The quirky Oakland bar co-owned by Green Day’s former manager

When old-school Rockridge dive bar Ye Olde Hut became the craft cocktail-serving Rockridge Improvement Club in 2016, the neighborhood didn’t take too kindly to the changes at first.

People shot the windows with BB guns, and “guys would come in the door and be like, ‘f—k this place,’” co-owner Scott Ayers said.

It was the end of an era for the dive known for its pool tables and cheap beer, housed in a building that’s been around since 1911. But despite rumors that the new owners were corporate types, or “tech bros coming to take over their little bar,” said Ayers, that wasn’t the case at all. 

He and co-owner Jeff Saltzman both hail from the music industry — Saltzman managed Green Day in the ’90s and has produced music by The Killers, Blondie and Death Cab For Cutie; Ayers is a producer and musician who was in Oakland electropop band The Lovemakers in the early 2000s. 

Ayers was also a familiar face in the neighborhood, having worked at bars and record stores there since he first moved to the Bay Area from Vermont in 1997. 

When streaming services made earning a living in the music industry more difficult in the early 2010s, Ayers asked his friend Saltzman if he wanted to buy a bar together. As luck would have it, the owners of Ye Olde Hut, Ayers’ favorite neighborhood bar, were looking to sell. 

It took a little while, but today, the Rockridge Improvement Club — named after the civic organization that occupied the building in the early 1900s — is fully embraced by the neighborhood. Even by some old regulars of Ye Olde Hut. 

“We made it a point to win them back,” Ayers said. “And for the most part, we have.”

Rockridge Improvement Club, also known as the RIC, may serve craft cocktails, but it still maintains a dive bar essence. Its Tudor-style exterior remains intact, and inside there’s wood paneling, a vaulted ceiling and a brick fireplace. You can pay $15 for a fancy cocktail, or $8 for a happy hour shot and a beer. There’s an arcade decorated with ’80s movie posters, a photobooth, a former phone booth that’s found new life as a “makeout booth” and TVs that play either sports games or Bob Ross’ “The Joy of Painting.” 

At first, Ayers said they didn’t have a concept for the bar. One materialized organically when his friend brought in a kitschy velvet painting of a mountain lion one day. 

“I was like, oh my god, it would be awesome if we just had tons of them all over the place,” said Ayers. “So we just went on eBay and they’re all like seven bucks a piece. It just turned out that they were mostly unicorn art and then it became a thing.”

Today, the RIC is filled with velvet paintings of unicorns and horses. A black unicorn with a glowing horn, a majestic unicorn flanked by a rainbow, a carousel horse mounted in the rafters. Ayers’ favorite unicorn, a glamorous, doe-eyed beauty gazing pensively into the night sky, has a place of honor above the fireplace. At night, the bar glitters to life with string lights, a year-round Christmas tree and a disco ball.

The quirky decor lends itself well to the RIC’s identity as a sometimes-gay bar, with weekly Thursday drag shows hosted by Ava LaShay.

“The thing about having these wonderful art pieces up is, you know, people that aren’t so cool to the LGBTQ scene would be like, ‘This is a gay bar, I’m not going to be in here,’” said Ayers. “I’m like, ‘Perfect!’”

Aside from the drag shows, the RIC stays a lively event space throughout the week with Skee-Ball on Tuesday, trivia night on Wednesday, karaoke on Friday and DJs and live bands on Saturday. 

“Scott here has created a community center of sorts,” bartender Geoffrey Morgan said. “It’s the only place like this in town.”

Most of the RIC’s bartenders also live in the neighborhood, with some being longtime friends of the owners.

“This was my bar that I drank at before I worked here,” said bartender Andy Niven, who used to be Ayers’ roommate. “Pretty much everyone who works here lives within like six blocks.”

Morgan, a bartender since the RIC first opened in 2016, is also a good friend of Ayers, and has helped fix up the place, including painting the photobooth room downstairs and making the bar’s sign.

“It just feels like home and family,” said Morgan. “Like it’s our place as much as it is his.”

The building at 5515 College Ave. has always served the community in one way or another. The name Rockridge Improvement Club is a nod to the civic organization that built the building in 1911 and led projects such as getting new streetlights installed in the neighborhood or clearing the native brush and trees for new streets.

Ayers said that over the years, the building has had various iterations, from a dance studio to a day care, and the adjoining arcade was once a hair salon and a record store. During Prohibition, the Improvement Club moved out and the building became “The Hut,” a recreation club selling candy, soda, ice cream, cigars and tobacco, according to Oaklandside. It’s unclear when exactly it became a bar following the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, but Ayers said it definitely was by the 1950s. 

On a recent Tuesday night, the funk music playing over the speakers was occasionally punctuated by raucous cheers and high-fives — the Skee-Ball tournament in the front room was in full swing. A group of women in their late 20s gossiped loudly at the bar over cocktails; Ayers was at a table, too, chatting animatedly with friends.

“It’s kind of like ‘Cheers’ in a way, where we have so many regulars, you know that you can come here and hang out with someone that you know,” he said. “… I mean, I come in here to hang out with my friends.”

Since the pandemic, Ayers said the bar has been doing better than ever, and he hopes to keep it going as long as he can. In the near future, he has plans to finally kick into gear his original intention for the space: to host charity events and secret shows (and with those music industry connections, you can expect some great ones). 

“Obviously there’s no way that I could do this forever,” he said. “… But I’d like to continue to attract the more interesting fringes of society — the best parts of it — and make it weird and fun.”