February 2021
This is what is left of several buildings that once sat on this site.
Built in 1925, 1500 Mission was a one-story reinforced concrete industrial building originally designed in the Classical Revival style for the White Motor Company. The White Motor Company was created out of the White Sewing Machine Company. Founded by Thomas H White in 1876, his son, Rollin Henry White, invented the auto flash boiler in 1899. With his two brothers, Windsor and Walter, the sons diversified the sewing machine company’s products by introducing trucks and the White Steamer automobile in 1900.
Around 1940, the building was purchased by the Coca Cola company for a bottling plant.
The building when Coca Cola first purchased it
In 1941 Coca Cola enlarged and altered the building in the Streamline Moderne style. In 2010, architectural historian William Kostura ranked the building among the eleven best Moderne-style buildings in San Francisco: ‘The building as it was added to and remodeled in 1941 remains essentially unchanged since that date”.
The streamline moderne update was done by the architects Pringle and Smith, an architecture firm that worked with Coca Cola across the U.S. The Pringle and Smith Partnership was formed in 1922 by Francis Palmer Smith (1886-1971) and Walter Smith Pringle.
The building was purchased by the Goodwill Company in 1993 – you can see the clock tower on the far right in the background. Several buildings in the area, minus the original building used by White Motor Company and the Coca Cola bottling plant, were demolished in 2017.
The project that now occupies the site is a 1.2-million-square-foot development, located on 2.5-acres on the corner of Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue. One building is 39 stories of mixed-use and a 550 unit luxury apartment tower. A separate 460,000-square-foot office building will house San Francisco Planning and Public Works Departments.