Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon

A bar that sells history is usually selling a replica. Heinold's isn't replicating anything — it's still standing on the same foundation that gave way in 1906, and it never bothered fixing it.

The building is older than the bar itself. It went up around 1880 from a decommissioned ship's reclaimed timber, first served as lodging for oyster workers, and was bought by Johnny Heinold in the early 1880s, who turned it into a saloon at the foot of Webster Street. That waterfront location is the whole point: it was the first drink a sailor had after stepping off a ship, and the last before shipping out again. The name isn't a marketing flourish. It's a work schedule.

What the earthquake left behind

In 1906, the ground under one side of the building sank when the pilings gave way in the marshy soil, and the floor still slopes downhill from the front door to this day — the stools are bolted to the ground, and glasses roll if you're not paying attention. A clock on the wall stopped at 5:18, the exact moment of the tremor, and nobody's ever fixed it. Most buildings that survive a disaster get renovated until it looks like nothing happened. Heinold's kept the scar visible. It's not neglect — Oakland North's rundown of the bar's legends treats the tilted floor and the stopped clock as the place's real credentials, more than any commemorative plaque could manage.

The lighting is the other holdout. Heinold's is said to be one of the last commercial spaces in California still running on its original gas jets instead of having switched to electric decades ago — the bar's own history makes that claim with a hedge ("reputed to be one of the last"), and it's worth repeating here with the same caution rather than turning it into an absolute record. Either way, it's real gas flame, not a bulb shaped like one.

The bar that shaped Jack London

A young Jack London started hanging around the place at nine or ten years old, after his family settled in Oakland. Heinold let the boy stick around selling newspapers, sold him his first boat through a regular when he was fifteen, and at seventeen lent him the money to study at the University of California. London paid the bar back by writing it into his own work — he name-checks the saloon repeatedly in his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn, and drew on sailors he met there for The Sea-Wolf and The Call of the Wild. In 1998, United for Libraries' Literary Landmark program made the connection official, recognizing Heinold's as a literary landmark in London's honor. Not every bar can point to the exact stool where a career started. Heinold's can.

In practice

It's still a real, working bar, at 48 Webster St in Jack London Square — not a museum with a liquor license. Hours run roughly noon to 9 p.m. most days, a bit later on weekends, and it's an easy walk from the pier and Oakland's ferry terminal. Go for the tilted floor and the gaslight, stay because it's still cheaper and less polished than most of what's opened up around it since.

Why go

Because Oakland's waterfront has been rebuilt around this building more than once, and the building never budged to keep up. Near's coverage of the East Bay keeps landing on the same observation — a scene's newer rooms get the attention while the oldest one keeps pouring drinks a few blocks away, including Oakland's most recent crop of bars. Heinold's is the earliest entry in that argument, and it's still got the tilted floor to prove it.