Although PAC*SJ fought hard to save the historic cannery buildings on the former Del Monte Plant #3 site, the City Council voted to allow them to be demolished as part of a new housing project.
KB Homes' economic analysis claimed that rehabilitating the warehouses for adaptive reuse would result in an operating deficit. We hired Don Todd & Associates to prepare a Review of Economic Information which found that reducing rehabilitation costs and increasing housing densities would have resulted in a profitable project . The City planning staff also worked hard to develop alternatives in the EIR that would preserve and re-use the cannery buildings as part of the KB Homes project.
Del Monte Plant #3 closed its doors in December of 1999, after 82 years of fruit processing and canning. Since closure, there had been much discussion over what to do with the site located at 801 Auzerais Avenue. It was one of the last intact old-fashioned canneries in San Jose.
Formally speaking, the site was a Structure of Merit, one step below a City Landmark; but a 1999 evaluation suggests that it would be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places if it became part of a noncontiguous National Register Historic District based on the best of San José’s old canneries. That assessment has been formally confirmed by the State of California’s Office of Historic Preservation.
Del Monte Plant # 3 could have been rehabilitated much like Del Monte Plant #51 , which PAC*SJ worked very hard to save in 1999-2000. In that case, the Castle Group agreed to develop the four buildings of Plant # 51 by leaving the building largely intact, preserving the plant’s historic features, and converting it into 450 residential lofts and apartment units.
Site History
The San Jose Fruit Packing Company was born in San Jose when Dr. J. M. Dawson began the first commercial canning operation in California in 1871 with a cook stove and wash boiler installed in his woodshed at 1370 The Alameda. Del Monte, then the California Packing Corporation, came to this site in 1891, building what was then the world's largest fruit cannery, shipping 6,600,000 cans in 1895 alone.
In 1916, a merger created the California Packing Corporation. Immediately after the merger, the earliest structure extant on this site, Warehouse #3, was built. It was representative of an older architectural typology typically referred to as the Nineteenth-Century Commercial style. The style included heavy timber framing, brick bearing perimeter walls, truss roofs, deeply punched arched or lintel window openings, metal-clad fire doors and monitor roofs. The second extant structure, Warehouse #2, was constructed in 1932 according to the "daylight construction" method made famous by Detroit architect Albert Kahn in his Ford Motor Company factories. In the 1940s, Warehouse #4 and Warehouse #20 were built, the former with a distinctive saw-tooth roof. Both featured Streamline Moderne ornament, including horizontal incised speed lines near the roofline, projecting buttress-like pilasters and geometric diamond-shaped patterns. Warehouse #4 was the main cannery building for the complex from 1941 on, and had a unique timber-frame structure mandated by wartime restrictions on steel production. The plant continued to operate for 82 years, from 1967 onward as Del Monte Corporation. It recorded sales of $1.3 billion in 1998, before closing in 1999 as part of Del Monte Corporation's move of headquarters to Modesto. It was the last cannery to close in San Jose.
Note: Thanks to Page & Turnbull for their Historic Report in the Draft EIR for the KB Home Monte Vista Residential Planned Development Zoning Project, to the Mercury News for their articles on the closure of the plant, and to the authors of A Century of Service, on all of which this history was based.