Swenson wants to demolish a former manufacturing plant for Levi’s jeans in Downtown San Jose for a parking lot.
The San Jose-based developer has filed plans to bulldoze the historic plant that once served Levi Strauss & Co. and replace it with a parking lot at 115 Terraine Street, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
The two-story, 44,700-square-foot building, built sometime on or before 1949, is a sleek, mid-century modern building with smooth concrete inlaid with case-style windows.
Local historians say the 1-acre plant that sewed thousands of pairs of Levis should be saved.
“We continue to challenge our friends in leadership and the development community to do so much better than demolishing a place where women who could sew and who had sewing machines were hired to become the backbone of manufacturing for an iconic product,” Mike Sodergren of the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, told the Mercury News.
He said San Jose has a dwindling stock of historic resources, which should be preserved so future generations can view places as a backdrop for ”who we are and how we got here.
“We can do so much better than creating surface parking lots,” he said.
Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy, said it will be interesting to see how city planners respond to Swenson’s demolition application.
In prior years, city planners frowned on proposals to replace existing buildings with surface parking lots, according to Staedler. In fact, city planners didn’t even consider surface parking lots to be legitimate development proposals, he said.
“While I was with the Redevelopment Agency, the Planning Department had a policy that a parking lot is not a project,” Staedler said. “Let’s see if that policy has changed.”
Swenson, a long-time real estate firm with numerous Bay Area properties, declined to comment on the demolition and parking lot plan.
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Through affiliates, it owns multiple buildings and at least one surface parking lot near or next to the former Levi’s factory.
Last May, Swenson and Republic Urban Properties won approval to build a 263-unit apartment complex in Midtown San Jose, not far from Google’s proposed transit village.
— Dana Bartholomew