In 2000, Tuck purchased a 10,000-square-foot building that had last sold produce and canned goods. He needed space for a lifetime of collecting, and the cavernous former store offered plenty of it. Word got out about what he had stashed inside: the giant blue hat from the top of the Playland Funhouse, cases of never-opened ticket books, original signage, ride components, employee uniforms, and prizes from the arcade games. Community members started showing up, not to buy anything, but to help. Volunteers organized and cataloged the growing collection, and Tuck made a decision that transformed a storage problem into something remarkable. He would turn the building into a museum dedicated to fun. Eight years of design work and construction followed before Playland-Not-At-The-Beach opened its doors on May 31, 2008.

The museum held 25 exhibits, with particular emphasis on the attractions that had once drawn San Franciscans to the original Playland and the nearby Sutro Baths. But this was no static display of artifacts behind glass. Over 30 pinball machines lined the walls, their bumpers and flippers still working. Carnival skill games invited visitors to try their luck. Dioramas celebrated Halloween and the holiday season with the same handmade exuberance that had defined the original park. The Marcks Family Miniature Circus, a painstaking scale model of circus life, occupied its own corner of wonder. For visitors old enough to remember the original Playland, the museum was a time machine. For their children and grandchildren, it was proof that amusement once meant something more intimate than a corporate theme park — something built by hand, maintained by devotion, and sustained by the peculiar magic of mechanical entertainment.

What made Playland-Not-At-The-Beach unusual was not just its contents but its operating model. The entire museum ran on volunteer labor. No paid staff, no corporate sponsors, no admission fees designed to maximize revenue. It was a nonprofit in the truest sense, a community project sustained by people who believed that preserving the memory of San Francisco's vanished amusements was worth their weekends. The museum earned enough local attention to be featured on the San Francisco television show Eye on the Bay in November 2009, which brought new visitors streaming through the doors. But the volunteer model that gave the museum its soul also set its limits. Running a 10,000-square-foot public space on donated time is an act of sustained generosity, and generosity, like everything else, has a shelf life.

The symmetry was almost too perfect to be coincidence. Playland at the Beach had closed on Labor Day 1972, the end of one last summer at the oceanfront park that had entertained San Francisco since the 1920s. Forty-six years later, Playland-Not-At-The-Beach closed on Labor Day 2018, after more than a decade of nonprofit community service. The echo was deliberate — a final nod to the original park's last day, a closing that rhymed with its inspiration. Ten years is a respectable run for any museum, let alone one powered entirely by volunteers in a converted grocery store. Walking Charley and the blue clown hat and the pinball machines had found a home for a while, a place where the mechanical laughter of Laughing Sal could still ring out across a room full of people who came not for nostalgia alone, but for the simple, irreplaceable pleasure of fun made by human hands.