Drive out past the old hangars on Ferry Point after dark this fall and you'll see something the Navy never put there: a glowing white tent, roughly the size of a football field's end zone, lit up against the black water of the Seaplane Lagoon. Inside, servers in 1890s dress are pouring craft cocktails while aerialists warm up overhead. Outside, the tarmac that once handled naval aircraft is empty and quiet, the way it's been since the Naval Air Station shut down in 1997.
That contrast is the whole story of what's happening at Alameda Point right now. A stretch of decommissioned runway has become the site of a genuine tryout, and most of the people buying tickets to the circus inside that tent don't realize they're watching an audition for something much more permanent.
From Runway to Radium
The tent belongs to Radium Runway, an open-air arts venue at 2151 Ferry Point run by a nonprofit called Radium Presents. The organization launched in 2017 with a specific, stated goal: build the Bay Area's first waterfront performing arts center, a 600-seat venue with views across the water to San Francisco. That building doesn't exist yet. What exists instead is the runway itself, repurposed year after year as a proving ground for the idea.
The current tenant is a 12,000-square-foot tent shipped in from Tortona, Italy, nicknamed the Tortona Big Top. Vau de Vire Society, the San Francisco performance company behind The Soiled Dove, first pitched a tent in Alameda back in 2016 after a developer bought the block they'd been using in the Mission. What started as a temporary landing spot has turned into a multi-year residency, and Radium Presents has built its case for a permanent venue directly on top of it.
What's Actually Under the Tent This Season
The Soiled Dove is the anchor show, and it's not a typical night at the theater. Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines has called it "Cirque du Soleil in fishnets," and the description holds up: a Barbary Coast-themed dinner circus set in 1890s San Francisco, built around a three-course meal from the San Francisco catering company Work of Art, live music from the band Sgt. Splendor, and a cast that runs past 30 performers, including aerialists, dancers, and comedians working the crowd between courses.
This season's marquee addition is Joan Baez, who joined the cast as a guest performer under the name Paloma Blanca. It's an unusual pairing on paper, a folk icon who sang alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial and helped launch Bob Dylan's career, sharing a stage with burlesque dancers and circus aerialists in a repurposed military tent. Reviewers who've caught the show this year describe an evening built around blurring the line between dinner and performance entirely, with courses arriving in sync with the acts and servers doubling as cast members.
Shows run Friday and Saturday nights and stretch from summer into November, with the exact closing date shifting slightly year to year. Recent seasons have priced tickets from around $85 for general admission standing room up to roughly $240 for VIP seating at the runway with dinner included. It's not a cheap night out, but it's also not competing with anything else on the island. There's nothing else in Alameda built like it.
The Tent Isn't Only Doing Circus Duty
Radium Runway has started hosting a second, quieter program alongside the Soiled Dove's Friday and Saturday runs: Radium Stories, a monthly storytelling series under the same big top. The September 24 edition, themed "Back to School (Fool)," pulled together an NPR Storyteller of the Year and two Moth GrandSlam winners alongside stand-up comedians and a podcast host, with a 7:30 p.m. show following an hour of gallery browsing and drinks from a card-only bar. Another edition is scheduled for October 22.
The storytelling series matters here for a reason beyond programming variety. A single tent hosting both a $240 immersive dinner circus and a $30 storytelling night in the same month is doing double duty as a pitch deck. Radium Presents is using the tent to prove the site can carry more than one kind of show, which is exactly the argument a nonprofit needs to make before anyone commits real money to a 600-seat building.
The Rest of the Fall Calendar at the Point
The tent isn't the only reason to head toward the Point this season. The wider stretch of reclaimed runway and taxiway has turned into a recurring host site for events that have nothing to do with Radium Presents but benefit from the same open space:
- The Alameda Island Running Festival took over City Hall West at Alameda Point on September 19 and 20, with a half marathon, 10K, 5K, and family fun run routed through the Point's recently opened trails, with a portion of registration fees going to the Alameda Education Foundation.
- The Alameda Point Antiques Faire returns October 4, drawing dealers and browsers to the same open lots that once served as aircraft parking.
- The city's own "Creative Futures" sessions, held at the Alameda Point Collaborative Screening Room, have brought residents into the conversation about what else this stretch of the base becomes next.
None of this was engineered by one organization. It's the accumulated effect of a decommissioned base with more open pavement than any other part of the island, and organizers of every stripe treating it as the default answer to "where do we put this."
Why a Tent, Not Yet a Building
The most telling detail in all of this is what hasn't changed since 2017: there's still no permanent structure. Radium Presents has spent nine years running shows out of a tent while making the public case for something built to last, and the tent has become the argument rather than a placeholder for one. Every season under the Big Top adds another data point to a track record the nonprofit can point to when it eventually goes looking for the capital to build a 600-seat hall in the same spot.
For anyone who lives near the Point, that means the version of Alameda Point you're watching right now, tent shows, running festivals, antique dealers filling old parking aprons, is a working draft. The runway that used to move fighter jets is currently moving circus performers, marathon runners, and folding tables full of vintage glassware, and every one of those uses is quietly building the case for what gets built there permanently.
The next time you're deciding whether a Friday night under the Big Top is worth the ticket price, it's worth knowing you're not just buying a dinner and a show. You're watching an island figure out, in real time, what an old runway becomes when nobody's landing planes on it anymore.
If you're weighing a move to Alameda and want a read on how neighborhoods like the West End and Alameda Point are actually developing, not just what the listing photos show, Shalaya Shipman can walk you through what's changing on the ground and what it means for your search.
