Seals Stadium and Hamm's Brewery

Unfinished History

Seals Stadium from corner of Bryant and 16th looking northeast, c. 1958, during the first year of the Giants in San Francisco.

Photo: Shaping San Francisco

Opening Day 1934, San Francisco Seals vs. Seattle Sounders, April 3, 1934.

Photo: Bancroft Library

Seals Stadium from the air, 1950s.

Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Seals Stadium anchored the block between Bryant and Potrero on 16th St. for about 30 years, and was home to the SF Giants in 1958 and 1959 when they first arrived in San Francisco. When Candlestick Park opened in 1960, Seals Stadium was destroyed, and replaced by a White Front department store, which in turn made way for an Auto Center and Safeway, and is now known as the Potrero Center, a new mall opened at the end of 1996.

Photo: Private Collection, San Francisco, CA

The former Hamm's Brewery (before that the Rainier Brewery), now an office building, used to anchor the northeast corner of the Mission at 15th & Bryant, adjacent to the Freeway and former Seals' Stadium. For a brief time it was home to a thriving punk rock scene and known as "The Vats."

Photo: Private Collection, San Francisco

Until the late 1970s/early 1980s the northeast corner of the neighborhood was still home to a large pocket of industrial sites with their blue-collar jobs, including breweries, a mayonnaise factory, a cement factory, several steel mills, and so on. This same corner was targeted by the pro-business Mayor Jordan as a "Biotech Development Zone," but community opposition derailed that. By the mid-1990s the area was being converted into offices and lofts, largely serving small media companies and their employees (e.g. SF Bay Guardian, KQED, etc.)