"Hapa's Brewing Doesn't Do Things By Halves!" Says Edith Daley

It’s a crazy time in Silicon Valley right now - lots of construction and new office space, lots of traffic, lots of folks moving in. The 1970’s tilt-ups around our current office are failing to the bulldozer and getting replaced with four stories of apartments and AMD engineering cubicles. Our office manager just moved west from North Carolina, and I can’t imagine how crazy this place seems to her - wide open skies, brown hills, and too damn many verification engineers and JavaScript ninjas. Neighbors fighting neighbors over coding style conventions. French bulldogs with LinkedIn profiles. It’s a common story - if this was the turn of the century, we would have had a bunch of Italian immigrants, fresh off the boat, looking for cannery or farm work, and we would have overheard arguments about the correct way to fix a canning line without stopping the line or losing a finger. If this was the 1950’s, we’d be fighting for seats at the Burger Pit against IBM and Lockheed engineers, while a bunch of drunken Fairchild engineers argued about the best way to dope germanium. Instead, we avoid getting run down by Nvidia self-driving cars or a Google bus, and fight for space at the bar with senior product managers with pugs on leashes.

Silicon Valley overheating means things are changing. In our neighborhood, we’ve lost a couple former orchard farmhouses that survived surprisingly long in the middle of subdivisions- the triple size lots are too valuable for a 1920s 2 bedroom house. The trendy bar out in the country by Saratoga is getting torn down for executive-level houses. The occasional 1950s strip mall goes post-modern, with a bunch of hipsters at Philz waiting for a bespoke cup of coffee to finish dripping. (Geez, just pour the d*mn coffee already!) If you're a friend of older San Jose - whether the 1920's, the 1970's, or the 1990's - this isn't a bad time to be taking a good look at the old stuff you like before it turns into a new apartment complex.

But progress also means some things are getting reused. Paradiso’s Deli, out by the former Del Monte cannery, looks like it’s been reinvented and reopened. Santa Clara is slowly working to reinvent its downtown. And in the former Salsina cannery building off on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose, redevelopment has cleaned up this underused building in what used to be San Jose's western cannery district and turned it into a bike repair, gallery, and beer hall.

Salsina Cannery, 2019

I've written about this building before. It was built in 1918 as Salsina Packing, a cannery founded by Carlo Aiello and Alfonso Lambroso to make tomato paste for the American market, though they quickly branched out into apricots and peaches. Edith Daley, my favorite San Jose Evening News columnist, visited the cannery in 1919; her story led with the headline "Workers at the Salsina Plant Smile Easily". Edith was impressed by the new and impressive building, the friendly management (William Leet bought ice cream for the entire canning staff on the day of her visit), and its well-ventilated interior - a big deal for the usually-hot cannery. She was also a mite confused by the name, asking for Mr. Salsina before being told that Salsina (tomato paste) was the product, not the producer! Salsina hit challenging times in the post-World War I recession. The company was sold to Virden Packing in 1922 to build William Virden's goals for a fruit-and-meat-packing colossus. Virden Packing, over-extended, failed in 1926 and got broken up, but the building appeared unused for quite a while after that date.

Back side of cannery - much more utilitarian

In 1935, the former cannery building appeared as the home of Saint Claire Brewing Company the first local brewery to open after the end of prohibition. Saint Claire disappeared by 1936, and the building was used for a series of businesses: warehouse space for the San Martin winery, a drayage company, and a good ten or fifteen years as a discount furniture store.

But the neighborhood's changed; the former cannery district is now mostly large apartment complexes. Salsina's well-ventilated cannery became studio and retail spaces a couple years ago.

Working end of the brewery

So here I am, sitting in the same cannery where Edith Daley saw “Billy" Leet buy ice cream for the entire cannery crew back in 1919. It’s now Hapa's Brewing. My chance to sit inside shows it's a stylish building both from a model railroad and canning perspective. Concrete floors for ease of cleaning and storing a seasons worth of tomato paste. The sawtooth roof adds interest from above. Concrete walls on the street side, worn corrugated iron on the railroad side. Huge beams holding up the roof so there’s more space for canning equipment. Light rail rolls by much more often than the "Friendly" SP ever serviced the Los Gatos branch. Today's Saturday afternoon crowd provides the background noise to hint at how active the building sounded at its birth. The Sainte Claire Brewing folks who had the building in 1935 would be pleased that the buildings still a happy provider of alcoholic beverages.

Edith’s pleasant description of the building still holds true - “The plant is sunny, well-ventilated, and a pleasant place in which to work.” Definitely true - the sawtooth roof brings in a surprising amount of light, and open loading doors keep it light and airy in today’s moderate May weather. I wouldn’t mind being stuck here in July. I'm not at all displeased about sitting at the bar today.

Freight door from original cannery

A hundred years ago when Edith visited, she found a San Jose where the cannery mostly had Anglo workers. “There’s a dignified high school professor from San Francisco happily at work on the fruit grader. There are sons and daughters of doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, and they are making from $20 to $25 per week.” Mrs Addington was forewoman, J. Turner watched the incoming fruit and tomatoes to ensure it met Salsina’s quality. With the demographics she saw, perhaps it’s not surprising that Edith found the “little Italian girl- the most prolific of the bunch” so surprising in Campbell a few weeks before. Even for an Italian-run cannery, Italian immigrants on the line were either not easily identifiable, or not newsworthy to Edith’s eyes.

Fifteen years later when the Sainte Claire Brewing company started making local beer, a good fraction of the groceries in San Jose had Italian names... at least for the markets that wanted to sell local beer from San Jose.

(Side notes about the people Edith met in 1919: Mrs. Ludy Addington, 132 Topeka Ave. in the Burbank neighborhood, was a midwest transplant; her husband, Charles, ran a service station at Race and San Carlos in later years, though he listed his occupation as "oil and gas merchant" in 1920. Charles was a Southern Pacific brakeman in 1913. Jacob Turner, from Ohio, listed his occupation as cannery superintendent in 1920. He lived at 529 N. 19th Street with his wife and eight children. By 1930, he was running his own plumbing business. Running a cannery made one very good at quick plumbing repairs, I expect.)

And once you get to modern days, Salsina’s demographics have changed again. All the nearby apartment buildings means that the place is filled with the local twenty-somethings on a Saturday, maybe working at Splunk in Santana Row packing web log data into attractive canned formats, contracting at Google but angling for a full time role at Facebook, or maybe figuring out ways to profit from supporting the masses coming to make the Santa Clara Valley a productive bread basket of technology. The faces are the usual Silicon Valley mix - some Anglo, some Asian, some Hispanic, highlighting just how varied the Santa Clara Valley is. Like Edith, what I’m seeing doesn’t match the true demographics of Silicon Valley; it’s less Hispanic here than San Jose as a whole. The place also doesn’t look like my co-workers - the collection of chip engineers at work who may have been born in India, but decided long ago that the Santa Clara Valley would be their home. Over in Fremont, they’re replacing the Portuguese Holy Ghost parade with Indian festivals. If you show up at Holi, you might get covered in colored pigment. The stories the immigrants tell are the same - new immigrants risking it all to move to the US, the dangers of starting anew in a land without friends and family, and figuring out how to mix traditions from the old country with their new home.

Billy Leet isn’t serving ice cream in the 21st century, but at least Hapa has a taco truck, helping to keep this century’s puff piece writers well-fed.

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Hapa's Brewing is at 460 Lincoln Ave in San Jose. It's a popular place, so folks other than me must think their IPA is tasty! No food in the restaurant, but they invite food trucks to stop by many days - check their events. Compare the photos from a few years ago to see how nicely the place has been fixed up. After your beer, walk around the neighborhood and check out the former Standard Oil depot at Auzerais and Sunol, and meander along the Los Gatos Creek trail beside the apartments that replaced the Del Monte cannery.

When Canneries Attack!

Buildings on model railroads often tend towards the offbeat and eye-catching. I might complain that many models aren't... well, boring and utilitarian... enough, but that doesn't mean the wacky buildings don't exist, and that they should be avoided. I just don't want every building on the model railroad to be the work of a crazed architect or builder.

Here's one wacky building example I particularly like: canneries devouring houses. This first photo is from the Salsina cannery at Lincoln Ave and Auzerais in San Jose. The original building was built in 1917 or so for a new tomato paste producer, with thick concrete walls and a sawtoothed roof for better interior lighting. That cannery must have been hungry, for a later addition swallowed up a small two story house that had been on the property.

I went inside the cannery a couple years ago when it was still occupied by a discount furniture outlet. The main factory floor was packed with dinettes, end tables, and bar stools. Behind the furniture on the back wall, I could see the outline of a cute two story house peeking into the building. They'd repurposed it as the business's office, so it still looked like a separate building, swallowed up by its neighbor.

Now, canneries eating houses might seem odd, except that I've found other cases of it. Here's a photo of Del Monte Plant #3, just a couple blocks away, swallowing up what I suspect was the superintendent's house.

Now, canneries swallowing up houses probably isn't that common, but these photos hint that canneries, with enough growth in volume and too little land for expansion, are likely to use every bit of land they can. If an accessory building happens to get in the way, it's not going to be free-standing for long.

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Photos of Salsina Canning taken by me earlier this year. Photo of Plant #3 from a John C. Gordon panoramic photo of the San Carlos St. bridge add Del Monte plant, taken around 1932. Original photo in the San Jose State University Special Collections.

The WP Crossing: Then and Now

While I'm crazily posting 3d printed stuff, I might as well share a photo. You all might remember the photo of the WP railroad crossing taken by John Barriger in the mid-1930's. If you're not local (or haven't done wandering near Auzerais and Lincoln recently), take a look at how things have changed in... 80 years.

The discount furniture place on the right side of the tracks, a.k.a. Castlewood Wines, a.k.a. St. Claire Brewing, a.k.a. Virden Packing is still there ninety years after it was built, and the corrugated steel looks near-original. Behind it, apartments replace the former U.S. Products cannery warehouse. On the other side of the tracks, Sunsweet's packing house (former George Herbert) is long gone, replaced first by office buildings and now by San Jose Medical Group's offices. The little white building used for sack storage is also gone, as is the row of power lines along the right of way. There's little sign of the WP's crossing any more; the mismatched fence may be it, but it's hard to tell. And the former Standard Oil terminal on the immediate left, now a roofer, still has a substantial fence.

If you go wandering down this way, definitely check out the little house that got swallowed up by Virden Packing - it's barely visible over the fence. If you go into the furniture store in the former cannery, you'll see the half-eaten house serving as the office for the store.

[Left photo from the Barriger collection at the University of Missouri. The library's been kind enough to share many of their photos on Flickr; go check 'em out, and thank them for providing high detail scans! Right photo: my photo.]

Virden Packing and Dreams of Great Business

I'm still thinking about whether to place the Virden Packing cannery on the layout. I did mock-up a paper model based on guessed measurements from the SP track drawings and Google StreetView photos, but it's looking awfully large and out of scale next to the gas station that I'd really prefer not to remove. Time for some more thought.

While we're thinking about whether to add the building, it's worth thiking about what makes the odd Virden Packing building special, and whether it helps with the story about what San Jose was like in the 1930's. Let's do a bit of historic research on that building, shall we?

The fact that 460 Lincoln Ave has survived is a pretty big accomplishment on its own. Before 1918, the building was just another lot on the western edge of San Jose. A 1915 Sanborn map shows it as additional storage for Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber's San Salvador Street yard, covered with twenty-foot-high piles of lumber. The odd-shaped lot was tiny compared with the main yard and mill further up along the track between Auzerais and San Carlos, but they must have needed the space.

Salsina Packing and Canning

Come 1918, things were changing in the valley. Straight from Western Canner and Packer:

Reviewing the canning industry of San Jose, the San Jose Mercury-Herald says six new canneries, representing an investment of $590,000, were constructed and put into operation in San Jose during the past year, making a total of 31 canneries now handling products of this county. This is in addition to the 30 packing houses. These six new canneries have outlined improvements which they expect to make immediately at the cost of $330,000.

...

The Salsina Canning Company, situated at the corner of Lincoln and San Salvador Streets, has an investment of about $200,000 at that site. The plant was installed during the past year and handled tomatoes and salsina exclusively. The company is now considering the advisability of constructing a new unit at a cost of $45,000 in time to handle fruits as well as tomatoes next year.

(The full article's worth reading, if only for the comments about the other canneries, the Santa Clara Valley orange business, and how all the canneries will operate cafeterias "with hot, nourishing food will be served to the workers in an attractive manner at cost." Sounds like Facebook or Google.)

Salsina Canning (misspelled as Salsini in a few places) was set up by "Italian interests in the Santa Clara Valley" according to California Fruit News. The name is telling; 'salsina' is the italian work for sauce (and perhaps implies tomato paste), highlighting that their market was the new immigrants and perhaps folks in the old country.

The original building wasn't enough; Salsina extended it in 1919 with a 60x600 warehouse according to a reference in American Architect and Architecture. Electrical World highlights how they're using fine electrical equipment for the new production line.

But what about those suspicious-sounding "italian interests" backing Salsina? They sound more upstanding when we look at old city directories, for it turns out the cannery is run by Gus (Gustave) F. Lion, son of German immigrants who arrived in San Jose in 1855. Gus was a serious mover-and-shaker: A Santa Clara University graduate, owner of one of San Jose's fine furniture stores, owner of the 5500 acre San Martin ranch out by Gilroy, banker, and even member of the Elks. A county history brags that he was involved both with the Republican and Democratic parties, back in the day when you could could straddle that fence. According to a 1919 San Jose City Directory, Gus was the president of Salsina, Alphonso Lambrosa was vice-president, and W. J. Leet was the treasurer.

Salsina didn't last long. By 1921, Lion was subdividing the San Martin ranch, and the same year sold Salsina to the Virden Packing Corporation.

Virden Packing

Virden's an interesting company. Charles Virden, the owner, had been active in the fruit business in Sacramento, and had worked for some of the large fruit distributors. He was also active in the Chamber of Commerce; internet research shows he broke the ground on a new country club east of Sacramento around 1920. Most importantly, he was a big booster for the Central Valley. He also spoke publicly about his frustrations with the availability of freight cars, and made some handy suggestions to the railroad about how to make sure businesses like his could ship their products. It's easy to find several speeches like this from Virden, and it's easy to tell his opinions.

But it sounds like Virden had more ambition, and decided it was time for him to take his personal Virden Packing business to the next level. He moved to San Francisco, and ambitiously snapped up several large canneries: Western Canning's plant in Emeryville (formerly Chinese owned and run), other plants in Sacramento, Marysville, Elmhurst (85th Street in Oakland), Fruitvale (29th Street, Oakland), Lindsay, and Oroville. (One contemporary report for the purchase said that someone wrote "Goodbye" in Chinese and English on the wall in the Western Canning plant.) On top of that, Virden also ran meat packing companies in Sacramento and in South San Francisco, and owned the Pioneer Fruit Company (according to a lawsuit from Zellerbach Paper). Virden's officers for the company include two early employees who had been part of the Sunlit Fruit Company that was swallowed up by the California Packing Corporation (Del Monte), so perhaps this was their challenge to CalPak, and their hopes of building a similarly huge organization.

Virden bought Salsina both for the existing business as well as a chance to do meat packing at the same location; Western Canner and Packer states that the "plant will be used for the packing of all the company's meats drawn from the field south of San Jose."

Lots of dreams and plans, lots of ambition. Very little news, though, between 1921 and 1926 apart from the daily stock ticker declaring the value of the Virden Packing shares.

By the mid-1920's, though, Virden's shrinking. The falling prices which hit other canners and dried fruit packers is one potential cause. Rumors of company meetings and potential sales appear in 1926. The March 13, 1927 Oakland Tribune notes that the company is abandoning the fruit business and is in the process of selling the canneries, "three in Oakland, one in San Jose, and a fifth in Marysville". Charles Virden claims that the company will be focusing on the meat business from now on. Balfour Guthrie, a British importer and owner of farmland in California, takes an option on buying the largest plants at Maryville, San Jose, Elmhurst, Fruitvale, and Emeryville. (The Lodi Sentinel said on May 6, 1926 that Balfour-Guthrie was already operating the canneries.) The Gridley Herald explains this only as a financing move, and the canneries will be managed by Francis E. Laney, head of the Sutter County growers co-operative.

But it doesn't look like the canneries go to Balfour; the former Western Canning in Emeryville is sold to CalPak, and becomes Del Monte Plant #35, a huge cannery that eventually disappears in 1989 and becomes the current site of Pixar. The Fruitvale plant also goes to Del Monte. The San Jose site keeps its name - there's nothing in the record to decide whether Virden did or did not sell out.

Virden died in January, 1932, leaving a million-dollar insurance policy to keep the company going. By 1935, it's all over for the meat business too as the remaining business, including the meat packing plant in South San Francisco, is sold to Armour, the monopolist in the meat packing industry. A 1936 lawsuit charges that Virden Packing overpromised the extent of the meat business in Sacramento when it first issued stock.

Virden's cannery in San Jose must have kept going, either under the old or a new management. It appears in the 1928 and 1929 San Jose city directories at the same location on Lincoln, and also appears on a 1930-ish Sanborn map, but it disappears from the city directories in 1930. It (tellingly) doesn't appear on that 1931 Southern Pacific track directory that I was given a couple years back.

San Martin Vineyards

I can't find any mention of the building through the Great Depression; it must have sat empty, just like the Hunts cannery in Los Gatos did. (Correction: the Fall 2023 "SP Trainline" article on the San Jose route change includes a switching map from 1932. The ex-Salsina spur is labeled "Calif Packing Corp.", suggesting that Del Monte was using the warehouse - not surprising considering it was a block away from the main Del Monte cannery. More recent research noted that the St. Claire Brewery used the space around 1935.) However, by 1949, the building is in use again, this time as a warehouse for the San Martin Winery. The existing building has a cask mounted on the wall as a reminder of the winery's days in the building. The 1950 Sanborn map shows the accessory buildings behind including the boiler and cooling tower (for former refrigeration?) SP engineering drawings from 1949 show a platform being added to the Lincoln Ave front, as well as work on the team tracks branching off behind the building. Interestingly, the SP SPINS booklet from 1970 shows neither of the spurs that were visible on the engineering drawing. By 1970, San Martin is out, and Hank and Frank Drayage is in the building; their sign remained on the building until recently.

Today

And today, you can go wandering over to Lincoln Avenue, pass the new luxury apartment buildings going up on the former sites of the U.S. Products and Contadina canneries, cross the railroad tracks, and see the slightly orphaned and slightly worn concrete building on the right side. The cannery had a short life - maybe 1918 to 1930 as a cannery, then years empty, then downgraded to use as a wine warehouse, then a less prestigious warehouse, and now it's being used as a furniture discount warehouse, probably just as a temporary occupant until it's time for the building to be torn down and replaced by more housing.

You can go in and wander; it's a warren of rooms from warehouse days, with wood trusses overhead, the sawtooth roofline, pierced with banks of double-hung windows, are very visible above the dining room tables and nightstands. You can also see how the building expanded; the street side is definitely a different bit of construction from the east side facing the SP and WP tracks, and you can see the materials change as you cross through from one side to the other. You also can see that the east wall really is corrugated iron, highlighting the different eras of the building. If you noticed the small peaked roof visible from Auzerais St., you'll also learn it's actually a small house that got swallowed up by the building, and now serves as an office, sitting right there in the middle of the largest portion of the warehouse.

Outside, the concrete's looking pitted after a hundred years of hand trucks and rearranged loading doors. Below the loading dock on the Lincoln Ave. side, the rails are still poking up out of the asphalt, with strange rounded balls located where the end of the siding would have been, probably to block the wheels.

Virden Packing obviously didn't survive long - it was a small cannery during the great explosion in canneries in 1918. I suspect its backers weren't thinking big enough, and couldn't compete against the three big canneries surrounding it. Like the Hyde Cannery in Campbell, dropping prices in the late twenties doomed it, and the Depression must have closed it down forever.

That said, it's still got a bit of magic. You'll spot it as an obvious example of rail-served industry as you drive towards downtown San Jose. Some five year old is probably wandering through right now as his parents search for a new kitchen table, and he's looking up at all that trusswork wondering why someone built a building so odd and interesting compared to the boring buildings at the mall...