Bluebird Play

About

There is a children's bookstore underneath the play space and the two are one business, which explains most of what the room feels like. Murals run wall to wall and turn the place into a storybook; the structures are custom-built rather than catalog-ordered, with slides, pretend-play corners and reading nooks worked in. The shop below stocks board books, instruments, costumes and puzzles instead of the usual plastic. One visiting family had a twelve- and a fourteen-year-old contentedly occupied downstairs while the little ones played above, which is not a sentence you get to write about most play spaces.

It is small and it is quiet — two reviewers, a year apart, describe having the room more or less to themselves on a weekday afternoon — with an area set aside for the smallest babies and enough couch seating that grown-ups can genuinely sit down. Best from babies to about six. Two things to know: grip socks are required, and the venue has its own free lot reached through the alley, which in Ocean Beach is worth considerably more than it sounds. The owner is usually on the floor, and reviewers keep saying so as their way of explaining why the place feels personal.