Heinold's First and Last Chance: The Bar That Financed a Literary Career
Near San Francisco, California
The building was built in eighteen eighty from the salvaged timber of an old whaling ship, on fill at the foot of Webster Street at the Oakland waterfront, and Johnny Heinold converted it into a saloon in eighteen eighty-three. He nailed together something functional: low ceiling, scarred bar, a few tables, tilted floor from the eighteen ninety-six foundation settling. He did not renovate it after the nineteen oh six earthquake shifted it further. He did not renovate it at all.
The bar that resulted, still standing, still open, still tilted, was where Jack London spent his adolescence. London grew up in Oakland's waterfront poverty. He worked as a child in a cannery. In his early teens he became what he later called an oyster pirate, taking small boats out at night to harvest from the Southern Pacific Railroad's private oyster beds in the Bay. He came to Heinold's because the bar was on the water and Heinold was the kind of man who was interested in the people around him.
Johnny Heinold loaned London money for the college entrance examinations. The California History journal and the San Francisco Historical Society document London's Oakland waterfront years and his connection to Heinold's. The OAC's Oakland Public Library collection holds London materials corroborating this record.
London went on to become one of the most widely read writers in the world, and one of the highest-paid, before his death at the age of forty. He wrote socialism from the inside, from specific Oakland economic conditions, not from theory. He wrote about what it cost to be poor in a city organized around a waterfront economy.
The bar is still there. It is among the oldest bars in California, and it is the last commercial establishment in the state with its original gas lighting, according to historical accounts. The floor still slopes. The wood is still from that whaling ship. The man Heinold loaned money to became Jack London. The bar outlasted him by over a century.
