MITCHELL SCHWARZER A Tale of Two Waterfronts: Oakland’ s Jack London Square Competes with San Francisco “When I was fourteen my head filled with the tales of the old voyages, my vision with tropic isles and far sea rims, I was sailing a small centerboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the com- monplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a thrill with romance and adventure, dream- ing a wild life in the wild man world.” 1 In John Barleycorn (1913), Jack London penned a portrait of raucous times along the Oakland waterfront toward the close of the nineteenth century, sailing the sloop Razzle Dazzle, pirat- ing oysters, and capping the days in the company of those sailors, sealers, fishermen, oyster- men, and hoboes who frequented Heinold’s First and Last Chance saloon. 2 The semi- autobiographical novel brought alive the waterfront’s ties to distant places; to the miners, gamblers, and working girls of the Alaskan gold camps; to the treasure hunters and fur traders plying the high seas of the Pacific and great rivers leading inland from it. 3 In the shadows of clipper-ship masts and steamship stacks, London elevated seafaring and seaside merriment into an epic that would come to influence the redevelopment of the city’s downtown waterfront. By the time of London’s death in 1916, the rising volume of shipping tonnage and the in- creasing size of vessels were leading to the relocation of Oakland’s port. Shipyards, ferry ter- minals, and maritime enterprises decamped for larger tracts of land both closer to the bay and further up the estuary. Over the next several decades, the waterfront alongside down- town declined. An idle ferry pier became a fishing spot. A storage shed was demolished and discarded railroad ties piled onto the site. In a sign of things to come, a warehouse was repur- posed into a restaurant. On May 1, 1951, the haphazard reuse of the downtown waterfront took a leap toward or- dered redevelopment. Joseph Knowland, chairman of the Historical Landmarks Committee 6 WINTER 2014 California History, Vol. 91, Number 4, pp. 6–30, ISSN 0162-2897, electronic ISSN 2327-1485. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/CH.2014.91.4.6.