This is a building in downtown San Francisco, now called 130 Bush:

(Credit Todd Lappin/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.)

It’s nine stories tall, but only about 20 feet wide. It’s now an office building, with a restaurant in the ground floor space, but it didn’t begin that way.

It closely resembles a modern extra-tall rowhouse-style apartment building, like this:

M. Nolan Gray @mnolangray

Meet the mini-midrise: five stories of housing over a storefront on a 25-foot wide lot. nationalpost.com/life/homes/ris…

July 27th 2022

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But it did not begin life as a residential building.

Well, if it wasn’t offices or apartments, there aren’t many other options for a downtown building, are there? (Infrastructure buildings like pump houses could be beautifully built, but that type of thing wouldn’t be in this location.)

It was a factory. And not just any factory, but a necktie and suspender factory. In other words, a remnant of an era when this stuff was made in American city centers. This neighborhood is now part of the Financial District.

From Curbed:

Christened the Heineman building, 130 Bush started life in 1910 as a necktie, belt, and suspender factory. In fact, it was one of the first buildings in the area, built four years after the great earthquake.

G.A. Applegarth, a noted local architect, was commissioned by H.M. Heineman to create the factory in a space not much larger than an average house lot. The lot measures a petite 20 feet by 80 feet deep.

And from Atlas Obscura:

At the time, the Heineman, now known as 130 Bush, was the most impressive building in what was then the garment neighborhood, but the factory only lasted around 20 years before it was converted into more standard office spaces. By then, two buildings had grown up alongside it, and they seemed to make the skinny oddity stand out even more. 

That reminds me a little of my old D.C. office, which was in this building in the middle. It used to be flanked by different buildings; somewhere in the lobby there was a black-and-white photo hanging, showing the since-demolished buildings on either side.

It’s interesting how on a block of connected structures, individual buildings still come and go. The street of Theseus.

Related Reading:

Locked Up in the Art Studio

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #27

Ghost Buildings

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