did a DJ set.

And Yekutiel highlighted how DFT has invested $325,000 in San Francisco's creative community by hiring DJs, musicians, and other performers for these events.

Local drag queen and DJ Grace Towers, who has hosted the "Discoteca" area on Minna Street since the first DFT last May, tells SFGate, "It’s an intersection of radical joy that’s just really necessary for artists right now."

The next DFT will be on May 1, which will be the official one-year anniversary of the event.