The Oldest Bar in Town Has New Landlords — and They Already Run the Loudest
Every scene has a keystone, the small room that holds the arch up, and in Sacramento that keystone is a corner bar at 10th and S. Old Ironsides opened in 1934 as the first business in the city to secure a liquor license once Prohibition lifted — a distinction it wears like a birthright. For 90 years it stayed in the Kanelos family, a genuinely rare run of single-family ownership. Then, in 2024, the deed changed hands, and the identity of the buyers says a lot about where the scene is headed.
The new owners are Bret Bair and Eric Rushing — the same duo who founded Ace of Spades, the 1,000-capacity downtown warehouse that hosts the metal packages and hip-hop tours. Which means Sacramento's smallest historic room and one of its largest modern ones now share a family tree. On paper that is a real-estate footnote. In practice it is a quiet consolidation of the pipeline: the room where a band plays its first Sacramento show and the room where it plays its breakout are now, in a sense, run by the same people.
Do not mistake that for corporate flattening. Old Ironsides earned its stripes as a live venue the hard way, hosting Sublime, Everclear, Death Cab for Cutie and Cake in a space that comfortably holds a couple hundred bodies and uncomfortably holds a lot more. Comedians passed through too — Katt Williams and Aisha Tyler among them — back before the marquees knew their names. The bar's whole value proposition is intimacy: you are never far from the stage, and on the right night the line between crowd and act basically dissolves.
The optimistic read on the ownership change is that the people who understand how to fill a 1,000-cap room also understand why the 200-cap room matters — that you cannot have the big night without the small one that came first. The pessimistic read is the one every longtime regular is quietly bracing for: that "improvements" become "polish" become a place that no longer smells like 90 years of last calls.
For now, the lights are still on and the bands still load in nightly. Sacramento should keep showing up — partly out of loyalty, mostly because a room this old, this small, and this storied is exactly the kind of thing a growing city forgets it has until the day it's gone.
Sources: Old Ironsides (bar) — Wikipedia); History — Old Ironsides; The History Behind Sacramento's Old Ironsides — CBS Sacramento