Alameda Point's Spirits Alley Is Thriving. Its New Neighbors Build Airplanes.

Walk down Monarch Street on a Saturday afternoon and the first thing you notice is the water. The San Francisco skyline sits low across the estuary, close enough that Faction Brewing's patio treats it like wallpaper. Dogs wander between picnic tables. Someone's kid is on their third snow cone from a food truck parked outside Rock Wall Wine Co. If you stop at any tasting room along the strip, the person behind the counter will hand you a small passport booklet, no application, no appointment, just a stamp card that says you're welcome to keep walking to the next one.

A few streets over, on the same former Naval Air Station, a company called Pyka tests autonomous crop-dusting aircraft inside a 110,000-square-foot hangar. It doesn't pour anything you can drink. It doesn't want your foot traffic. And it's paying roughly $100,700 a month to be there, which tells you something about what's actually happening at Alameda Point right now that a bar crawl alone won't.

The Alley Everyone Already Knows

Spirits Alley has been the anchor of this stretch since Faction Brewing opened in 2014 inside what used to be a helicopter repair center, a detail the taproom still leans on. The lineup that followed reads like a who's who of East Bay craft beverage: Dashe Cellars, which spent fifteen years in Jack London Square before jumping the estuary to share a building with Urban Legend Cellars, Rock Wall Wine Co., St. George Spirits with its gin and whiskey stills inside a 65,000-square-foot former hangar, Hangar 1 Vodka, and Admiral Maltings, whose onsite pub, The Rake, overlooks the malting floor and pours beer brewed with the malt made right there.

None of that is new information if you've lived on the island for more than a few years. What's changed is how the alley organizes itself. The passport program ties the whole strip together into a single afternoon instead of a series of separate stops, and it's the kind of low-key civic project that only works once there's enough density of tenants to make the walk worth it.

What Actually Opened This Year

That density got a real boost recently. A few names worth knowing if you haven't been out there in a while:

• Saltbreaker, a restaurant inside a converted naval building serving a seasonal California menu with a design-forward dining room, has become the spot for an actual sit-down dinner rather than just a flight of beer.
• The Yard at Alameda Point opened as a more casual, open-air gathering space with a full bar and patio seating, built for the crowd that wants a longer hang than a single tasting room allows.
• Hangar 40 Sports Bar and Cafe is the newest addition, giving the district something it never really had before: a place to watch a game.

Put those three together with the original five or six anchors and you get a corridor that can hold a whole Saturday without anyone needing to drive somewhere else for dinner.

The Hangar Next Door Doesn't Pour Anything

Here's where the story stops being a simple bar roundup. Walk past the tasting rooms toward West Tower Avenue and Skyhawk Street and the buildings start belonging to a different kind of tenant entirely. Pyka inked an eight-year deal with the city for its headquarters and manufacturing plant at 950 West Tower Avenue, with the lease beginning in March 2024, and told Alameda it expected to grow past 130 employees by 2026. Astra leased Building 360 at 1900 Skyhawk Street, a 179,070-square-foot hangar, to expand its work on satellite delivery vehicles. Down on Monarch Street itself, ownership records show four hangars split between the city and a company called Natel, which owns one outright.

These aren't rumors of future development. They're signed leases and completed sales sitting on the exact same street grid as the tasting rooms, inside buildings that were purpose-built during World War II for aircraft repair and are now, eight decades later, doing something close to their original job again.

Why the City Started Talking About Selling Instead of Renting

The reason both stories are happening on the same six blocks comes down to money the city doesn't have. At a January 20, 2026 City Council workshop, staff laid out a problem that had been building for years: the estimated cost of new infrastructure at Alameda Point, streets, utilities, parks, levees, stormwater basins, had climbed from $700 million in 2020 to $840 million in 2025. Over that same period, only five buildings had actually sold, generating around $31 million total, a fraction of what's needed. Land and building values, meanwhile, hadn't kept pace with the rising infrastructure bill. In some cases, according to the staff report, they'd fallen.

That math is why the city is now weighing a shift from leasing high-value buildings for their monthly income to selling them outright for a lump sum, and why one specific complex, the vacant Building 11 hangar and its two attached buildings on Monarch Street, is being floated for sale after several developers reportedly toured it and expressed interest. It's also the quiet backstory behind something a Spirits Alley winery owner told a reporter back in 2022: he'd moved his operation to Alameda Point expecting the city to eventually improve the sidewalks, lighting, and transit access nearby, even though none of that was written into his lease. Whether a building gets fixed up or sits waiting has always come down to which side of this leasing-versus-selling math it falls on.

The Slow Year Nobody Forgot

That same 2022 reporting painted a rougher picture of the alley than the one you'd see walking through today. Traffic for at least one tenant had reportedly dropped to a tenth of what it had been the year before, and the departure of a couple of popular businesses raised real questions about whether the district could hold onto its identity as new leases increasingly went to tech tenants instead of beverage makers.

The alley didn't recover because the city finally repaved Monarch Street. It recovered because enough new tenants, Saltbreaker, The Yard, Hangar 40, layered onto the existing anchors that a visit stopped requiring advance planning. The passport program formalized what was already becoming true: there's now enough here to fill an afternoon without repeating a stop. That's a different kind of turnaround than an infrastructure fix, and it's one residents can actually feel on a Saturday even while the city is still years away from resolving how it pays for the rest.

Building an Actual Saturday Around It

If you haven't been out to the Point in a while, here's a version that uses what's actually there now. Start at the Monarch Street cluster, Faction, Dashe and Urban Legend sharing their building, Rock Wall down the block, and grab a passport at whichever door you hit first. Walk the Seaplane Lagoon Promenade afterward for the open water view and a look at the USS Hornet docked nearby, now a Smithsonian-affiliated museum ship. If your timing lines up with the first Sunday of the month, detour toward the Alameda Point Antiques Faire, one of the largest vintage and antique shows in Northern California, with more than 800 dealer booths spread across the old runways. Close the day at Saltbreaker or The Yard, or duck into Hangar 40 if there's a game on.

None of this requires knowing anything about hangar leases or council workshops. But the reason the day works now, when it might not have five years ago, has everything to do with which side of Alameda Point's financing puzzle each building landed on. The bars filled in because tenants kept signing leases in the smaller spaces along Monarch Street. The giant hangars a block away filled in because aerospace companies needed exactly the kind of column-free, high-ceiling space the Navy built and nobody else in the East Bay was offering at a comparable rate. Both things are true on the same six blocks at the same time, and that's the actual state of Alameda Point in 2026, not a finished waterfront district, but a working one, filling in unevenly, one lease at a time.

If you're curious about what else is changing across Alameda's neighborhoods, or you're thinking through a move to the island yourself, the team at DiMaggio Betta Group knows this market block by block. Get in touch anytime.