San Diego is a city with Spanish names on its map and very little Spanish architecture to go with them. Cabrillo landed at Point Loma in 1542. The Mission San Diego de Alcalá was founded in 1769, the first of the California chain. After Mexican independence and US annexation the area kept the toponyms, kept a few of the original adobes, and otherwise stayed almost empty. As late as 1880 the city's population was around 2,600.
What followed the Spanish era was not the next chapter of the same story. It was a hundred-year gap and a different city built on top of the names. The harbor existed without much of a city around it until the railroad arrived in 1885. From then the curve climbed without stopping until the post-war years.
The three breweries below are inside three of the buildings that came out of that climb. A 1924 bakery in East Village, a 1946 warehouse in Little Italy, and a 1923 Navy mess hall on Point Loma. Each one answered a different question for a city growing fast: how to feed a population multiplying by the decade, how to store the post-war tuna industry, how to train the Navy. I read them on a single AIA conference walking tour. The beer is the prop. The buildings are the reading.
Why San Diego grew on this exact curve
The change agent was the railroad. The California Southern reached San Diego in 1885, finally giving the harbor an inland connection to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe network and through it to the rest of the country. The population in the next census, five years later, was a little over 16,000. From there the curve never flattened until after World War II.
| Census year | Population | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1870 | 2,300 | Pre-rail. |
| 1880 | 2,637 | Pre-rail. |
| 1890 | 16,159 | First census after the railroad arrives in 1885. |
| 1900 | 17,700 | |
| 1910 | 39,578 | |
| 1920 | 74,361 | |
| 1930 | 147,995 | Wonder Bread Building (1924). Tuna canneries hit their peak in Little Italy. |
| 1940 | 203,341 | Naval Training Center (dedicated 1923) is a major employer. |
| 1950 | 334,387 | Ballast Point's warehouse (1946) goes up the year after the war. |
Read the table back as the order of the buildings to come. The 1924 bakery is the rail era catching up to a hungry city. The 1946 warehouse is the post-war tuna industry near its peak. The 1923 mess hall is the Navy putting down roots at the edge of the bay. None of them would exist without the curve. Each is a different decade answering a different question of how to feed, store, or train a city that did not used to be there.
The railroad: Mission Brewery, in the Wonder Bread Building
Industrialization moved west by rail, San Diego's population grew sixfold in a decade, and a city that had been a sleepy port needed bread. The Continental Baking Company opened a Wonder Bread bakery on this lot. The current brick structure dates to 1924, and Wonder Bread operated here until around 2000. The building nearly came down twice for stadium projects, and was saved in 2007 by a preservation settlement. Mission Brewery moved in around 2011.
The reuse works because a bakery and a brewery want the same things: a big open floor, high ceilings, and ventilation. Look up and the original wood bow trusses and the rooftop monitors (the raised clerestory windows that pour daylight onto the floor) are still doing their original job. They were kept rather than replaced with new steel. The original flour silo is intact on the brewing side, repurposed as the grain silo and mill.
Look down and the floor is a small museum. Set into the concrete are pieces of the Sinclair Collection: salvaged manhole covers, granite paving blocks, and industrial fittings from the East Village's making-things era. Bob Sinclair was an East Village sculptor and the founder of Pannikin Coffee & Tea. He spent decades acquiring the equipment, signs, and street fittings of the neighborhood's factories as they closed, calling himself an industrial archaeologist. He died in a motorcycle accident in 2011, and pieces of his collection are scattered across the neighborhood: a large industrial motor at Park Boulevard and J Street, four big steel artifacts in a pocket park on 14th. At Mission Brewery, his manhole covers are set face-up in the brewhouse floor.
What I came in for is the silo, and what I left with is the floor. The silo is intact, four stories tall, still moving grain. You can stand under it. The mezzanine wraps the brewing volume in a way that feels worked-out rather than retrofitted. Under your feet is something different. Bob Sinclair's manhole covers sit flush in the concrete, plates from East Village streets that the brewhouse now uses as a finished surface. The result is a building that argues for adaptive reuse without saying anything about it. The bones do the work. The floor names the neighborhood.
Fishing: Ballast Point, in a 1946 warehouse
By the time the warehouse that now holds Ballast Point went up in 1946, San Diego was the tuna capital of the West Coast. The neighborhood you walk through today was a working Italian and Portuguese fishing and tuna-canning community, the boats and canneries clustered along the waterfront and the canners' families living blocks up the hill. The canneries closed in the 1970s and 80s as the industry moved overseas. Interstate 5 cut through the neighborhood in the early 1960s and erased about a third of it. What is now called Little Italy is a 1990s revival on top of that thinned grid.
The warehouse itself has none of the architectural pedigree of the Mission Brewery building. It is a plain post-war shed: no famous architect, no historic designation. When Ballast Point opened here in 2013 they did the minimum: dropped tanks, a fermentation room, and a kitchen straight into the open bones. The point of putting Ballast Point on this tour is exactly that the building does not need to be precious for the reuse to work. The bow trusses are the same building idea as Mission's, scaled down to a smaller shed. The roof is high, the volume is flexible, and the warehouse keeps doing what a warehouse does.
A block away on India Street, the Adams-Henry Building carries a faded painted Ben-Hur mural on its side wall, the kind of pre-war advertising that survived because nobody could be bothered to paint over it. The mural belongs to the neighbor, not Ballast Point, but it does what the neighborhood does well: tell you what this place was, in passing, on the way to dinner.
The warehouse is not trying, and that is the point. It is a 1946 shed with a roof and four walls and no preservation status, and Ballast Point has done very little to it. The bar runs the length of one wall, the tanks are visible behind glass, and the patio out back is shaded by canvas sails. The neighborhood is the part to sit with. The Italian and Portuguese families who built Little Italy did it on fishing boats and inside canneries, and most of that grid was lost to the freeway sixty years ago. The warehouse that survived is exactly the kind of building that would have been used to receive and store whatever the boats brought in. The reuse here is not preservation. It is continuity.
The Navy: Stone Brewing, in a Naval Training Center mess hall
The third building is the prettiest, and arguably the smartest piece of original architecture on the tour. The Naval Training Center was authorized in 1919, broke ground in 1921, and was dedicated in 1923. For the next 74 years it fed and trained recruits at the western edge of San Diego Bay. When the base closed in 1997 the campus was converted to mixed civilian use as Liberty Station, including arts, retail, residential, and dining. Stone Brewing opened in one of the former mess halls in 2013.
The building is Spanish Colonial Revival, the style codified locally by Bertram Goodhue's pavilions for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and adopted as a regional vernacular through the 1920s. Whitewashed stucco over thick masonry walls. Red clay-tile roofs. Vaulted, exposed-truss interiors. Generous courtyards arranged for daylight and cross-ventilation.
You can feel the masonry before you understand what it is. The walls absorb afternoon heat and release it overnight. The ceiling is high enough that brewing steam rises and dissipates. None of that was retrofitted. The 1923 engineers chose mass because they did not have a window unit, and a building meant to feed two thousand recruits at a time had to stay cool on its own. The campus around it is the same Spanish Colonial Revival language that the 1915 Exposition codified and the Navy adopted through the 1920s. Standing in a 1923 mess hall built to recall a 1700s mission, drinking from a brewery that opened in 2013, is the loop back to the intro. The Spanish era set the names. The Navy era built the rooms. The breweries are using both.
Reading the three together
Each building is the city remembering a different decade of how it got built. The bakery is the rail era and the population boom. The warehouse is the fishing era and the working immigrant grid that built Little Italy. The mess hall is the Navy era and the long economic anchor that came with it. The drink in your hand is the prop. What I noticed on the tour is that San Diego is more legible as a sequence of useful buildings than as a single city. The breweries are how I have started reading it.
Notes and credits
This post is a write-up of an AIA San Diego conference walking tour ("ET133: Sustainability on Tap"), co-organized with Daniel McDermott and Agustina Aboy. Daniel led the architectural narration, Agustina the sustainability framing. Anything in this post that reads as observation came off the tour. Anything that reads as fact has a source.
Population figures are from US decennial census counts for the City of San Diego, 1870 through 1950. The Wonder Bread Building's 1924 construction date follows its historical designation record. A bakery occupied the site under various structures from 1894. The Sinclair Collection details follow Bob Sinclair's profile in the San Diego News and the San Diego ASLA chapter's write-up of the collection. The Naval Training Center dates are from the site's National Register record.