Elevation Sky Park Opens at Pier 70 on September 19 With a Waterfront Festival

Elevation Sky Park San Francisco opens to the public at Pier 70 on Saturday, September 19, with a one-day waterfront festival called Pier Play San Francisco. The event runs 2pm to 10pm, is 21 and over, and is headlined by the Ibiza-based DJ and producer BLOND:ISH, according to the announcement from festival producer RASA World.

What Opens September 19

Opening day is the festival, not the finished campus. Pier Play is the first public programming at the site, staged outdoors across the waterfront grounds at Pier 70, at the end of 22nd Street where it meets San Francisco Bay. The lineup also includes Nico de Andrea, Darco, MALAS and Admiral, across Afro house, organic house and Latin-influenced electronic music. General admission and VIP tickets went on sale July 30.

RASA World was founded in San Francisco and launched Pier Play on the Santa Monica Pier in 2024. This is the company’s first festival outside Los Angeles.

Three Domes, Opening in Phases

The completed park is planned around three geodesic projection domes designed for 360-degree programming: live concerts, art, film screenings and events. The domes are sized from 150 to 750 guests each, and the site is built for roughly 2,500 people in total, with outdoor gathering areas, food and drink, and year-round programming. Dome-based programming and the other immersive experiences begin in the months after opening day, as the campus opens in phases beginning this September.

Who Is Behind It

Elevation Sky Park is the flagship venue of Elevation XR, a company building a network of dome-based venues, and it is being developed with Brookfield Properties, the master developer at Pier 70. EMPIRE, the San Francisco independent music company, took a strategic stake in the campus in September 2025 to back its music and cultural programming. Elevation XR says the venue is built on the operating model of its Wisdome LA site.

“We built ESP SF to be a gathering place for the Bay Area,” Sean Ahearn, chief executive and co-founder of Elevation XR, said in the announcement. Port of San Francisco executive director Michael Martin said the port was “thrilled to welcome Elevation Sky Park to Pier 70.” Elevation XR says the project took input from Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office, the Port of San Francisco and Dogpatch community organizations.

What It Adds to the Dogpatch Waterfront

Pier 70 is a 19th-century shipyard site that Brookfield is redeveloping into housing, workspace and public space. Brookfield has separately sought city approval to add about 600 homes to the Pier 70 project, which would raise it to roughly 2,750 units. A few blocks inland, the Museum of Craft and Design reopened on September 5 with its OBJECTS: USA exhibition.

Getting There

Pier 70 sits at the end of 22nd Street on the Dogpatch waterfront. The Muni T Third light rail stops at 20th Street in Dogpatch and the 55 Dogpatch bus serves the neighborhood; from Third Street it is a walk of roughly half a mile east to the pier. Caltrain’s 22nd Street station is a similar distance west of the site.

Photo: Clyde Charles Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.