Porto’s Bakery in Buena Park held its grand opening yesterday with some hungry patrons bolting across Beach Boulevard’s eight lanes all in the name of cheese rolls, refugiados and other delights. The ultra-popular Cuban eatery held the ribbon cutting ceremony for its first OC location at 10 a.m. and promised the first 500 customers a free giveaway bag of goodies. By morning time, hundreds of people formed a line stretching back to Medieval Times on Beach when things got a little out of hand.
The Buena Park Police Department posted a video and photo on Facebook, writing “We’ve seen some death defying acts from pedestrians running across Beach Blvd. Use the crosswalk and wait for the appropriate signals!” Proving themselves to be a social media-savvy department, the police post featured the hashtags #ItsWorthTheWait and #NoFrogger. Funny!
“When there are crowds of this size, our primary concern is not only the safety of the patrons, but for the motorists using the adjacent roads,” Buena Park Police spokesman Sgt. Mike Lovchik later wrote the Weekly. “Some of the observed activities that could be deemed ‘unsafe’ were pedestrians crossing Beach Blvd. outside of marked crosswalks and motorists making unsafe turning movements.”
Four motorcycle cops arrived to the area during the initial hours to monitor the situation and uphold traffic laws. But things calmed down after that. “As of this writing, I am unaware of any negative incidents amid the opening festivities,” Sgt. Lovchik added, “and it sounds like it was a huge success.”
Let’s hope that includes nobody having spilled a box of potato balls in a mad dash back across Beach Boulevard because that would truly be a tragedy!
Gabriel San Román is from Anacrime. He’s a journalist, subversive historian and the tallest Mexican in OC. He also once stood falsely accused of writing articles on Turkish politics in exchange for free food from DönerG’s!