Playland to be replaced by condos - again

August 13, 2018 5:49 PM

The last of San Francisco's series of now-defunct amusement parks was Playland at the Beach, which closed in 1972. in 2008, Playland Not-At-The-Beach opened to the public across the Bay in El Cerrito. It contains memorabilia related to Playland, Sutro Baths, a miniature version of the Sells-Floto Circus created by Isaac and Donald Marcks, a variety of pinball machines and other amusements, and even a room devoted to Eartha Kitt. Unfortunately, the building is slated to be demolished and like its predecessor, replaced with condos, so Playland Not-At-The-Beach is closing Labor Day 2018, and its contents will be auctioned.
posted by larrybob (17 comments total)

SF is dead, dessicated by wealth.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:09 PM on August 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

This place was really great. I learned how to play pinball here 2 or 3 years ago. Sad to see it go.
posted by bleep at 6:11 PM on August 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

So will the next incarnation be Schroedinger's Playland, whose Beach status will be indeterminate until you open a box?
posted by delfin at 6:12 PM on August 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

SF is dead, dessicated by wealth.

I mean, I'm kinda sad to see PNATB go, but do you know anything about where it's located? I used to live right near there and there ain't much there but low-density housing. And "dessicated by wealth" is not exactly the phrase that comes to mind to describe it.
posted by asterix at 6:33 PM on August 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

SF is dead, dessicated by wealth.

Somebody’s working on a eulogy.
posted by D.C. at 6:46 PM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

It is/was a wonderful place and I’m lucky to have a wonderful mother who took my son there one last time this past Thursday while I was in town for work (and at 82 years old whooped him pretty good at pinball)
posted by The Gooch at 7:36 PM on August 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

I am a lifelong Bay Area resident, born in 1974 at Kaiser Oakland. Also a Bay Area history buff: I love reading about Playland at the Beach and enjoyed my visit to Playland Not at the Beach - a fun place for a quirky kid's birthday party. However, I would so much rather El Cerrito build 50 units of housing than house this vintage arcade.

In an ideal world, we'd have both, that's why I think we should throw money behind land trusts for non-profits. Oakland has recently had two successful, crowdfunded efforts for community organizations to buy their buildings, and that is a great direction to go in for institutions like small community museums. But frankly, our housing crisis is bigger than our Remembering-SF-History crisis. So I embrace building housing on this site.

(I didn't notice in the couple links I clicked above where it said condos? Obviously I prefer inclusionary zoning, low income units, and affordable units, but honestly I will also take 50 units of market rate in El Cerrito... hardly an affordable neighborhood now.)

It's hard to see the Bay Area change. It's unjust that so much of the change is in the form of more for rich people and nothing for poor people/more for white people and nothing for African American and Latino and low-income immigrant communities. But honestly, I don' t think the loss of the Playland museum/arcade represents that. It is a loss for a certain community, namely, mine, of white, artsy, lefty folks over 40. And I don't dismiss that loss. But again, housing is more important to me right now. Things will change. It's a quirk of timing/history that I happened to be born at a stable moment in Bay Area history, wheras residents who lived here in the 1930s for example saw a complete remaking of their communities during and immediately after the war years. Stuff changes, and between the need to densify our cities to address climate change, and the need to build a fuck-ton of housing because of the housing crisis, now is a time our community needs to change pretty dramatically.

/my two cents
posted by latkes at 7:37 PM on August 13, 2018 [25 favorites]

fazbear's fright?
posted by es_de_bah at 9:39 PM on August 13, 2018

These condos are affordable housing for the working poor, low income and homeless...a gift from the trillion and billionaires right? In a just society this is what should happen.
posted by smudgedlens at 9:40 PM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also, the times that I was there, there were a lot of kids there learning how to play pinball. The funny thing about pinball is that it's such a physical game. That little ball is actually in there rolling around. I think that's important for kids to experience now.
posted by bleep at 10:15 PM on August 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

Sic transit gloria mundi. I hope at least some of the condos will be set aside as affordable housing.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:20 PM on August 13, 2018

Yeah, good points. Cool stuff like Playland that makes the Bay Area special does benefit everyone, and we should preserve those special institutions, for everyone's benefit.

Still, I personally think we need housing more than this institution at this moment in history. Displacement and homelessness and skyrocketing rents feel like a bigger crisis to me.
posted by latkes at 10:39 PM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

(i mean, we've still got the pacific pinball museum over in alameda... it's still awesome. i've gone like three times this year.)
posted by kaibutsu at 11:52 PM on August 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

The contents are going to be auctioned? Wouldn’t it be lovely if some gajillionaire could swoop up the artifacts/memorabilia and help a local historical society expand?

Always sad to see a pinball place close. They’re so great for bringing multiple generations together over a shared activity. And it’s a fun non-sports thing for “kids being kids together in public.” Something I realized while raising my son in the frenziedly-developed South Florida landscape is that there are so many communities without public spaces that are safe and acceptable casual social outlets for teens. I wish that rather than individual development companies scrambling to maximize returns, we could work more toward planned community space integration, so when more housing is provided, space is also reserved for social use.

(Good to know that there’s still pinball in the area at least!)
posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 2:20 AM on August 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I went to the original Playland at the Beach for either my 7th or 8th birthday. Laffing Sal has haunted my nightmares since. The tall wooden slide was too scary and I had to make the walk of shame down the very narrow, rickety stairs when I couldn't force myself to ride down. The "Barrel Roll" had to be stopped so I could get off because I kept falling down and couldn't make it out. I didn't even try the spinning "record player" wheel that basically started spinning with everyone scrambling toward the middle--throwing kids off into not very soft mats. I was trying things that really weren't appropriate for my age because, as always, I was trying to keep up with my older brother. So what I'm saying is, I was not particularly sad to see the original go, and I never felt the need to visit "...Not at the beach".

When I was quite a bit older, I unexpectedly encountered "Laffing Sal" at SC Beach Boardwalk. It was not a pleasant experience. I guess I was a sensitive, awkward kid, who became a sensitive, awkward adult.
posted by agatha_magatha at 10:33 AM on August 14, 2018 [3 favorites]

Even videos of Laffing Sals make me jump out of my skin; I can't imagine how I would react to one in person!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:00 PM on August 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I didn't notice in the couple links I clicked above where it said condos?

The PDF closing announcement says "Unfortunately, like the original Playland at the Beach, we will be making room for housing. In this case it is apartments not condos." That last sentence is elided in the Curbed article for some reason.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:11 AM on August 16, 2018