Albany pub where time stands still
Schmidt’s Pub doesn’t officially open until noon, but around 11:30 you’ll start to see the regulars. About a halfdozen people, mostly older folks, are the first customers at the offbeat, antiques-packed Albany tavern every day. They trickle in as soon as the door is unlocked, then stay for an hour or two amid the bookshelves and board games in the converted Craftsman. If the weather’s nice, they sit outside.
The pub keeps Old Speckled Hen on tap for one of these patrons, who orders a daily half-pint. Another regular, a locally beloved dancer and rare-book collector named Stuart Teitler, died in 2012 — but he’s still a fixture at Schmidt’s, thanks to the glass case that displays his dancing shoes and hat. During the month of February, there is a black cloth over the display, to which an employee has taped a piece of paper with the words “‘Because, f— February!’ — Stuart.”
“That was Stuart,” says John Schmidt, 75, the pub’s owner and patriarch, an hour before
opening on a recent Sunday. “He really hated February.”
Founded in 1978 on Solano Avenue near the Albany-Berkeley border, the pub — or Schmidt’s Tobacco Trading Co. & Pub, if you’d like to immediately out yourself as a nonlocal — doesn’t take credit cards. Transactions are recorded by pen on steno pad. Available for purchase are eight draft beers (always Guinness, Fuller’s ESB, Scrimshaw Pilsner and the aforementioned Hen; Racer 5, a couple Belgians and Fieldwork’s St. Thomas IPA rounded out the taps on my last visit). Then there are around 30 beers in bottles, coffee and tea, and a dozen wines by the glass.
But the pub’s most noteworthy offering, perhaps, isn’t potable. In a time and region where the concept of a smoking section is passé at best, Schmidt’s proudly offers nearly two dozen hand-labeled glass jars of fragrant Dutch, English and American tobacco, for both pipes and roll-your-own cigarettes. Peruse the converted gun case stuffed with antique pipes and flasks for sale, if you’re feeling Hemingwayesque. But simple rolling papers (75 cents each) are also plenty popular, thanks to the spacious front patio, a sturdy thing festooned with Christmas lights — and, on a warm Saturday evening, teeming with people.
If it’s cold, Schmidt’s interior offers a fireplace flanked by armchairs, wood tables topped with green glass bankers’ lamps, and a grandfather clock that hasn’t worked in years. This tchotchke-stuffed seating area is often overseen by a big black dog named Phoebe, who can usually be found lying on the floor. You’re welcome to bring your own dog, as well as your own food. But there’s no Wi-Fi, so don’t ask.
“When I was in corporate life, there weren’t any calculators. I used a slide rule. So I was very used to doing graphs, manual stuff,” says Schmidt, a native of Los Angeles who studied and taught at the University of Washington before becoming an economist with Kaiser Engineers in the Bay Area. Although over the years his son and other employees have begged him to let them update the back end of the business, Schmidt still does the accounting, and he still does it by hand.
“I have a computer and a cell phone and all that, but I’ve never felt particularly comfortable or interested in it,” he says, at the prospect of a digital upgrade. Besides: “I’ve always felt a place like this doesn’t need it.”
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By “a place like this,” Schmidt means a watering hole in the spirit of old English and Irish taverns, like the ones he fell for as a young man on business trips to the United Kingdom. “They’re more about the place than the beer: There’s music, people telling stories and then you have grandma knitting over there,” he says. “I just loved them.”
Pub life also turned out to be a sweet spot for the businessman, who always admired Jack London’s pursuit of varied interests.
When his engineering firm closed in the early ’70s, Schmidt decided he was tired of corporate life. He’d always had an eye for antiques, so he began buying them at markets, refurbishing and selling them out of a co-op just up the block on Solano, in what’s now a tapas restaurant. He also indulged his love of tobacco (an affinity he picked up in grad school, where “professors always had pipes”) and eventually opened a small trading post farther up the street, in what’s now a wine bar.
But in 1978, the building at 1492 Solano became available — when, according to Schmidt, former Albany Mayor Jerome Blank offered to trade him the “derelict” house in a business district in exchange for the small home Schmidt owned in a residential one. (Blank was a well-known developer, Rotary Club president and philanthropist; he’s still known, some 17 years after his death, as “Mr. Albany.” He is a story, perhaps, for another time.)
Schmidt couldn’t say no. He moved in his antiques and tobacco. He rebuilt the front and back decks, installed linoleum floors near the bar. He put in two taps ( John Courage and Henry Weinhard’s) and set up the sign out front (Schmidt’s Tobacco Trading Co. & Pub, until he could decide on a real name).
Then he promptly began losing money, he says with a laugh. He was 35, and he was the sole employee.
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Forty years later, Schmidt’s has stayed afloat, to say the least — though considering the craft beer boom and the rate at which new bars and restaurants have sprung up in this area, staying afloat is maybe saying a lot. A few blocks away on Gilman, Westbrae Biergarten offers kid-friendly outdoor seating with heat lamps, rotating local taps and Brazilianinspired salads and sandwiches. On San Pablo, the Albany Taproom slings gourmet burgers alongside 30-plus draft beers in a slick stainlesssteel setting. Meanwhile, the Hotsy Totsy, a quintessential Albany dive bar from 1939, was reborn in 2009 as a hipster hangout with a gin program. (This is no slight to these establishments, mind you — especially not to Hotsy Totsy co-owner and Bar Star Jessica Maria. Her cocktails are excellent.)
But for now, the march of time seems to have skipped Schmidt’s altogether. And once you spend an afternoon at the pub, you’ll see why its proprietor isn’t worried about the competition. Discriminating smokers are, understandably, drawn to the place. But there’s also a built-in, intergenerational clientele: Schmidt himself met his wife, Peggy, at the pub, when she asked him to dance at a party in 1987 — the old Irishmen in the black-andwhite photos on the walls are primarily her family — but he’s quick to add that they’re one of “probably hundreds” of couples who met here. He knows, because those couples’ kids are grown-ups now, and come in to tell him.
As with any cult favorite worth its salt, fandom is spread by word of mouth (Schmidt’s internet presence is minimal at best), and many patrons think of the place as their secret (someone will likely be displeased with this story). But its lore has traveled. In 1995, Schmidt received in the mail a signed copy of “The Great Good Place,” the influential book by sociologist Ray Oldenburg that argues for the importance of “the third place”: the cafes, barbershops and watering holes that bring people together outside of work and their homes. “John, my friend Peter Apanel says you have a ‘wonderful’ place, and that’s high praise,” inscribed Oldenburg, who lives in Florida. “Hope to enjoy one day!”
Late-morning sunlight is now streaming through windows onto the hardwood floors as, an hour before opening, the pub fills slowly with people, sounds, the smell of coffee. First Peggy breezes in with a laundry basket under one arm. Then longtime employee Phil Ramey arrives for the opening shift, gingerly stepping over Phoebe to wipe down tables, and prepping the espresso machine, pausing to demonstrate how it’s tricked out with an antique train whistle. (Ramey picked up the whistle a few years back, but couldn’t quite figure out a practical use for it, so lattes now come with optional atmospheric railroad sounds.)
Ramey can tell you about how the pub is a clubhouse for staff, as well. Schmidt likes to hire students, artists and musicians as part-timers; he currently employs nine. Their friends become regulars, and over time they all become kin, which accounts for the wide age range of the average customer. (When I mention a high school classmate who worked here more than 10 years ago, Peggy delivers a full report on his family and theater career up in Ashland, Ore.) On a nearby shelf is a photograph of a regular who died too young, with the caption: “Ara Jo. Artist, Pubster. Died December 2, 2016 in the ‘Ghostship’ warehouse fire.”
As for actual kin: John and Peggy’s two sons have other lives and jobs, but the pub is still the family business. John Patrick, 28, works the bar Mondays and Tuesdays, places orders and has begun to shadow his dad on managerial tasks; Ian, 26, makes warehouse trips and keeps the ivy outside from overtaking the place. John Patrick would like to make a few improvements, but he’s come to appreciate the pub’s anachronisms. “I think of that broken grandfather clock as a metaphor for the whole place. It’s stuck in time,” he says. “And a lot of that has to do with my dad’s ability to change things at the pace of a snail.”
At 11:30, the arrival of a regular out on the patio signals that the elder Schmidt should start the day’s office work. To be clear, although his kids are helping out, Schmidt doesn’t plan to hand the place down or otherwise retire anytime soon. Asked if he’d like to work here for the rest of his life, he shrugs.
“Sure,” he says, as he goes to greet his customer. “Unless I find something else I really like to do.”