The first time you notice it, you're probably not looking for it. You're doing the 6 a.m. loop past the pergola, coffee in hand, watching the construction crew finish up the new mural inside what used to be Sidebar, and you don't think twice about the low chain-link boom sitting out on the water near the northeast shore. It looks incidental, like something the Parks Department forgot to remove. It isn't. That boom marks the edge of a boundary drawn in 1870, and it's the reason the birds get their own islands while your paddleboard has to go around.
Most people who walk, jog, or row this lake weekly have no idea they're circling the oldest wildlife protection in the country. That fact isn't trivia. It explains more about how this specific stretch of shoreline works, and why it keeps attracting the same kind of investment, than any restaurant opening does on its own.
The boundary nobody sees
Lake Merritt reads as a park. It functions as something closer to a legal instrument. On March 18, 1870, the California legislature passed a law making it unlawful to take, kill, or destroy fish, ducks, cranes, herons, swans, pelicans, or "any wild animal or game" in or around the lake, within one hundred rods of the high water mark. That's not a city ordinance or a park rule. It's a state statute, and it predates the creation of Yellowstone as a national park by two years.
The motive wasn't purely conservationist. Dr. Samuel Merritt, who bought the land in 1852 and helped form the lake that carries his name, had grown tired of stray bullets from duck hunters landing near the homes going up along the shore. Protecting the birds also meant protecting the property values of the people building around them. That's worth sitting with, because the same logic is still playing out on Grand Avenue a century and a half later.
Why the birds still get the water
The practical result of that 1870 law is five human-made islands anchoring what's now called the Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge. A boom cordons them off from the parts of the lake used for kayaking, rowing, and paddleboarding, so the herons and egrets nesting there aren't disturbed by boat traffic. According to the Lake Merritt Institute, roughly 140 species of birds and 30 species of fish live in and around the lake today, along with opossums, feral cats, and a sizable colony of fox squirrels in Lakeside Park.
If you've ever wondered why there's a small building near the Gardens at Lake Merritt with binoculars-heavy volunteers coming and going on a Wednesday, that's the Rotary Nature Center, staffed by an all-volunteer nonprofit that leads monthly bird walks and has been doing so for well over a decade. None of this happened by accident of good intentions. It happened because a 19th-century real estate concern got written into state law and never got undone.
Grand Avenue's version of the same instinct
Which brings us to the storefront across from the pergola. Sidebar closed there in early 2024 and the space sat empty for the better part of two years before Maria Alderete and Rick Mitchell, the team behind the long-running Luka's Taproom in Uptown, signed a lease in November 2025. They opened Bar Skula there this summer, keeping the bar that overlooks the lake through the original windows and adding underwater murals from Bay Area artists, including work by Pancho Pescador and photographs of the lake's own wildlife by Damon Tighe. Alderete and Mitchell ran Luka's for fifteen years before a lease dispute closed it in January 2022, and by most local accounts, that restaurant is credited with a good share of Uptown's revitalization in the first place. Oaklandside's coverage of the opening captures a crew that's worked together for close to two decades finally getting the band back together, a few blocks from where they made their name.
At the same time, Enssaro, the Ethiopian restaurant that's operated on Grand Avenue for roughly two decades, is leaving. Not closing. Relocating to a new space at 5897 College Ave in Rockridge, which opened July 31, 2026. It's still family-run by the same mother, daughter, and son team, and the new interior was designed by Kalu Gebreyohannes-Royster of Liyu Designs, whose other work includes Meski in San Francisco and Lucy Blue here in Oakland. The Oaklandside's monthly roundup treats this as one relocation among several across the city that month, which is exactly the point. A restaurant with two decades of goodwill doesn't leave a location because business is bad. It leaves because it's confident enough to bet on a new one.
Read together, these two moves say the same thing the 1870 statute says. This shoreline has always been worth fighting for, whether the fight is over hunting rights or a lease on a storefront with a lake view.
The Saturday everyone already knows about
None of this competes with the market. Every Saturday, year-round, rain or shine, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Splash Pad Park fills with more than 40 local farmers and 30 specialty food purveyors for the Grand Lake Farmers Market. The park itself was designed by Walter Hood, a MacArthur Fellow, and it's operated by the Agricultural Institute of Marin, which also runs the CalFresh, Market Match, and WIC programs on-site so the market stays accessible beyond the tote-bag crowd. If you've never made it a habit, the honest pitch is that it's one of the few weekly rituals in Oakland that hasn't changed in any meaningful way in years, which is precisely its appeal in a stretch of the city that keeps turning over its storefronts.
139 steps, no lake view required
If your loop includes a detour up Lakeshore Avenue, you've probably climbed the Cleveland Cascade without knowing its backstory. Landscape architect Howard Gilkey designed it in 1923 as an Italian-inspired water feature, water sheeting down semicircular bowls lit by colored lights at night. It fell apart sometime in the 1940s, the bowls were smashed and removed, and the whole thing got buried under rosemary bushes for decades. In May 2004, neighbors rediscovered it after finding an old photograph, and the volunteer-run Friends of the Cleveland Cascade have since installed new railings and lighting and had replacement pieces cast. There's no water running down it today. What's left is a stair workout with 139 steps between the bottom and the top, popular enough that Bay Area boxer André Ward has been filmed training on it.
What's actually on the calendar
Fall brings the one event that turns the lake's usual daytime rhythm into something after-dark. The Autumn Lights Festival runs three nights, October 15 through 17 this year, as a fundraiser for the Gardens at Lake Merritt. It's presented by the Friends of the Gardens at Lake Merritt, an all-volunteer group formed in 2004 to help maintain the seven-acre garden collection as the city's own gardening staff has shrunk over time. Combined with the Necklace of Lights that circles the lake year-round on ornate Victorian poles, this is the stretch of the calendar where the lake looks the way postcards make it look.
A few things worth putting on the fridge between now and then:
- Saturdays, year-round: Grand Lake Farmers Market, Splash Pad Park, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Fourth Wednesday of each month: bird walks hosted by Rotary Nature Center Friends
- October 15 through 17: Autumn Lights Festival at the Gardens at Lake Merritt
The loop is older than it looks
None of this is nostalgia for its own sake. The point is that a resident circling this lake today is walking through a boundary that a 19th-century real estate dispute carved into state law, past a stair workout that a group of neighbors rescued from being buried under rosemary, into a market that hasn't needed to reinvent itself, and past a storefront where a fifteen-year restaurant legacy just moved back in across from where a twenty-year one just moved out. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the same instinct, repeating itself, about a shoreline that's been worth protecting since before there was a park service to do it.
If you're weighing what a specific block near Grand Avenue, Adams Point, or the lake itself might mean for your own next move, Diana Ip knows this stretch of Oakland well enough to talk through it honestly, no pressure attached.
