Ballers and Corrugation at Prescott Market, West Oakland, Wednesday evening and Thursday morning

At 9:15 am, the vibes at Prescott market in West Oakland are "irritated." The handful of people inside are being blared at by music that’s 20 percent too loud while the handful of people taking their calls outside—pre-emptively avoiding irritating other people—are irritating to those of us who are outside, who are also irritated by the brightness of the sun, and struggle to adjust our umbrellas to compensate. I feel like I have offended the Highwire people and I do not know why.

It has no business opening at 8 AM, which it inexplicably does. When I was here the evening before, the place fully made sense: “Hoppingly family friendly bland beer garden” as a friend put it; the big ass sandbox crawling with kids had appealed to me, as a dad, and there had been lots of dogs on the artificial grass, albeit significantly more Ballers caps. Beers had been amiably consumed at a picnic table, against a corrugated steel background. At a certain point, all the Ballers caps had disappeared, presumably when the game began, just across Campbell street. I had come back this morning, with my laptop, to see what the keyboard warrior vibe was, but if anybody else was working from home from Prescott Market, we were outnumbered by the bare handful of stroller pushers.

When there is a Ballers game, this place makes the same kind of sense as it does that they opened it about a month before the Ballers season began, and that the city finished evicting the Wood Street Encampment in time for both. What its 300 inhabitants had called the Wood Street Commons settlement makes no sense for what srmERNST is building there: “a portfolio of seven (7) properties totaling over 120,000 sf in the Prescott area of West Oakland building on Oakland's entrepreneurial and creative culture and targeting innovative manufacturers such as food tech, lab R&D, and robotics.” The guy who “curated” this place also founded the farmers market that shows up here a few years ago, also sponsored by srmERNST (“SRM is taking a neighborhood approach to the redevelopment”). It also makes sense that Joe Ernst has been looking for this opportunity for decades; Jerry Brown liked to observe, when he was Mayor, that West Oakland is closer to the financial district than is most of San Francisco. Ernst seems to have the same sense of the place’s relative geography (“I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to Emeryville or Berkeley and gone up Mandela and just thought, ‘This is so convenient,’…It’s such a great location. It’s quick to downtown, it’s so fast to San Francisco, you’ve got the freeways, BART.”)

Is it "quick to downtown, so fast to San Francisco"? I dunno. It's a convenient walk to all the newish developments nearby, like the big campus of condos just west of Wood St between 12th and 14th. "Oakland’s recent swell in popularity has made West Oakland a common spot for the commuting crowd outside of the Golden Gate City" declares one of the apartments on Boxcar Circle. I'd wonder where all these people live, except there never seem to be all that many people in them. Maybe they all commuted to work in the "the Golden Gate City," a thing that definitely exists and normal people say.

It will not surprise you that the outward-facing architecture of this place is as "a man's food court is his castle" as it is. The bike racks and parking lot are inside the compound’s walls and gate—which is what they feel like—and there's a security guard in a car parked at the entrance (though “hard to find a car less threatening than a Prius,” as a compadre observed). There was a cherry-red Tesla C there last night, and this morning, a white one; I assume there is always one Tesla, which changes its colors to indicate time of day. When I had biked here last night, I had trouble finding the entrance and went all the way around the place; exteriorly, it's all just the same century-old red brick industrial walls and fences that most of the buildings are, in this mostly unresidented area. It’s a lot bigger on the outside than the inside, so driving here makes sense.

Inside, the architecture answers the question: “what if a 2014 tech company had a bunch of babies with a ghost kitchen?” There are couches and nooks where some architect has proposed you have an impromptu meeting with a stranger or your manager, an offer which no one has accepted.

At the tables, you’re supposed to order food with your phone (which irritated me, so I did not), which I bet is very convenient, even if it’s a step more hostile than just being cashless. It also means that the various restaurants inside lack the usual waiting-to-order architectural cues, or queues, that show you where to stand and how to move; because you’re supposed to QR code your order and then, when you get a text, run inside and grab it—and not linger—the restaurants lack the kind of organized liminal space between server and customer one is accustomed to, like lacking a face. You can see right into the kitchen areas, like peering into a skull. At 9:15 AM, the whole place feels like it hasn’t opened yet, and also that someone who works there is about to ask you to leave.

Outside, the curated murals are about 50 percent more artificial than even usual, with titles so evocative ("Science and Tech," "Car Culture," Food Culture," and "Music Scene") they must have been assigned by a grant application. Dogs are instructed by an optimistic sign to remain 20 feet away from the sandbox, and there is yoga here once a week and shit like that. The disorienting way the music leaps leaps from pop country to "Not Like Us" and back again is the soundtrack to revitalization.

But look, it’s all fine. I got some work done outside, and as a white guy who doesn't live in West Oakland, I find myself compelled. I might come back, with my laptop, and get some more work done. I might bring my toddlers, and I bet they’ll have a grand time in the sand box. Maybe we'll even take in a Ballers game.