Old downtown San Jose building with Wild West ties might be bulldozed

A seven-decade-old building in downtown San Jose with ties to a Wild West icon might be bulldozed and replaced with a parking lot.

SAN JOSE — A veteran developer seeks to bulldoze a seven-decade-old building in downtown San Jose with ties to Wild West icon Levi Strauss & Co. and replace the structure with a parking lot.

Swenson has filed a proposal to demolish a downtown San Jose building at 115 Terraine Street that was built in 1949 or earlier and is linked to Levi Strauss & Co., the history-rich company whose roots date back to the Old West when it manufactured jeans and other clothing.

For an unspecified period of time starting in the 1940s, Levi Strauss used the Terraine Street building as a manufacturing center, according to documents on file with History San Jose.

Now, Swenson’s vision for the building is a demolition and its replacement with one of the most mundane of real estate endeavors short of a vacant parcel: a surface parking lot.

The prospect that the wrecking ball might face a building that once was used for an iconic clothing product created by a legendary manufacturer dismayed Mike Sodergren, an official with the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, an advocacy group for historic buildings.

“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,” Sodergren said.

The two-story building totals 44,700 square feet and occupies a 0.8-acre site at the corner of Terraine Street and West St. John Street.

“It will be interesting to see how planning responds to this demolition application,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy.

In prior years, San Jose city planners frowned upon 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 added.

“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.”

San Jose-based Swenson, a long-time real estate firm with numerous Bay Area properties, declined to comment for this news story.

“PAC SJ can get on board for new development, even projects that we know will have a negative impact on San Jose’s dwindling stock of historic resources,” Sodergren said. “We just want future generations to be able to see historic places as the backdrop for the wonderful story of who we are and how we got here.”

Swenson, through affiliates, already owns multiple buildings and at least one surface parking lot in the immediate vicinity, or next to, the 115 Terraine Street building the company proposes to bulldoze.

“We can do so much better than creating surface parking lots,” Sodergren said.