Saturday night. At a remote location on the other side of Potrero Hill, a caravan of box trucks lines up along a dead-end street.
At 9 p.m. they all fling open their doors to reveal small rooms — a bowling alley, a high school portrait studio, a diner, a thing with lots of branches and blinky lights, and so on.
The Lost Horizon Night Market was organized, in the Mission, to be a guerilla art event based on a similar party held in Brooklyn earlier this year. The location was kept hush-hush until a few days before.
Participants rented box trucks, outfitted them according to their own whimsy. In its potential for infinite creativity, the Night Market nonetheless held to certain tropes familiar to attendees of similarly open-sourced events. There was, for example, a stripper pole. There were clowns. There was a fog machine.
A crowd of several hundred wandered from truck to truck, flirting, drinking and bantering, turning an industrial corridor momentarily into something not unlike Valencia Street on a warm night. Then, a little over three hours later, it was all over. The truck doors rolled down, and they, and their contents, got lost.
Some more great images here: http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2010/12/scenes-from-san-franciscos-box-truck-night-market.html
Also: others have pointed out that the Night Market was organized by people all over the Bay Area, especially Oakland.
The first “call for participation” meeting was held at Chez Poulet on Cesar Chavez, but it was definitely held in the Bayview and organized all over the place.
It was great. This is why I live in San Francisco.
You had to be there, words and pictures do no justice.
The led fake poi spinning guys could have stayed home
though. That stuff is like the whistles at 90s dance party.
The night market was amazing!
What SUCKED was the uninvited fire performance which threatened to get the event closed down… LAME!
I took some photos as well, albeit mostly of the Checkered Slag racetrack: http://www.flickr.com/photos/winterhalter/sets/72157625588121310/
The lead photo was from “Mac N Attitude” and I heard it went over very well. Here are some better photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carnivillain/sets/72157625581297578/.
Frog: Send us your photos and we’ll put them up. Best,Lydia