Escape from Mission Bay

The aforementioned Mission Bay pedestrians were discovered a block away on Fourth Street at Spark, a food truck park.

The site is more charming than its sibling, the SoMa StrEat Food Park on 11th Street which is surrounded by overhead freeways, and Spark looks to have become a de facto community center for the new neighborhood.

It was an interesting mixture of people stopping for lunch and groups of friends getting together for an afternoon beer garden with food.

They even have "The Field" which you can reserve, and last Saturday it was occupied by the surreal sight of a Bubble Soccer game.

We walked back through the neighborhood and it felt more like David Cronenberg's Scanners than ever.

It's nice to see the waterfront being returned to its residents, finally, after decades as an industrial port.

I remember the final decade of the thriving Port of San Francisco, the 1960s, and watched as everything went to the Port of Oakland in the 1970s when new container shipping facilities were built connecting to railways in the East Bay.

For decades, San Francisco politicians stuck in the recent past made it clear that the only possible use for the waterfront had to be commercial port related even though that ship had sailed long ago.

One of the great silver linings of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was seeing the San Francisco waterfront for the first time without a doubledecker freeway. 28 years later and the city is still only beginning to figure out how to use the discarded railyards and parking lots and piers of former decades, while various citizens try to defend the waterfront from real estate investors who care more about profit than public space.

We arrived back at the Giants baseball stadium, a nice mixture of entertainment, profit and public space, just as the afternoon Escape from AT&T Park session was to begin.