Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon
The floor still runs downhill from the 1906 earthquake, and the saloon says it has been serving Jack London Square since 1 June 1884.
Why go
The room sits on the shore of the San Antonio Estuary and has been pouring for sailors, locals and visitors for well over a century, on its own telling.1 The walls carry the last hundred and forty years, and the saloon lists them: Vietnam, Korea, the Second World War, Prohibition, the First World War.1 The floor runs downhill under your feet. The saloon puts that down to the 18 April 1906 earthquake, and says the closure Oakland's police and fire commissioners ordered that day was the only mandatory one it saw until the state shut it from 16 March 2020 to 3 April 2021.1 Outside, a patio hangs over the water. Boats go up and down the estuary while you sit.1 Every fact above comes from the saloon itself, and nobody else has confirmed any of it.
Order this / avoid
- Avoid: turning up without a wallet. The house rule is printed on the front page:
Please bring your I.D., as just like Safeway and BevMo, we I.D. all of our customers!
1 - I have no drink to point you at. The saloon publishes no menu, and I am not going to invent a house pour for a bar this old.
Good to know
- Hours: Monday from 3pm, Tuesday to Saturday from noon, Sunday from 11am, closing at
9ish,
which the saloon defines as before midnight and after the Square empties out.1
Verdict
should-visit — A bar that says it has opened every day since 1 June 1884 except for the year the state shut it, and whose floor still runs downhill because the 1906 earthquake pushed the pilings, is worth twenty minutes of anybody's afternoon. The patio sits on the San Antonio Estuary and you drink watching boats go by. What holds it off the top rung is that every word of that comes from the saloon itself, and nothing published tells you what is actually good in the glass.