My partner and I have just rolled into Bolinas for the weekend. Sidling up to the mahogany bar to order a drink, I half expect a cowboy to burst through the back door and greet the bartender with a “howdy.” No such cowboy arrives, and I order my hard kombucha with activated charcoal with a smidgeon of shame. There’s a little carved sailor figurine on the bar top, mirrors in ornate gold frames, historic photos of Smiley’s circa 1851, a weathered Baldwin piano in the corner, and a copy of the “Bolinas Hearsay News” posted on the wall behind the bar.īartender Frederick Newbill (second from left) talks with a customer at the bar at Smiley's Saloon. Inside, the bar has douglas fir and redwood walls, ceiling and trim, and a few old hippies sipping brews on bar stools. Smiley’s certainly looks old, a two-story white building with shiplap siding and an old-fashioned colonnade supporting the balcony for the hotel upstairs. “I've sent messages to them and to William Tell and have been like, ‘So do you guys want to talk about this? Should we have a showdown at high noon, perhaps?’” jokes Leila Monroe, the owner of Smiley’s, sitting across from me on the saloon’s balcony. The William Tell House in Tomales, just down the road from Bolinas, boasts that it’s “Marin County's oldest saloon,” despite dating back to a comparatively modern 1877.
There’s the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland just outside Yosemite National Park, which touts the tagline “oldest saloon in California” (though they opened in 1852, a year after Smiley’s). You see, Smiley’s isn’t the only old-timey bar in California laying claim to this title. To the casual bar fly, this assertion can seem arbitrary, but it’s actually quite contentious.Ī historical placard recounts the history of Smiley's Saloon in Bolinas, California. “Established in 1851, Smiley’s is reported to be the oldest continually operating saloon on the West Coast.”
But what drew me to Smiley’s was a force much older and stronger: a very bold claim on its website: