For Sale: Berkeley Residence Where Oppenheimer Lived and Partied

Asking $1.5 million, the tan building shaded by oak and conifer trees at 2665 Shasta Road has four units: a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, a one-bedroom apartment with one bathroom, and two studios. A brick staircase winds around the 3,890-square-foot property, which also offers three carports and a two-car garage.

Each apartment has a private balcony providing the same view of the bay Oppenheimer admired when he moved into the lower level of the home in 1929. He was 25 years old and had just been hired as an associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley, where he would eventually be approached about running the Manhattan Project.

At the time, Oppenheimer’s landlord, Mary Ellen Washburn, lived in the main house of the property and threw lavish parties attended by intellectuals who would stay up late into the night, debating and drinking martinis. Oppenheimer was known to avoid teaching before 11 a.m. so he could spend hours with them. At one of these parties in the spring of 1936, he met Jean Tatlock, a brilliant young woman who was in her first year at Stanford Medical School, studying to become a psychiatrist.

Oppenheimer was smitten. The couple started dating by the fall, and their relationship was intense and tumultuous. The pair got engaged at least twice, broke up and got back together again multiple times over the course of three years until Tatlock called things off for good. (She and Oppenheimer would continue having an affair after he married Kitty Harrison, and they saw one another several times a year and went to parties in Berkeley together.)

The Shasta Road home was listed less than a month ago, and the timing with the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster surely couldn’t have been coincidental. A real estate agent with the Pinza Group, the Walnut Creek-based firm showing the property, was not available to respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.

SFGATE managing editor Katie Dowd contributed to this report.